STRAY COUNTRY

C.K. Turner
STRAY COUNTRY

There is a country beyond that which is known to humankind. A stray country. A country that exists west of October. Whose borders are somewhere between midnight train whistles and the distant howl of a dog. A country that lies somewhere in the stitched and jittering static between radio stations. A country that drifts through America like a traveling salesman, but every now and then stops to nest on a small town. A small church. A single street. And maybe, just maybe, some kinda delayed radio broadcast you’ve stuffed in your ears . . . STRAY COUNTRY is a fiction podcast. Original Novels. Delivered chapter by chapter. Come to the Country - www.straycountry.com. If you’d like to support the podcast consider leaving a rating, sharing it on social media/with a friend, or visiting my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/ckturner See you in the Country . . .

  1. EPISODE 1

    Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Opening Narration

    Portrait of a small suburban street.  This is the world homecoming G.I.s built after witnessing death delivered on an industrial scale.  Small.  Quiet.  Ordinary.  Well behaved to the point of being boring.  Green manicured lawns stretched out like slumbering cats.  Polite little houses, all standing in a row.  Two trees per yard.  A streetlight keeping watch on every corner and smoke panting up out of a thousand chimneys like the soft plumes of faraway trains.  There's something of a carousel quality to it all.  Been here before.  Seen this already.  But this is where men who'd gone to fight the first fully mechanized war tried to forget about it.  A war without horses.  A war dedicated to the patron saint of internal combustion.  Where cannons drove themselves, and gasoline was as good as gunpowder.  A war governed by bombs and bigger bombs and bigger bombs until the bombs had grown so big there was fear they'd crack the planet like a nut.  These poor boys came home looking for a quiet not even the churches could portion.  Hushed corners of America had to be built to suit, named Southmoor, or Westmoor, or Moormont where former soldiers tried to drain their heads of all the noise of the frustrated, frightened century.  The jangled century of hate and heavy industry and fascist wars.  If you've ever stood on a quiet suburban street in the middle of the day and noticed the hushed picture has something of a cemetery quality to it, you may consider who it was built for, after where they'd been, and what they'd seen.  Men who thought they were running away from the machines, but ended up in the same place.  Like a ride on a carousel.  Because their homes and streets were milled at a rate of thirty houses a day in a distilled twenty-six step process.  Manufactured on the same scale, using the same principles and converted energy of industrial war engines.  You see, a hungry beast built this peace and quiet.  A hoggish, greedy entity that shows up once humankind starts playing with machines.  A type of pig.   . . . and even though this is 1987, there is still something hungry on Eastmoor Road.

    4 min
  2. EPISODE 6

    Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 5

    There is a building not far from your home.  A squatty, ugly building.  Expansive.  Long.  But small, in the eyes of the world.  Of little historical consequence.  It will have no historian.  No lengthy narration.  No bound and shelved chronicle.  Someday, it will be torn down and built anew.  After which it will exist in the memories of those who were unlucky enough to have passed through it, until the bodies that hold those memories are eaten by worms or shut up in a furnace.  It is a building that haunts folks no matter how far they run from it.  No matter how many years they put between themselves and it.  A building that does as much to shape a kid as a rigid church, a broken home, a drunken father.   It is a building composed in the main of bricks and mortar.  But in truth, built on the strange shifting tides of adolescent years.  A building where children are forced to inter their childhoods, and try on the strange, starchy, and ill-fitting funeration clothing of adulthood.  A burial ground for song, dance, and invisible friends.  A corner of the country where Americans lose the faith, in the religion of being children.    Which means an ill-lit corner of Stray Country.   And would you believe there is a man who chose this building as his place of employment?  He's called a janitor.  And he's the man who mops up the molt of kids' childhood shells.  After hours.  Alone.  By himself.  Perhaps looking . . . perhaps, wondering . . . just where he misplaced his own childhood.

    19 min
5
out of 5
21 Ratings

About

There is a country beyond that which is known to humankind. A stray country. A country that exists west of October. Whose borders are somewhere between midnight train whistles and the distant howl of a dog. A country that lies somewhere in the stitched and jittering static between radio stations. A country that drifts through America like a traveling salesman, but every now and then stops to nest on a small town. A small church. A single street. And maybe, just maybe, some kinda delayed radio broadcast you’ve stuffed in your ears . . . STRAY COUNTRY is a fiction podcast. Original Novels. Delivered chapter by chapter. Come to the Country - www.straycountry.com. If you’d like to support the podcast consider leaving a rating, sharing it on social media/with a friend, or visiting my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/ckturner See you in the Country . . .

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