Summary: by Kate Heartfield read by Christiana Ellis This story originally appeared in the Crossed Genres Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page Thank you for visiting us on Facebook and Twitter author Kate Heartfield about the author… My agent is Jennie Goloboy of Red Sofa Literary. I write fiction, mainly speculative fiction. My stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Podcastle, Daily Science Fiction, GlitterShip, Bizarrocast, Crossed Genres, Lackington’s, Postscripts to Darkness, Waylines, Flash Fiction Online, On Spec, Black Treacle, Spellbound and elsewhere. You can find the list of stories I’ve had published on the Stories page. I’m an active member of SFWA. I’m also a member of Ottawa’s East Block Irregulars and the Codex writers’ group. I was lucky enough to benefit from the mentorship of the late Paul Quarrington, through the Humber School for Writers, in 2007. I’m working now on a historical fantasy novel. From 2011 to 2014 I was a member of the board of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. I’m also a journalist. I’m the editorial pages editor for the Ottawa Citizen, the daily broadsheet in Canada’s capital. I live in rural Ottawa. My Pinterest profile | My Goodreads author profile. narrator Christiana Ellis about the narrator… Christiana Ellis is an award-winning writer and podcaster, currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her podcast novel, Nina Kimberly the Merciless was both an inaugural nominee for the 2006 Parsec Award for Best Speculative Fiction: Long Form, as well as a finalist for a 2006 Podcast Peer Award. Nina Kimberly the Merciless is available in print from Dragon Moon Press. Christiana is also the writer, producer and star of Space Casey, a 10-part audiodrama miniseries which won the Gold Mark Time Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Production by the American Society for Science Fiction Audio and the 2008 Parsec Award for Best Science Fiction Audio Drama. In between major projects, Christiana is also the creator and talent of many other podcast productions including Talking About Survivor, Hey, Want to Watch a Movie?and Christiana’s Shallow Thoughts. The Semaphore Society by Kate Heartfield Gia blinks twice to drop the keyboard-display down. She doesn’t want to talk to her mom anymore and that’s the quickest – and, if she’s honest, the most satisfyingly annoying – way to make that clear. “If you won’t let me help –” her mom says. Her fingers grip the back of Gia’s wheelchair so hard that it shudders, and the monitor screen mounted to one arm of the chair shakes. Her mother never stops trying to make it all better. Gia is so goddamn sick of it. And she’s itching to log in to the Semaphore Society. Maybe Manon will be back today; she left so abruptly last night. Any conversation that isn’t about therapy or the power of positive thinking would be a relief. The screen reflects her mom’s slight frown. Her face always looks like that when she worries about her daughter, which is most of the time. She must have worried before, when Gia was a kid, but Gia can’t remember seeing that precise expression before the day she collapsed on her high school’s stage halfway through the opening performance of Pippin. The first time Gia can remember seeing that expression was later, when Gia woke up in the hospital, when her dad explained that they had found a tumour, that they were going to treat it, but that the bleeding in her brain – The blinking pattern that pulls up her eye-tracking software is a lot like the blinking that stops tears. Up it pops, Gia’s blank slate. Her mom hates this flickering-snow screen; it gives her migraines. But she can’t argue against it. It is so much easier on Gia than the keyboard-to-voice interface, with Gia staring at each letter, blinking in frustration to make choices when the eyetracker doesn’t catch her pupil dilation. (A QWERTY keyboard, for God’s sake. It’s not like her fing[...]
