The Midnight Edition Archive
A midnight obituary-radio fiction podcast.
Filed after midnight · Literary audio fiction
Stories
Book chapters, short fiction, and serial work — separate from issue postings, still filed from the desk.
Chapter 1
Chapter 1 of an unfinished book, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. On a rainy Friday on Lark Street, municipal records clerk Warren Bell arrives at The Bacchanids — a lounge with a stuttering sign, speed introductions, and a lost-and-found box where a name is corrected again.
Chapter 2
Chapter 2 of an unfinished book, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. On a hillside pool above Los Angeles, Nelly intercepts a fax from Georgia — a little death certificate without the death — and offers Virgil a country where he is not late.
Chapter 3
Chapter 3 of an unfinished book, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. Virgil leaves Nelly's island before dawn, lights a wastebasket fire as cover, meets Dante at a black sedan prepared years too early, and forces the property line into the Los Angeles wasteland.
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 of an unfinished book, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. Virgil and Dante force the wet streets of Los Angeles under ash rain until the raft dies on the freeway and the concrete river accepts what the island would not: runoff, ash, and a man.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5 of an unfinished book, presented inside the This Day in Deaths broadcast. In a concrete Los Angeles wash, Virgil loses his name to fever and the river house of the unfinished dead — until three young women at a chain-link fence hold water he cannot reach.
Story
Long-form broadcast reading from Issue 12 — Morton Tusk, the brass house key, seals at the fish dock, and a body built for another world.
Story
Long-form broadcast reading from Issue 12 — Dennis Larch, the Cretaceous Physical Fitness Test, municipal records, and a sticky note crossed out.