Breaker Whiskey

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Fiction
**Breaker Whiskey**

BREAKER WHISKEY is an ongoing, daily microfiction podcast exploring one woman’s journey to find additional survivors in an America made empty by an unknown event in the late 1960s. In 1968, two women find themselves in rural Pennsylvania during what turns out to be some kind of apocalyptic event. By the time they discover that everyone else is gone, it’s too late to figure out what happened. Despite not liking each other at all, the women work together to survive, until six years later one of them sets out on her own, driving around the country to find other survivors. This is her, calling out to anyone who might listen. BREAKER WHISKEY is made by Lauren Shippen and recorded on a 1976 Midland CB Radio. Please visit breakerwhiskey.com for more information or to send a message to Whiskey.

Latest Episodes:

171 - One Hundred Seventy One Mar 18, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Harry?

[click, static]

Harry, do you read?

[click, static]

Okay, that’s…good. I don’t know that I want her to hear this. But I feel like I need to say it out loud or I’ll go crazy keeping it in.

I’m nervous. I—I pulled over because I turned onto a road that I’ve driven down a million times before on supply runs and it was the most familiar thing I’ve seen in nine months and all of a sudden it got so real. My heart started pounding, my palms were sweating on the steering wheel…

[click, static]

(laughing) I’m just nervous! It’s stupid, it’s not like—I mean, I know what to expect. I’m going to walk into the house and call out for Harry and she’s not going to respond because she won’t be able to hear me from the garage and then I’ll put the kettle on and she’ll only come in from her studio when she hears the whistle go, which for some reason is audible from the garage. And I’ll pull two mugs down from the cabinet and make tea the way we like it—black for me, steeped for two minutes; two sugars and steeped until it’s bitter for her—and Harry will pull out some kind of muffin or scone or something from somewhere and pretend like she didn’t put nuts in it specifically because I like them and then…I don’t know, then she’ll make some comment about how I’m back so soon and I’ll…

I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe she’ll ask if me being back means I forgive her and maybe I’ll say that I’m not sure I need to forgive her before we can—

[click, static]

Or none of that will happen. And instead she’ll be unpleasantly surprised that I’ve come back and she’ll ask me to leave. She’ll say that I’m not welcome anymore, that I resigned my right to call that place home the moment I pulled out of the drive.

[click, static]

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170 - One Hundred Seventy Mar 15, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Well, welcome back to the fucking party, Birdie. Once again, telling me that a place isn’t safe.

Do you really think that I’m going to trust you? Do you really think I’m going to listen to whatever you have to say? Where the fuck have you been? I don’t know if you know this, but I’ve been talking to someone else—also through morse code, so maybe you know them but they…well, they have been at least a little more helpful than you.

And now you’re telling me that it’s not safe back home? Why would I believe you? I went to Denver and there was nothing there. Just ghosts in photographs and phantom concerts. And if you are telling the truth, and it’s not safe? Well, then, I have to go back, don’t I. I have to make sure that Harry’s okay.

Anyway. I’m only about forty miles from the house so…Harry, if you can hear me…put the kettle on, bring out that one bottle of whiskey you’ve been hiding for three years. We’ve got a lot to talk about.

[click, static]

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169 - One Hundred Sixty Nine Mar 14, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Okay, so, I’ve been marinating on all of it, the book, the messages from Fox, what Birdie told me all those months ago. And something is starting to crystallize.

Eternity’s whole purpose was to make the smallest possible change in order to preserve the one future they wanted. Nöys and her people could also time travel but they allowed for multiple futures. And her forcing Harlan to choose between killing her and saving Eternity fundamentally changes the future and destroys this patriarchal system of reality control and…well, I guess in that sense, Nöys is the hero of the book. She allows for there to be freedom in the way that reality unfolds. So, maybe Asimov was trying to say something positive with that even if a lot of the ways Harlan thinks and speaks about women is…

…not the point. The point is…Nöys is a stone. So is Harlan. They’re these individual people who create these ripples that radiate outwards and affect everything.

I…it really is an inventive story. Maybe not entirely my cup of tea, but I don’t think I could have come up with it. I might be living it and I wouldn’t have thought of that kind of intricate world. Even now, I’m not totally sure I understand it. At least not as it pertains to me.

Harlan betrays his job because of his love for Nöys. Birdie said they betrayed their job. That they hurt people. Fox seems to know things about this place, this time…whatever it is, that you wouldn’t know unless you were…

Look, Fox, if you’re trying to tell me that Eternity is real and that you’re somehow moving the pieces on the chessboard of reality and that’s why I’m stuck here…I don’t know if I buy that. I have a hard time with omnipotence.

But…my life is what it is and maybe a little science fiction is not out of order. Maybe…maybe the choice I made did create some kind of hidden century, maybe it did…end the future. But I—I don’t know if I can handle that if it’s true.

[click, static]

(sigh) God, I’m tired.

I should get back to the house by the end of tomorrow. Hopefully Harry will be able to put these puzzle pieces together better than I can.

[click, static]

[beeps]

Do not go back. Not safe.

-.. --- / -. --- - / --. --- / -... .- -.-. -.- .-.-.- / -. --- - / ... .- ..-. . .-.-.-

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168 - One Hundred Sixty Eight Mar 13, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Okay, so I’ve been reading this fucking book, The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov and I finally finished it …

Listen, it’s not really my thing. Not that sci-fi isn’t my thing, but I’m not sure this kind of sci-fi is up my alley. And why are male writers so weird about women so often?

That’s not the point. The point is…I assume you’re trying to tell me something with this. That you’re trying to say that this somehow holds the answers.

I’m going to assume also that it doesn’t hold all the answers. That it’s more of a…nudge in the right direction. A shorthand for you to use to try and easily explain complicated shit to me.

You know, you’d think Birdie would’ve been able to figure something out like this, right? Presumably they’ve also read books.

Anyway. The End of Eternity. It’s about time travel. Or, well, not time travel, but—actually, there is literal time travel, in these things called kettles but it’s not time travel the way we think about time travel, you know, it’s—

Let me start over. There’s this guy, Andrew Harlan, he’s the main character, and he works for this god-like organization called “Eternity” that basically…alters reality to make humans suffer less. But they can only go back in time so far because the technology to go upwhen and downwhen—that’s what they call going up and down the…timeline, I guess, which I think is sort of cute actually—so, yeah, they can only go back in time so far because that technology was only invented in the 27th century, and they can only go so far forward because after a certain point, the world is just…empty. And they don’t really know why.

So, yeah. There’s that. And Harlan brings Nöys—that’s this woman that he falls in love with when he’s in a certain time and that time is supposed to be altered, so she’s going to disappear—or, the version he knows of her is going to disappear, she’s going to change because of the way that Eternity is going to alter reality and he’s you know, falling in love with her and he doesn’t want her to change so he brings her on a kettle to one of those empty centuries to hide her from Eternity and keep her safe, keep her trapped in amber.

Which…well, listen, I have a lot of thoughts about that, but I’m not here to get into what Asimov is saying about women or being in love or any of that. I’m here to try to understand what the hell you want me to get out of this.

I haven’t time traveled. I’m not in some kind of far, distant future after humanity has ceased to exist, because everything’s the same, just minus all the people. If I’m living in the Hidden Centuries, why do they look the same and how did I get here?

At the end of the book…well, it turns out that Nöys isn’t exactly who she said she was, surprise surprise, and she and Harlan have this stand-off. She’s from a version of time that also had time travel, but not Eternity, so they had lots of different futures instead of just the one that Eternity would always be making by altering reality. That’s Eternity’s big thing—that’s what people like Harlan would do. They would go to different times and do different things so that Eternity could perfectly shape the history and the future of the world in the way they thought it should be shaped. But Nöys…her time didn’t do that—they came about the technology a different way and saw things differently. And she tries to convince Harlan that that’s the better way to do things and I guess he does get convinced because all of a sudden, something in reality changes and the kettles disappear, so it turns out that Eternity never happened—oh, they have this stand-off in the 30s—the 1930s—somehow, so it’s before Eternity is invented and Harlan choosing not to kill Nöys in the 1930s prevents the future from ever happening and so Eternity isn’t created. I think. And the book closes with “the end of eternity, the beginning of infinity” which is a nice sounding phrase, but I’m not sure it means anything.

I’m not sure any of this means anything. Trying to explain it out loud, I feel like a total crackpot. What, exactly, am I supposed to be gleaning from all of this? [click, static]

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167 - One Hundred Sixty Seven Mar 12, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Alright, I’ve mapped out a route back home—back to Pennsylvania and I think it’ll take me…four days? At most? It’s pretty snowy up here, I wish I were taking the southern route, so I don’t want to push it too much. A few days is not going to make a world of difference, but me spinning out on black ice and wrapping the car around a tree will.

[click, static]

I don’t know…I don’t know what I’m going to say to her to be honest. Because as far as I know, the last eight months for her have been business as usual. And probably particularly uneventful in the last few months. There’s never anything to fucking do in winter. She will have stashed up enough produce for the winter, just like Leann did, and it’ll be too much for her to eat, just like it was for Leann. So used to growing food for two people, and now needing to feed only one. But god, I hope she didn’t just subsist on veggies and bread. Or maybe that’s enough, maybe she’ll be fine eating like that.

Maybe she went scavenging for canned food. Maybe she finally taught herself how to butcher the chickens. Well, I guess she knows how, I told her how, I showed her how, she just never wanted to.

Always my job to get my hands dirty I guess.

[click, static]

I wonder how close to Pennsylvania I’ll have to get before she starts being able to hear my transmissions. Before I start being able to hear hers. The fact that she reached me, once, all the way in Wyoming…well, that had to have just been skip. Unless she’s figured out something I haven’t, which isn’t impossible, but…

I guess it won’t really matter. I don’t need to tell her that I’m coming, I don’t need to check if she’s still there. She’s still there.

She is.

She has to be.

[click, static]

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166 - One Hundred Sixty Six Mar 11, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

I feel…hungover. It feels like my brain has been spinning nonstop and reading this fucking book—

My thoughts can’t land on any one idea, I’m taking in too much information and spitting too many theories out that it’s all becoming mush and I’m not sure anything I’ve said on here has made sense in weeks and I—I don’t want to be doing this fucking alone anymore!

[click, static]

There. I said it. I don’t want to be doing this alone. It’s—it’s too much. Even if I’m the one responsible for all of it, if I’m the one who has to carry the burden of the horrible truth that I discover at the end of all this…I don’t want to hunt for that truth by myself anymore.

I—I could go searching for other people that I think might still be here. Based on the ripple I caused. But that’s…it feels potentially extremely fruitless. And I know that Harry is here. I don’t know if she’ll be happy to see me, if she’ll even be at our house anymore, but I…

I know she wants answers just as much as I do.

I have to go back.

[click, static]

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165 - One Hundred Sixty Five Mar 08, 2024

Show notes

Please visit breakerwhiskey.com for more information or to send a message to Whiskey's radio. Breaker Whiskey is an Atypical Artists production created by Lauren Shippen. If you'd like to support the show, please visit patreon.com/breakerwhiskey. As a patron, you will also receive each week's episodes as one longer episode every Monday.

------

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

“F not here” — I assume by F, you mean Francis. And not that I’m going to take your word for it, but it’s…it’s interesting. That you should say that. That you should know that.

I think maybe I’m starting to understand. Well, maybe not understand, but I…I’m beginning to form a theory. Maybe.

So, there’s a pond. The pond is quiet, maybe has some ripples in it from what’s swimming underneath the surface, or the wind, the rain—the normal stuff that a pond experiences. And all those things create some kind of…chain reaction. But again, it’s the usual things—a frog dies, a tadpole grows legs, algae blooms, whatever.

But if you throw a huge boulder into that pond, everything goes fucking bananas. It kills a duck or displaces so much water that fish drown on dry land and then…

You have an empty pond? You have a series of smaller ponds? The water evaporates? I don’t know where to go from there. But if Harry, Leann, and I are all fish that got thrown into another pond by the water splashing around the boulder then…

[click, static]

(frustrated sigh) I’m not sure that that’s anything.

I wish there was…I don’t know, a book I could read, a scientific journal, something. I’m going to go into the next library I find and see what I can dredge up. Because this all feels vastly beyond my comprehension.

I—it occurred to me…well, am I a terrible person for thinking of my art fence before thinking of Martha? It’s not that I didn’t care about her—sure, we were never committed, but I cared.

I think I’ve just been hoping that I wasn’t important in her life to really have an impact. She was this bright, uncomplicated spot in a pretty messy life and I hope…I hope she stayed that way. I hope we were both a refuge for each other, an escape from our real worlds. And that, because of that, the mistakes of my real world didn’t shake hers.

[click, static]

[beeps]

.- ... .. -- --- ...- / . -. -.. / --- ..-. / . - . .-. -. .. - -.--

Asimov End of Eternity

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164 - One Hundred Sixty Four Mar 07, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

I didn’t—I guess I’m not totally numb to everything. I didn’t mean to…go on like that yesterday. I—(sigh) if anyone is listening, maybe just ignore everything I’ve said this week. It’s not—I didn’t mean anything by it. Let’s just—let’s move on.

[click, static]

It’s only been, what, a handful of weeks since I left Los Angeles? But I find myself needing to lay out the same stuff that I tried to understand when I was there—what I know, what I don’t know, and what questions I have.

I guess I have a little more information now, though god only knows what I’m supposed to do with it. I’m trying to wrap my head around how I could cause such a ripple but…

(laughs) There is something so…

I got out. I fought and clawed my way out of imprisonment, I got Harry out too, and we were free. I’m not saying that we didn’t deserve to be held responsible for our crimes but…

Actually, fuck that. What we did—stealing art, jewelry, antiques—who cares? I mean, sure, the people who owned the stuff cared, but they were wealthy enough to buy more. But because those people were powerful, we got—

Well, joke’s on us, huh? It’s clear that we’re getting our due anyway. From the frying pan into the fire. The grand irony of the universe. Like a cartoon, dodging the anvil falling from the sky only to go careening off a cliff.

All of that. The choices I made. What I did. It was supposed to get me out, but it just…it never stops. The waters never calm and I’m—I’m going to drown.

If this really is—I mean, if Leann was the farthest edge of the pond, to continue to beat this metaphor into the ground, then Harry would be the water right where the stone hit, right? It makes sense, I dragged her right along with me, just like she dragged me along unknowingly with her choices. But it clearly didn’t stop there. So who’s between Harry and Leann?

Who’s lives did I touch? Who was I intertwined with enough to truly affect their life?

Is it sad that the first thought I had was about my landlord? That’s a pretty direct effect, right? I disappear, I stop paying my rent and things snowball from there. But then I thought, well, I was going to prison anyway, so it’s not like I was going to keep paying rent either way.

[click, static]

Is that…is that the difference? I—I did something, caused a ripple, and it…

[click, static]

(shaking it off) But where’s Pete? Don? Francis? We all got caught for the same thing—well, not Francis—but I…

Well, shit, I didn’t go up to Provincetown, did I? I never really thought there was a chance he was there.

Is that—is that where I should head to? See if Francis was hit by the ripple? I mean, he would be old, but that doesn’t mean…

God, I don’t want to find his body. I—I’m not sure I could take it.

But what choice do I have?

[click, static]

[beeps]

..-. / -. --- - / .... . .-. .

F not here

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163 - One Hundred Sixty Three Mar 06, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Except, if I were dead, how does that explain Harry? I obviously have some…guilt over what I did that I think would factor into my brain making up a weird purgatory of no people and mysterious, possibly all-knowing beeps on the radio that feel like they’re taunting me more than they’re helping me. But, even if I didn’t spend my life thinking there was an afterlife, I could see my subconscious deciding that the best way to process what was happening was to justify my death somehow through creating a punishment.

Because, let’s be honest, if I’m dead, I know how. I know why. What I did—what I was trying to do in this case, in this case—that failed and I didn’t make it out and deep down I decide that “hey, this is probably for the best, because here’s what would happen if you did succeed, do you really want to live like that? But even if all of that was true...I don't know that my brain could resist giving me something I did want. Someone I want.

Harry seems real to me. Annoyingly so. Real and exactly who she’s always been to me. No substantial change, despite everything we’ve been through. And I’m not sure I’d punish myself that much. Maybe I just don’t want to believe I would.

So if not dead…then what? We’re back to square one, which is me as the stone, setting a ripple around the world that destroyed nearly everything.

[click, static]

I’m not sure I should be so cavalier about this stuff. Talking about my own death, my own final gasping breaths of life. But ever since finding Leann, there’s a sense of unreality that I can’t get over. I’m sure there’s a real name for it, something a psychiatrist would immediately be able to identify, but I never did see a shrink back in the world. Because I mostly didn’t have to deal with shit like this.

But I’m outside my body. Outside everything. And I want to figure out what this all means, find the truth, the answers that I’ve been wanting for so long and also….it feels almost inconsequential now. Like nothing I uncover or grow to understand will actually change anything.

I’ll still be alone in the world. I’ll still have done what I did. Harry will still have betrayed me. And I’ll still be in—

[click, static]

It’s not like learning certain things changed anything. Knowledge can’t kill love.

[click, static]

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162 - One Hundred Sixty Two Mar 05, 2024

Show notes

[TRANSCRIPT]

[click, static]

Okay, alright, sorry, I think I had a mental breakdown yesterday. Um, another mental breakdown. Maybe this is all some kind of prolonged breakdown and I’m actually sitting in a padded room somewhere.

The thing I almost asked—I’m not sure I even want to say it out loud, it’s idiotic.

[click, static]

I was going to ask if you’re god. There. See? Fucking stupid.

[click, static]

But, then…who are you? What are you? If I’m the one who caused all this, then how do the two of you fit into this?

I just keep circling back around to…

[click, static]

I’m dead, aren’t I? That’s—it’s the thing that makes the most sense. Or, I don’t know if that’s true, it doesn’t explain everything, but it would explain…

Well, if I’m dead, then Birdie, Fox, Leann…it’s all a twisted figment of my imagination. There is no ripple because this is just my own personal hell, some kind of ghostly afterlife where nothing makes sense and there’s no way out and nothing and no one else is real. But I can’t bear to be alone, even in death, so…

People say that your life flashes before your eyes right before you die, but maybe it’s not really like that. How would we actually know anyway? I guess, near death experiences. I’ve never had one of those, not really. So maybe that is what happens when people are facing down death, they see everything like a movie reel behind their eyelids.

But what if..what if that’s not what it is. What if, instead, we see our future, our afterlife flash before our eyes? And there really isn’t an afterlife at all, but instead whatever it is we were imaging in our actual life…it flashes before our eyes but because we’re dying, the moment seems infinite. That blink of time, a life’s worth of feelings and beliefs and speculation about the universe, compacted into the last few seconds before our hearts give out.

Maybe all of this is the final burst of comprehension from a dying brain.

[click, static]

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