Po is a 2021 audio chuck original made for our friends at Sirius XM.

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Seconds, minutes,

hours, the currency of our lives.

Every day we're given our allowance,

and every day we wrestle with the clock,

a three-handed robber whose furious avarice knows no sleep. We scrape by, for the most part, but there will come a day when we can't

pay, when our last few moments are ripped away, when the thug-named time shakes us down and his bleeding scythe comes around.

In this story, every instant counts towards savings as life swings between the pit and the pendulum.

The pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe, adapted by Jake Weber 2021.

Here, the wicked mob cherished hatred and spilled innocent blood.

The country has been saved, and this cave of death has been demolished. Where once lived cruelty, there is now life and liberty.

When they finally untied me and I could sit, it was such a relief I felt my senses were

leaving me.

But then came the words, the words of my death sentence, and after that all I could hear was a humming in my ears, like the worrying of a fan.

My judges were dressed all in black, and through my pain and sleep deprivation, their faces looked surreal, distorted, their lips as white as the sheet of paper on which I handwrite this account of those terrible days, the days I was tortured.

One after the other, I watched as the merciless dark-eyed judges mouthed the word, death. Their lips drawn thin behind scraggly beards.

But after the first judge, all I could hear was that hum in my ears.

I remember the curtains were heavy and made of the soft fur of some animal, and there were candles on the table.

I had been delirious with pain.

They had kept me in stress positions so long I was having a hard time processing my surroundings.

...