Reading from: Lay Your Armor Down - Michael Farris Smith
What if it's True Podcast
Cameron Buckner
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 August 2025
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An old woman, riddled with dementia, walks off into the woods in the middle of the night. A light in the wood draws her to a campfire with two strange, dangerous men, one young and one old, who are there plotting a crime of as-yet-indeterminate purpose. The two men have a job to do. They are hunting something precious but have only been told: you’ll know it when you see it. When they arrive at the place, an abandoned church cellar in the burned-out countryside, they find an answer they never could have predicted. Now, the job feels dubious, one that’ll surely bring them to ruin. Yet if they’re to go against orders, no step can be undone, and nothing can be taken back.
In spare, imagistic prose, Lay Your Armor Down reduces the epic to its most elemental. It charts the course of several broken people, all outrunning danger’s dark fingers, and all brought together for one last chance at redemption.
https://www.amazon.com/Lay-Your-Armor-Down-Novel/dp/031657337X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1I4CV497KSFRF&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.eWPHY_YbPVBDxLaFsW8F7LBFePkq_lQBLjAGgJK_2eVgBw-g3IB0RORNCQSBofWd.tptTpfuD8hj4EJZc5JYkAcxhxhFBwDxGXXBRvwRwx5E&dib_tag=se&keywords=lay+your+armor+down+by+michael+farris+smith&qid=1754411626&sprefix=%2Caps%2C207&sr=8-1
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lay Your Armour Down, a novel by Michael Ferris Smith. |
| 0:17.0 | Chapter 1 |
| 0:17.8 | She moved in the solemn lamplight of the cluttered house like a vague figure of a troubled |
| 0:24.4 | dream. |
| 0:25.8 | She shuffled from room to room, opening drawers and closet doors and picking up things |
| 0:30.9 | and putting them into the grocery sack, no sense or order, to the gathering. |
| 0:36.6 | A random ring and a broken bracelet from a spilled jewelry box. |
| 0:41.0 | One shoe. |
| 0:42.4 | A ragged notebook from the bottom of a stack of other ragged notebooks. |
| 0:47.5 | Two postcards from a long dead sister. |
| 0:50.6 | A handful of hair clips. |
| 0:52.5 | A small wooden picture frame that held the rudimentary drawing of an angel |
| 0:57.5 | that had been created by her child decades before. |
| 1:02.3 | She wore a thin housecoat that hung on her aged and slender figure, her gray hair, and a matted mess. |
| 1:10.5 | She talked to herself as she moved throughout the |
| 1:12.8 | house, reminding herself of errands that had been years ago completed and gossiping about |
| 1:19.2 | people she no longer knew and singing fragments of songs that had once played on the radio |
| 1:25.0 | during the summer days of her small town youth. |
| 1:29.3 | In doorways, she would stop and look into the shadows and touch the tip of her index finger to her chin, |
| 1:35.6 | and hold it there in trouble thought, and then she would begin again to fill the sack with random fragments of time gone by. |
| 1:44.5 | At the end of the hallway, the closet door was open, and the contents overflowed and spilled |
| 1:50.2 | out onto the floor, as if the house were regurgitating its own clutter. |
... |
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