Hi, I'm Lovar Burton and this is Lovar Burton Reads.

When every episode I had, pick a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

Hey y'all, today's story is by Darcy Littlebatcher. She's a lapan, a pochi scientist, and writer.

After studying gene expression and toxin producing phytoplankton, she has received a Ph.D.

from Texas A&M University. That's right, go Aggies. Her short fiction and comics have appeared in

several publications including Light Speed, Stranger Rhyzen's, Mythic Delirium, Love Beyond Body,

Space and Time, you get the idea. Her young adult novel Elatso is out this fall and has ghosts and

ancestral magic and just all kinds of good stuff. Now, before I start talking about her story,

well, for those of you with kids in the car, there are a couple of curse words that feature

prominently in the text, so there you go. As you may know, a lot of short story anthologies are

organized around some kind of central theme. Think, reimagined fairy tales, stories of first contact,

time travel stories. The piece that I'm going to read today was featured in an anthology of stories

that all begin with the same first few memorable words. These are the kind of words that you use in

recounting an incredible improbable tale. Them being no shit, there I was.

The story is called Skinwalker Fast Talker. And if you're not familiar with the Skinwalker of the

title, it's a figure that pops up in indigenous American culture, including the Navajo and Apache.

It varies a bit from people to people, but generally a Skinwalker is a type of harmful

which you can either turn into or disguise themselves as an animal. And you'll also hear about

the coyote in this story, who is traditionally a trickster figure. Our protagonist is Mel,

a person of indigenous descent who lives somewhere in Texas. Mel works for a tabloid,

kind of like the weekly world news. You know, the type of paper that publishes stories about

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