The Holy Shiver

Gonna kick off today with a little ghost story for you.

So there's this woman, and she's going through weight loss surgery, and when she gets home, she starts hearing these gurgles and creaks, and realizes she is being stalked by the former bits of herself, her flesh that she has cut away.

Or there is a house that is maze-like and haunted by quiet cruelties that occur between you and your partner, and it feels like there is no way out.

These are some of the stories of the prize-winning writer Carmen Maria Machado.

Some of them are true, some of them are fiction, all of them are charged with this sense of spookiness.

I have spent hours of my life being pleasantly spooked by her, and so I was totally delighted when she wrote into our show wondering about something that had happened with her partner of four years, Lauren Brown.

You rolling?

Yes.

I gotta

That spooked her.

Should I, should I say?

You can say.

Um, the first time Lauren and I hooked up with each other, I noticed goosebumps on her body right before she, like, had an orgasm.

But the pattern was really unusual.

Like, it wasn't just universal goosebumps, it was these kind of, like, leopard spot goosebumps.

Sometimes I'll, like, touch Lauren on the arm, and, like, she'll get goosebumps, like, where I've touched her.

So it's like you leave a trace? Radiolab reporter Maria Paz Gutiérrez.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

And editor Soren Wheeler, who sat in with Carmen and Lauren to hear the tale.

Sometimes you have, you call them crispy ones, which is like they're really, really, really pointy.

Yeah, extra, extra crispy is, like, I say that you could, like, grate Parmesan or, like, [laughs] zest a lemon on me.

Like, they just are, like, so intense and feel really, like, sharp.

Right.