Aaron Smith
speaker
2,298 appearances
12 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 25 Aug
Aaron Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
He knew who he was.
Someone would ask him whether he carried Brahms' German Requiem or Valerie Wellington on an extinct Chicago blues label, and he had both.
Sometimes he was sick of who he was, and the sickness passed.
The two guys who came in that afternoon were AWOL from a nearby army base and maybe only intended to rob the place and had no idea who they were.
There was a young woman who worked afternoons there and her boyfriend had stopped by to tease and flirt with her a little.
The two men pretended to browse through the stacks of record albums for a while and then made the owner close the store and march them down the steps and made the woman take off her dress and made the boyfriend watch as one and then the other raped her there.
What happened after that is blind and smells its way to the sea.
They forced the woman and her boyfriend to swallow some Drano from a can and then flushed their mouths with water and made them swallow.
But before they found the leftover can with the snowy crystals in it or had thought of using it...
One of them must have noticed the owner with the pencil in his ear, then the short pine two by four.
Has the thought ever entered your mind?
One of them said after they had made the man lie on the floor, made him lie on his side with his ear exposed, with his ear turned up to them, listening to everything, wondering how an ear could feel naked when it never had before.
Did the man really believe the two of them would let the others live if he would lie as still as possible as they had told him to and let them do it?
This is usually the moment when the fool is hanged and the poet disappears because he doesn't know what happens next.
And a hunger with a mouth as small as the eye of a sewing needle overruns and darkens the flaxen grasses and the willows and the staring eyes of ponds.
And you know there wasn't any king.
There was only a man who owned a record store and who believed two murderers would be kind and keep their promises and waited for it to happen.
Lying there on his side, waiting until they were ready to drive the unbelieving pencil through his ear.
That's a hard one.
Like I had forgotten how brutal and it just, it just, I literally have shivers.
Showing 841–860 of 2,298 · page 43 of 115
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