LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy Story Podcast (Sci-Fi | Audiobook | Short Stories)
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Creator: Adamant Press
Synopsis:
Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, LIGHTSPEED is a Hugo Award-winning, critically-acclaimed digital magazine. In its pages, you'll find science fiction from near-future stories and sociological SF to far-future, star-spanning SF. Plus there's fantasy from epic sword-and-sorcery and contemporary urban tales to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folk tales. Each month, LIGHTSPEED brings you a mix of original short stories and flash fiction featuring a variety of authors, from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven't heard yet. When you read LIGHTSPEED, you'll see where science fiction and fantasy have come from, where they are now, and where they're going. The LIGHTSPEED podcast, produced by Grammy Award-winning narrator and producer Stefan Rudnicki of Skyboat Media, features original audio short stories 6-8 times a month.
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Episodes:
Sagan Yee | Two Motes in the Zeugma Dark
Thu, 19 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Every date followed the same pattern. After the dinner and drinks, and the long moonlit walk along the canal, Jules would casually remark that the hangar was not far from here, and would they like to come see? | © 2024 by Sagan Yee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 12 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0000
This month's Lightspeed Science Fiction Short Shots episode features "GaaS" by Meg Elison (© 2024 by Meg Elison), narrated by Alison Belle Bews and "The Mote in Bird's Eye, or Note Attached to a Frozen Corpse Retrieved from Deep Space" by Jon Lasser (© 2024 by Jon Lasser), narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Osahon Ize-Iyamu | We the People Excluding I
Mon, 09 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0000
We were in the mines when the world was falling apart. I remember, the earth was cracking, and the plants were going limp, and the world looked dark blue, less full of life. | © 2024 Osahon Ize-Iyamu. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gabriela Santiago | Reconstructing “The Goldenrod Conspiracy,” Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30
Thu, 05 Sep 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Can someone get the doors? Thanks. Please remember we’re on an honor system for chairs—if you’ve eaten today, please leave them for someone who hasn’t. We don’t need another fainting incident. | © 2024 by Gabriela Santiago. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"The Terrible Secret of The Immortal Bards" by Adam-Troy Castro + "A Superior Knot" by Ash Huang
Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:57:07 -0000
This month's Lightspeed Fantasy Short Shots episode features "The Terrible Secret of The Immortal Bards" by Adam-Troy Castro (© 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro), narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and "A Superior Knot" by Ash Huang (© 2024 by Ash Huang, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe | Child of the River
Tue, 27 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Mother used to say I am a child of the river. I never understood her. I thought I would be a child of the wind, like her. | © 2024 by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Archita Mittra | The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strain’d
Thu, 22 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000
It is the year 3048 and you still hate your job. | © 2024 by Archita Mittra. Narrated by Arthur Morey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"Resistance" by Cat Rambo + "Under the Skin" by Deborah L. Davitt
Thu, 15 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000
This month's Lightspeed Science Fiction Short Shots episode features "Resistance" by Cat Rambo (© 2024 by Cat Rambo), narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and "Under the Skin" by Deborah L. Davitt (© 2024 by Deborah L. Davitt), narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dominique Dickey | Look at the Moon
Tue, 13 Aug 2024 17:00:35 -0000
We drove out to Joshua Tree for the star party—a gathering of amateur astronomers under a clear, dark sky. It was Holly’s idea, an impromptu adventure on a Friday after work: “Hey, Lou, do you want to go look at the moon tonight?” | © 2024 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Richard Thomas | The Darkness Between the Stars
Thu, 08 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Buddy and I abandoned our hydrogen nomad at the edge of the wastelands before trudging around the rusted chain-link perimeter of the abandoned fairgrounds, waiting for the blast of steam and guttural earthly moan to escape from the fractured soil, signifying that it was clear to enter the area. | © 2024 by Richard Thomas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"Mud Maidens Rise" by K.A. Wiggins + "What's in a Name" by Matthew Hughes
Tue, 06 Aug 2024 04:00:00 -0000
This month's Lightspeed Fantasy Short Shots episode features "Mud Maidens Rise" by K.A. Wiggins (© 2024 by K.A. Wiggins), narrated by Nan McNamara and "What's in a Name" by Matthew Hughes (© 2024 by Matthew Hughes), narrated by Arthur Morey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | Between Above and Below
Mon, 29 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Next war, the angel decided, he was going to sit out. Before the dust settled, before hosts rose and fell depending on their actions and inclinations, he fled. Cowardice, maybe. More like pragmatism, he rationalized. | © 2024 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko | The Heist for the Soul of Humanity
Thu, 18 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0000
The simulation blossomed around Nadja Gavrić like a hypercube unpacking itself into three dimensions. | © 2024 by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko. Narrated by Susan Hanfield, with Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vanessa Fogg | The Red Queen’s Heart
Mon, 15 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Anything can be bought or sold at the Night Market. A dozen hummingbird tongues curled like tiny snails, basted in honey and chili oil and served on a silver tray. A mermaid’s song, caught in an antique bottle of smoked glass. | © 2024 by Vanessa Fogg. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 11 Jul 2024 16:38:55 -0000
This month's Lightspeed Science Fiction Short Shots episode features "The Only Writing Advice You'll Ever Need to Survive Eldritch Horrors" by Aimee Picchi (© 2024 by Aimee Picchi), narrated by Susan Hanfield and "The Aliens Said They Want to Party" by Joel William David Buxton (© 2024 by Joel William David Buxton), narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mon, 08 Jul 2024 19:04:00 -0000
This month's Lightspeed Fantasy Short Shots episode features "Songs of the Sorrow of Thorns" by Amayah Perveen (© 2024 by Amayah Perveen), narrated by Susan Hanfield and "A Guide on How to meet the Deity of Many Faces" by Oyedotun Damilola Muees (© 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees), narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dominique Dickey | The Last Lucid Day
Thu, 04 Jul 2024 04:00:00 -0000
You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail. | © 2024 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oyedotun Damilola Muees | Warning Notes from an Annihilator Machine
Thu, 27 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Today makes it a decade and a day I have been keeping tabs on you. I started by watching your mother, monitoring all her movements while she housed you. There’s no better time to relay this message but now. | © 2024 by Oyedotun Damilola Muees. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shanna Germain | The Weight of Salt
Mon, 24 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
We’ve never been so busy. The cave where we work used to be calm and, if not entirely devoid of sound, then split only by the crash of waves at high tide and the occasional cry of a woman who didn’t listen when we said listen this will hurt this will hurt this will hurt. Or maybe she did listen, but she thought we meant physical pain, when what we meant was your heart your heart your heart. | © 2024 by Shanna Germain. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dominica Phetteplace | The Help Hotline
Thu, 20 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
The trouble started after my husband reported a strange Zoom call at work. | © 2024 by Dominica Phetteplace. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Deborah L. Davitt | In the Hands of the Mountain God
Mon, 17 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
The towering granite shoulders of the mountain god braced against the blue heavens above. Eero’s eyes remained closed beneath his glacial mask, his body swathed in a cloak of green trees. | © 2024 by Deborah L. Davitt. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrea Kriz | Udo Gehler and the Virgin Bitch of the Resistance
Thu, 13 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Udo Gehler saw his next opponent was the Virgin Bitch of the Resistance and didn’t even blink. | © 2024 by Andrea Kriz. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Chee | An Otherworldly Cat Tells You the Secrets of the Universe
Mon, 10 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
There are a near-infinite number of strange and marvelous worlds in this Universe, and in all of them there are Cats. | © 2024 by Megan Chee. Read by Scott Peterson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
dave ring | The Waking Sleep of a Seething Wound
Thu, 06 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Dawn shot a quiver of cirrus that smeared like sunscreen across the sky. Bini had been awake for hours, back aching. She was too old for this shit. | © 2024 by dave ring. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Varsha Dinesh | Sparrow and the Parasol
Mon, 03 Jun 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Deep in the abyss of the Unholy Bazaar, in a shop that reeked of death and god-blood, Sparrow lay screaming in a web of rope and unbreakable silk. | © 2024 by Varsha Dinesh. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 30 May 2024 04:00:00 -0000
I want to tell you everything. I should tell you that you’re the greatest accomplishment our people have ever produced. I should tell you that you’re loved. | © 2024 by Ash Howell. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
P H Lee | Richard Nixon and the Princess of the Crows
Mon, 27 May 2024 04:00:00 -0000
The night before the comet hit, Richard Milhous Nixon awoke restless and well before dawn. | © 2024 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nisi Shawl | Over a Long Time Ago
Thu, 23 May 2024 04:00:00 -0000
She should go back inside the watchpod. Maree and Blaise didn’t have to be dead. | © 2024 by Nisi Shawl. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marissa Lingen | And the Dreams That You Dare to Dream
Mon, 20 May 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Gemma checks and rechecks the stories and songs, but she can’t find anything that says you have to go back. | © 2024 by Marissa Lingen. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephen Geigen-Miller | The Last Thing They See Is Laika
Thu, 16 May 2024 16:44:30 -0000
So much for Shapcott’s harbinger of astronautical doom. He hasn’t seen her at all. Or anyone, obviously. | © 2024 by Stephen Geigen-Miller. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mon, 13 May 2024 16:22:15 -0000
I joined The Ministry in 2009. Before that, I worked in grocery stores, pawn shops, and liquor stores. | © 2024 by Ben Peek. Narrated by Ruth Wallman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caroline M. Yoachim | We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read
Thu, 09 May 2024 11:53:20 -0000
This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only find one thread. It mimics your language in its simplest form, a single strand of words laid end to end. You will have to work hard if you want to understand us properly. You must learn to hold more than one thread of language simultaneously in your mind. | © 2024 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Ruth Wallman, Alison Belle Bewes, and Caroline M. Yoachim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mon, 06 May 2024 04:00:00 -0000
As with Robert Johnson, a lot of people who believed in the devil also believed that Jack Malagan had made a deal with him. | © 2024 by Rory Harper. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rich Larson | Limping Toward Sunrise
Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Lester swung his chainsaw, mowing a path through the mob of needle-toothed quantum parasites, while Kit batted clean-up with her Louisville Slugger. Across the plain of dark rock, their destination: a whirling, gnashing portal that could doom all humanity. It wasn’t ideal timing for an awkward conversation, but it never was. | © 2024 by Rich Larson. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vandana Singh | Travelers’ Tales from the Ends of the World
Mon, 22 Apr 2024 17:45:54 -0000
Welcome, Stranger! This is a story for you, you who wait for my words to fall into your ear, so that we can share being and become more than we are alone. | © 2024 by Vandana Singh. Narrated by Annette Oliveira, with Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Susan Palwick | Mother's Day, After Everything
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000
All of us remember what Mother’s Day was like before we became sterile: flowers and candy for living mothers and tears for dead ones and anger at bad ones, and women who couldn’t be mothers or who’d lost children marinating in grief, and nobody really profiting from any of it except Hallmark and the restaurants and florists. | © 2024 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Judy Young Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mon, 15 Apr 2024 19:50:25 -0000
There is a city called Salemo. Salemo sits atop a cliffside at the edge of a sea. | © 2024 by David Marino. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Anaxagoras | Under a Star, Bright as Morning
Thu, 11 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes. | © 2024 by David Anaxagoras. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Modupeoluwa Shelle | How to Know Your Father Is a God
Mon, 08 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000
I know you’ve been following me since I left school, boarded the train, and took to the alley. Why didn’t I run? | © 2024 by Modupeoluwa Shelle. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Endria Isa Richardson | A Pedra
Thu, 04 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000
Audio Recording, “Lydia and Ecco at Insight,” February 3, 2134 I didn’t run. If the boy had not called to you, you would have run. I would not have run. | © 2024 by Endria Isa Richardson. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mitchell Shanklin | a testament to indirection, an enigma, the sun above
Mon, 01 Apr 2024 04:00:00 -0000
So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. | © 2024 by Mitchell Shanklin. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marissa Lingen | Islands of Stability
Thu, 28 Mar 2024 05:00:00 -0000
Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. | © 2024 by Marissa Lingen. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sharang Biswas | Season of Weddings
Thu, 28 Mar 2024 05:00:00 -0000
To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of flatbread smeared with soft, spicy cheese; and the wine has a buttery quality he hasn’t encountered in decades. It’s marvelous. It’s been such a long time since he attended a wedding. At the last one, Thor ate so many of the hors d’oeuvres that he hadn’t been able to finish his dinner. Nate wants to tell Thor how good the hors d’oeuvres are at this wedding, but he’s not sure they’re quite there yet.| © 2024 by Sharang Biswas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Three Thousand, Four Hundred Twenty-Third Law of Robotics
Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:31:40 -0000
If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it, the kind of man who will not be coming back.... | © 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
P H Lee | Only Some of True Love's Miracles
Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:29:06 -0000
True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her (for how could he fail to kiss her, loving her as truly as he did?) then the gods in their mercies and compassions granted her life, that she might return his love. | © 2024 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Angela Liu | An Incomplete Body Has No Answers
Thu, 14 Mar 2024 11:44:45 -0000
You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer. A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts. | © 2024 by Angela Liu. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alex Irvine | Kopki and the Fish
Thu, 14 Mar 2024 05:00:00 -0000
The story as it is told in the dry valleys north of Averon, where the only roads run down to the Cricket River and the only power is the freehold of Skadar, begins with a merchant envoy from the southern coast who traveled from Averon. | © 2024 by Alex Irvine. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Will McMahon | Fragments of a Symbiotic Life
Thu, 07 Mar 2024 08:58:17 -0000
I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm---I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon. | © 2024 by Will McMahon. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shingai Njeri Kagunda | Let the Star Explode
Thu, 07 Mar 2024 08:52:57 -0000
The last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next to her holding her waist in the space between his biceps and his lower arm. And her mother who is half an inch shorter than her stands on her left side. | © 2024 by Shingai Njeri Kagunda. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Phoebe Barton | But From Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive
Thu, 22 Feb 2024 14:19:34 -0000
It was a long fall in-system from the warp point, so Va Sojourner had plenty of time to observe. She found a peace in her observations that was expensive or painful to scratch out anywhere else, when she had to organize herself around the demands and expectations of everyone around her. | © 2024 by Phoebe Barton. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
KT Bryski | An Elegy for the Former Things
Thu, 22 Feb 2024 06:00:00 -0000
You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass. | © 2024 by KT Bryski. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Wen-yi Lee | What Becomes of Curious Minds
Thu, 15 Feb 2024 15:56:29 -0000
On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys. | © 2024 by Wen-yi Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher Rowe | The Pearl Captain
Thu, 15 Feb 2024 06:00:00 -0000
Josea Dream was the pearl captain at the heart of the bivalve ship Blue Spring, which had swum the black for a thousand years. It was a mystery to Josea---it was a mystery to anyone who’d ever thought about it---why the bivalves suffered their captains’ proddings. | © 2024 by Christopher Rowe. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 08 Feb 2024 13:10:12 -0000
Scarlett’s eyes had to be perfect. Jon was the artist who’d made her, so it bothered him to think that so much of Scarlett would be crafted by other people. Scarlett’s limbs were carved from silicon polymer and coated in a soft synthetic skin from the best prosthetics companies in the world. | © 2024 by Everdeen Mason. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mari Ness | Further Examination and Capture of Candle Skulls Associated with the Baba Yaga
Thu, 08 Feb 2024 06:00:00 -0000
Recent scholarship has shed considerable light on many previously puzzling or mysterious aspects of the life of the Baba Yaga---or, as some would still have it, the Baba Yagas. But one element has remained largely unstudied, and indeed, almost completely ignored. | © 2024 by Mari Ness. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stewart C Baker | Companion Animals in Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight
Thu, 01 Feb 2024 06:35:30 -0000
Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight is an American web series created by an unknown animator or animators. The show combines magical girl anime tropes with cosmic horror, following high schooler Sally Hoshino (Kira Kira Sunlight) and her friends. | © 2024 by Stewart C Baker. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
P H Lee | A Sojourn in the Fifth City
Thu, 01 Feb 2024 06:00:00 -0000
The coffin she carried had felt like an imposition at first—a holy imposition! a welcome imposition! but an imposition nonetheless. But by now she had carried it on her shoulders out from the tenth school, carried it across plains, up and down canyons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Wed, 31 Jan 2024 00:20:29 -0000
My son tells me that there’s a man in the house, someone he hears well after the lights are out, in the narrower halls or maybe at the far side of the den---a gait and creak he’s certain isn’t me or his mom, since he can hear us both breathing heavily and tossing in our sleep. | © 2024 by Thomas Ha. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Anaxagoras | We Shall Not Be Bitter at the End of the World
Mon, 29 Jan 2024 22:52:13 -0000
It’s my twelfth birthday and we’re all waiting for Wormwood and everyone is here and I mean everyone. Me and Mom and Dad and Big Pa which is my grandpa who was the strong man at one of the last traveling carnivals in America, and Bigfoot of course, and a swarm of killer bees collectively named Kyle who aren’t really so mean. | © 2024 by David Anaxagoras. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aimee Ogden | Night Desk Duty at the Infinite Paradox Hotel
Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:00:00 -0000
“Good evening, sir,” Dave says pleasantly, hiding his crossword puzzle under his computer keyboard, as the front door chimes. “Do you have a reservation?” “Afraid not.” The guest fiddles with his suitcase. “I saw the No Vacancy sign, but I gotta ask---” “No problem at all.” Dave’s keyboard clatters busily, a series of well-practiced keystrokes. | © 2024 by Aimee Ogden. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Farewell to Faust
Thu, 18 Jan 2024 13:30:35 -0000
Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he exerts authority for this one time and says that this is a man, | © 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lowry Poletti | In the Tree’s Hollow, a Doe
Fri, 12 Jan 2024 04:37:58 -0000
Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned by the doe’s diaphragm, is so peaceful he might as well have been asleep. | © 2024 by Lowry Poletti. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 11 Jan 2024 06:00:00 -0000
Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page, never more than a scene. The scene would be set inside a shop, or a bar. | © 2024 by Ben Peek. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rachael K. Jones | Five Views of the Planet Tartarus
Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:49:10 -0000
Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the passengers. As the orbiting debris bounces and scrapes against the hull, the prisoners squeeze their eyes closed. | © 2024 by Rachael K. Jones. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sloane Leong | A Saint Between the Teeth
Thu, 04 Jan 2024 11:54:17 -0000
Kharatet moistens his sightless eyes with his tongue as he draws his finger across the limestone tablet glyphs. His audience today is a clutch of toddling nymphs, motionless save for their short tails rippling the shallow water impatiently. It’s a good age to read to, while the little ulmuns are still young enough. | © 2024 by Sloane Leong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A.T. Greenblatt | Mindfulness and the Machine
Thu, 28 Dec 2023 06:00:00 -0000
The first time you can’t answer the question, you are already within the Great Dragon. Any bad decisions today? Mindy’s text reads. Around you, the Great Dragon’s pistons squeal, stutter, while the crew’s stressed voices echo above and below you. | © 2023 by A.T. Greenblatt. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Fri, 22 Dec 2023 12:00:00 -0000
The two of us, myself and this man I did not know, sat at a table in a windowless white cell with an indefinite light source. I was afraid, as afraid as a human being can be. I remembered every step that had brought me here and I did not consider this a place of safety. | © 2023 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carlie St. George | We'll Never Die in the Woods
Thu, 14 Dec 2023 06:00:00 -0000
The unkind witch in Hook Tree Woods has little use for people. Mothers and sisters, obviously, will only disappoint you, and friends—well. She never had many of those. Her only friends now are snakes and toads, who are far preferable to humans. | ©2023 by Carlie St. George. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
D. Thomas Minton | Carbon Zero
Thu, 07 Dec 2023 06:00:00 -0000
“Is there a problem, officer?” “We’re not the police.” My partner, Enrico, places his palm against the door, ready to test the old man’s resolve. I tap my finger against my thumb and SNAPbeam the warrant to the old man’s synaptic cache. “We’re EPF.” | © 2023 by D. Thomas Minton. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Martin Cahill | The Moment Before the Moment
Thu, 30 Nov 2023 06:00:00 -0000
Azahn had been the ninety-third Imperial Foresight to the Dynasty of Silken Flame for only three weeks when he was forcibly retired. His body had been blessed by the holy waters of the Sky-Vein River, and he had earned the named-blade Stalwart Thy Mind, Strong Thy Arm, even now strapped to his back. He had trained his entire life. © 2023 by Martin Cahill. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Regina Kanyu Wang (translated by Rebecca F. Kuang) | A Record of Lost Time
Thu, 23 Nov 2023 15:00:00 -0000
How did we end up here? The humans before me had the same physiological traits as I did, yet still we had no means of communicating with one another. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Words and phrases spilled from their mouths, a torrent of sounds bleeding into one another, syllables pouring out in a drum roll, unending and uninterrupted. | © 2023 by Regina Kanyu Wang. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Osahon Ize-Iyamu | Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters
Thu, 16 Nov 2023 06:00:00 -0000
I didn’t want to eat Joshua, but he turned into dust, and the way things go in Carrucchi village is that if someone turns into ashes you inhale them till there’s nothing but smoke in your lungs and redness in your eye. Sometimes we have to eat people to make us less lonely. I didn’t want to do it, but Joshua named me as his eater, so my entire village forced me. | © 2023 by Osahon Ize-Iyamu. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 09 Nov 2023 11:00:00 -0000
If you’re reading this, in a self-destructing DM, on the reverse strand of a plasmid, in the recipe binder you found in a deported neighbor’s belongings dumped on the curb, you’re no longer angry. You’re hungry. Your last co-op got raided by the Department of Homeland Biosecurity, hunting for pharmaceuticals “dangerous” to those at risk of getting pregnant. | © 2023 by MKRNYILGLD. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A.L. Goldfuss | Where the God-Knives Tread (Part 2 of 2)
Thu, 19 Oct 2023 21:20:05 -0000
Every Teshiarr metropolis, town, and hamlet had featured an agora, the community centerpiece for shopping, conversing, and joining. It was where one received their daily meals, heard news from leaders, and reported to communal soul alcoves. © 2023 by A.L. Goldfuss | Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A.L. Goldfuss | Where the God-Knives Tread (Part 1 of 2)
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 05:00:00 -0000
When the ship’s scanners first chirped in the dead of night, Sien figured it was another misfire: light reflecting off asteroid ice, solar radiation, space dust. But xe still slid from xir berth into the chilly, cramped cockpit, eyes bleary. © 2023 by A.L. Goldfuss | Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu | His Thing
Thu, 28 Sep 2023 05:00:00 -0000
The house was on the same street as a bakery whose only offering was penis-shaped waffles. Rufaro didn’t like American houses very much. They looked paper thin like doll houses that would lift off into the clouds if a strong wind came by. | © 2023 by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. | Narrated by Christina Ogunade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Kessel & Bruce Sterling | Money in the Bank
Wed, 06 Sep 2023 05:00:00 -0000
“I lined up a new gig for you,” said the Glovemaster. “All you have to do is protect one special guy.” I sat in my trailer with my Bluetooth headphones on and my laptop perched on an Amazon box. I wore a boonie hat with a militia logo. | © 2023 by John Kessel & Bruce Sterling. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lowry Poletti | In the Nest Beneath the Mountain-Tree, Your Sisters Dance
Thu, 24 Aug 2023 06:00:00 -0000
Dr. Nirwater Leera only agreed to study Mr. Girat because he is supposed to be dead. Tomorrow, they will meet in person for the first time. But today, Leera wastes time by staring at a cellophane bag full of Girat’s vomit. | © 2023 by Lowry Poletti. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sloane Leone | The Blade and the Bloodwright
Thu, 03 Aug 2023 05:00:00 -0000
The soldiers slit the woman’s throat every evening before bedding down so they can sleep without worry. She mocks them but never fights the knife coming to her. Two of the men still take turns watching her in case she heals before the rest of the cadre wakes. | © 2023 by Sloane Leong. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 27 Jul 2023 05:00:00 -0000
Muna shuts the storeroom door as quietly as she can. Holding a just-waxed bundle of letters to her chest, she sticks out her head to check the bookshop floor. If she walks between the shelves on the far right, she can slip out unnoticed in ten heartbeats. The main door of the bookshop is propped open, the sun shining after what feels like a year of sodden clouds and sludged streets---she can’t wait to feel its warmth on her skin. | © 2023 by Isha Karki. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
JB Park | Six Months After All Life on Titan Died
Thu, 06 Jul 2023 05:00:00 -0000
I need a binge-worthy banger about the incident on Titan. Let’s start with that one picture from Titan that leaked, the one of the weird fishes in those underwater ruins dying. Let’s get going with a second-person narration of You looking at it, thinking about how extinction just happened, and your hands are trembling, and history---your memories of all the tragedies and scandals past---informs you that everyone will forget about it in a few weeks. Insert some beefy workplace drama in the background. | © 2023 by JB Park, Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Deborah L. Davitt | Philoctetes in Kabul
Thu, 29 Jun 2023 05:00:00 -0000
Call me Philoctetes. My real name doesn’t matter, and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you what it is, anyway. Security concerns, you understand. What you need to know about me is that I was a US Army Green Beret---one of the Quiet Professionals. Usually tasked with working with the locals in counterinsurgency efforts and the like. The stuff that doesn’t---or shouldn’t---make the newspapers. | © 2023 Deborah L. Davitt. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dominique Dickey | Spaceship Joyride
Thu, 08 Jun 2023 05:00:00 -0000
The most beautiful boy you have ever seen in your life is hot-wiring a spaceship. It’s an objectively unsexy spaceship, insofar as a spaceship can be unsexy---a six-seater built like a 2008 Honda Odyssey, a car model you’re only aware of because it continues to appear in memes. The boy is decidedly not unsexy, though. His name is Eddie, he’s your xenobiology lab partner, and he’s currently bent over the spaceship’s popped hood. | © 2023 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Timothy Mudie | Blood For a Stranger
Thu, 25 May 2023 05:00:00 -0000
Crunches and shrieks buffeted the Magellan LLC smartship as it plunged into Enceladus’s kilometers-thick ice crust, making their way to the subsurface ocean and the rival LuxeSpace corporation’s station situated there. Warning signals flashed through Jarrell and his fellow shipminds’ readouts, but they followed their orders and continued inward. They’d long since learned to ignore such dangers---the digitized brains of former human corporate-soldiers that controlled smartships could afford to take risks and go places traditionally-crewed spaceships wouldn’t dare. | ©Timothy Mudie. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | One Heart, Lost and Found
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:02:06 -0000
I came to the city to find an egg. A robin’s egg, to be precise, an oval of pale, perfect blue that echoed the spring sky. Inside, not a robin, but an emerald. Inside the emerald, a wizard’s heart. He had decided he missed it, and he wanted it back. It was the usual sort of thing, or so he had assured me. His heart taken out and stored for safekeeping, a place where his enemies---and certainly there were many, jealous of his power---would never think to look. So well hidden, in fact, that he himself was no longer quite certain where it was. ©2023 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Amanda Helms | The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks
Thu, 27 Apr 2023 10:02:01 -0000
The house wakes from its somnolence as the witch trudges up the path made of tarts. Through its rock-candy windows, the house scans her figure for any signs of hurt. The witch’s errands in the city make her nervous. And the house, being made of her magic and therefore of the witch, worries along with her that the wrong person might recognize her, or simply think they do. | ©2023 by Amanda Helms. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brian K. Hudson | Virtually Cherokee
Thu, 06 Apr 2023 10:01:31 -0000
What I observed was a giant anthropomorphized ribbon microphone, the type one might imagine standing in front of a radio announcer and his studio audience, selling soap in the dirty 1930s. It sauntered lazily over to an overstuffed red couch, walking on stick-figure legs that looked like they’d been hand-drawn by a young child. The large red couch sat next to a five-foot tall elephant ear plant. | ©2023 by Brian K. Hudson. Narrated by Scott Peterson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Benjamin Peek | The Ministry of Saturn
Thu, 23 Mar 2023 10:02:47 -0000
The town was not called Byzantium. The Ministry named it during the first meeting. “It’s not a colony,” Thomas James would have said if he could, but the office was hot and bright, the sun in the windows, in his eyes. He felt like he was surrounded by faceless figures even though there were only two other people in the room. The town they were talking about was located between worlds. The entrance was in the remains of Ooldea, out on the edge of The Nullarbor Plain. | ©2023 by Benjamin Peek. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Daniel H. Wilson | Crystalline
Thu, 02 Mar 2023 11:01:29 -0000
“Who loves you?” I ask. My daughter looks away. Doesn’t answer. I lean down and turn her to face me, resting my thumb in the dimple in her chin. It’s the same dimple her mother has. Or had. “You love me, Daddy.” “That’s right, so please listen closely,” I say. She’s only nine, but Anya’s eyes are flat and black and hard to read in the dim light of the cave. “Only you can make our family whole again.” “But. Last time. I saw . . .” ©2023 by Daniel H. Wilson. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sam J. Miller | His Guns Could Not Protect Him
Thu, 23 Feb 2023 11:02:30 -0000
I punched my brother because he was an idiot, because he couldn’t see what I saw, how hard mom held onto the dish rag when she came out onto the deck to tell us dad had been in an accident, which is why the first thing out of his idiot mouth was “So can we go to Pizza Hut for dinner instead?” And her face had already been enough to tell me dad was in real danger, but the fact that she didn’t scold me for punching Rem made my skin prickle up like when a snowball hits the back of your head. | ©2023 by Sam J. Miller. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | Learning Letters
Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:01:06 -0000
Enid sat on the front porch of Haven’s clinic with a half a dozen books, some paper, and a small chalkboard. Three days a week, when she was in town, she taught reading to Haven’s children who wanted to learn. The last two weeks, Rose was the only kid who came to the lessons. Her household’s daughter, Rose, eight years old, stared at her while wearing a resentful frown that begged to be allowed to do anything else at all in the whole world but this. ©2023 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jendayi Brooks-Flemister | From the Largest Crater
Thu, 26 Jan 2023 11:01:35 -0000
AUDIO LOG BF-0003 / 2083-14-09 13:36 / This . . . feels strange. They said that it’s healthy for those of us whose spouses take Return Missions to record our thoughts. Audio journaling, they called it. Zeli, if you saw the way these devices look, you’d have laughed at the very suggestion of it. They said other spouses who’ve done it have found it helpful for “processing difficult emotions.” It just makes me think they want to keep tabs on what I say and do, but that’s my father’s paranoia coming in. They said it helps to finish my recordings with “over” so that I know when I’ve gotten my thoughts out. Doesn’t that seem strange? ©2023 by Jendayi Brooks-Flemister. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:02:43 -0000
My father was so honest, people often spoke of him in cliches. For example---you know the way someone will sometimes say so-and-so was so honest they’d walk five miles to return an extra nickel they’d been given in their change? Nobody means anybody actually did that kind of thing when they say it, of course---you and I both know they’re only exaggerating for effect. Except in the case of my father. My Dad had really done that. Around the neighborhood, he was seen as so calm and understanding when compared to other fathers, other husbands . . . some of the grownups jokingly referred to him as Saint Barney. ©2023 by Scott Edelman. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:02:32 -0000
The three wolves in the sun-smeared wood did not turn and run when Aran approached with his musket in hand. Wolves were supposed to run from men with guns. This was the way of the world. Sweat and necessity made his musket slide against his palms. He gripped tighter, not wanting to startle the beasts by bringing the musket to bear too quickly. Two of the beasts stood over the third, which reclined on its side in the patchy grass. He could count their rib-bones through their thin hides. His own hungry bones hummed in sympathy. But the world turned on toward frost and frozen ground, and necessity stilled the tremor in his chest. ©2022 by Aimee Ogden. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
L.D. Lewis | Last Stand of the E. 12th St. Pirates
Thu, 01 Dec 2022 11:01:50 -0000
STAND BACK DOORS CLOSING. Dee heard the musical bing-bong of the departure warning between song transitions in her headphones, and watched as the heads of workers in line ahead of her lolled back in the universal why, God gesture of commuters everywhere. There was only one freight car down the wall into the Flood District, and it was shared by all bulk service providers who came bearing gifts: maintenance workers, solar installers, grocery and package delivery, and the like. A bing-bong meant another fifteen-minute wait. | ©2022 by L.D. Lewis. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kristina Ten | The Noon Witch Goes to Sound Planet
Thu, 24 Nov 2022 11:02:43 -0000
The Noon Witch is not a cat person. She likes the color purple, hates police procedurals, loves breakfast foods, thinks scented bath products and anchovy pizza are gross. Hates platform shoes. Hates walnuts in brownies. Used to like the electropop group all the girls at school like, until they used too much synth on their latest album, so now she hates them too. The Noon Witch isn’t an overcritical person. She’s just at that difficult age when you’re desperate to figure out who you are, so you lean too much on your likes and dislikes to try to cobble together what you think should be your personality. | Copyright 2022 by Kristina Ten. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tania Fordwalker | Beyond the Shore
Thu, 03 Nov 2022 10:01:57 -0000
Nobody noticed the first few. They walked. One by one, in the beginning. Isolated instances. On every continent, mid-meal, mid-shower, mid-work, mid-fuck, right out the door of a pulled-up car in the middle of a freeway---ordinary people turned their backs on their ordinary lives and walked. They walked, shedding their hair in clumps along the way, sloughing their skin in translucent sheets to reveal pale grey beneath. On bleeding feet they walked down highways and lanes and trails, unerringly taking the path of least resistance to the nearest coast. They crossed the sand. The sea cooled their aching calves. Still, they walked. | Copyright 2022 by Tania Fordwalker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Debbie Urbanski | The Dirty Golden Yellow House
Thu, 27 Oct 2022 10:02:38 -0000
On the first floor of a Colonial-style house constructed last century out of planks of old growth cedar, a monster is dragging a woman’s husband from room to room. The specific path this monster takes will be evident the next morning from the gashes in the wood floors and the splattering of the husband’s innards upon the plaster walls. Blood on the ceiling. The woman herself is hiding in the upstairs bedroom in her closet, face buried in the nylon hems of her patterned dresses, hands to her ears, a washcloth between her teeth so she can bite down hard on something that isn’t her tongue. | Copyright 2022 by Debbie Urbanski. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gene Doucette | Primordial Soup and Salad
Thu, 06 Oct 2022 10:01:05 -0000
Wallace Englund, captain of the United Space Fleet vessel Caroline, stared out his private office window at the only view he’d had for nearly four years---outer space, in all its dull glory---and wondered why he couldn’t get a decent cheeseburger. Behind him were the last three attempts at a burger made by the ship’s food replicator. The first looked okay until Wallace bit into it and discovered a soft, gelatinous interior that still tasted like a cheeseburger but whose texture made it impossible to ingest. The second was visibly worse: the left side of the burger looked like brown gravy, and not in a good way. | Copyright 2022 by Gene Doucette. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Martin Cahill | Her Five Farewells
Thu, 29 Sep 2022 10:02:53 -0000
When the Asphodel Queen decides she’ll die to save our people from her ex-husband’s tyranny, she commands me to build her a coffin, the very first in our world’s history. Her ageless face of ivory and emerald is water on a windless day; her stillness betrays nothing of her decision. As the Senate screams in sorrow, I am held by her imperial glare, the enormity of my task sinking in like sunlight on skin. “Me, Your Majesty? I’m but a humble craftsman.” Her voice rises above the growing din, as panic races through data-vines and across the crystal-network. | Copyright 2022 by Martin Cahill. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
MKRNYILGLD | The CRISPR Cookbook: A Guide to Biohacking Your Own Abortion in a Post-Roe World
Thu, 08 Sep 2022 10:01:14 -0000
If you’re reading this---on some godforsaken imageboard, or dog-eared book page, or in encrypted base pairs sequenced off 3D-printed oligos---you’re probably grappling with a pretty tough decision right now. Breathe. I’m not judging you. I know how it goes. You tried your best but nothing’s infallible, or you slipped up one night, or he just straight-up went, your biological clock’s ticking, and hacked your birth control, knowing once it happens you won’t have a choice. The second his sperm enters your egg, he’s done, back to his star-studded career cranking out Science and Cell papers. | Copyright 2022 by MKRNYILGLD. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tobi Ogundiran | The Clockmaker and His Daughter
Thu, 25 Aug 2022 10:02:59 -0000
Gaza looked down at the city of Nyss, surveying his creation. He thought it was perfect. Well, almost. In the city centre stood several griots spinning a tale to a captive audience, their camels and brightly-coloured caravans sheltering in the shade of palm trees. The griots should be dusty---after all they had travelled some distance, spent several months weathering the harsh terrain of the desert. As it was they looked too pristine. | Copyright 2022 by Tobi Ogundiran. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | My Future Self, Refused
Thu, 04 Aug 2022 10:01:03 -0000
This much was clear. At some point in my future, I would have access to a time machine. This was a ridiculous sentence and a tragically irrelevant concern while my wife Judi was on the floor and possibly dying, but there it was: nonsense, in the presence of death. This was the central tragic absurdity of the day. My future self had materialized in the corner of the room, as solid as a blow to the face, and it was not even my most important concern. | Copyright 2022 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Micah Dean Hicks | Hungry as the Mirror Bright
Thu, 28 Jul 2022 10:02:10 -0000
She was born a low and needful thing. Hatched down in the tannin dark, dead leaf pillowed, gnashing her mouth in the loam. Burrowing deep where shed buttons and broken boot laces lay. Alone and babbling, prowling for worm-meat and snail-slick in the wet ground rot. Fattened on maggot and grub, she hardened white and lay sarcophagal. Then a second birth, splitting free and strange in new skin. | Copyright 2022 by Micah Dean Hicks. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 07 Jul 2022 10:01:27 -0000
Leo Gregory is losing altitude. He coasts on the thermals of a legacy fading behind him: a documentary here, a retrospective there, some greatest-hits collection down in the corner for the dilettantes. Oh, the work has lost none of its grandeur: his buildings remain timeless, his objets d’art still serve up facets upon layers from each new angle. | Copyright 2022 by Peter Watts. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jo Miles | Scientists Confirm: There’s a Black Hole in the Center of Your Heart
Thu, 30 Jun 2022 10:01:43 -0000
The black hole in the center of your heart devours everything around you. It always has, but when you were small, your event horizon was, too: you might pull in a teddy bear, your corgi puppy’s love, your grandma’s snickerdoodles. Small fuel for a small hunger. But you didn’t stay small. In school, you pulled other children into your orbit, cool kids and nerds and loners, along with shelves of books, the faded basketballs from the gym, the classroom iguana. | Copyright 2022 by Jo Miles. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Susan Palwick | Picnic, with Monster
Thu, 09 Jun 2022 10:02:29 -0000
Freedom means walking through the park on a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, instead of being locked up in the hospital or a group home. Caleb was released from the hospital this morning, not because he’s well---he knows he’ll never be what the doctors call well---but because they had nothing left to offer him. He dutifully took their pills when he was locked up, because otherwise, they just get a court order to force you. No freedom in hospitals. | Copyright 2022 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lina Rather | The Cheesemaker and the Undying King
Thu, 26 May 2022 10:02:56 -0000
Tana was in a humid cave checking the rind on a round of Tomme when the messenger arrived to tell her that the war was lost and her wife was to be hanged. She took her time rewrapping the cheese before she responded. Still too soft. Another week, she estimated. The rind was a beautiful blue-black shade that would catch a maid’s eye in the market. Ruining a fine wheel wouldn’t save Renae. And she knew what the boy was going to say as soon as she heard his nervous footsteps. | Copyright 2022 by Lina Rather. Narrated by Alison Belle Bews. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Grace Chan | Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu
Thu, 05 May 2022 10:01:23 -0000
I’d always known Calam would run. He had all the signs. A taut restlessness, body brittle as an overstretched lute string, when we stayed too long in one place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted through stretches of dead space. A sullen crease between the brows, whenever I tried to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen. But after ten years, why now? | Copyright 2022 by Grace Chan. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Leah Cypess | The Fairy Godmother Advice Column
Thu, 28 Apr 2022 10:02:45 -0000
Dear Fairy Godmother: I work as the housekeeper for a collective of seven men. It’s a non-normative living situation, but it works for me. (I am estranged from my family, due to my stepmother being crazy.) Lately, however, I’ve been harassed by a woman trying to sell me apples. She is constantly offering me free samples and acting hurt when I don’t buy. My employers have forbidden me from letting anyone into their home, and I value their trust. But I also know there are a lot of prejudices about old women who wander around forests selling apples, and I don’t want to play into that. | Copyright 2022 by Leah Cypess. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sandra McDonald | Advice from the Civil Temporal Defense League
Thu, 07 Apr 2022 10:01:43 -0000
Do: Be Aware of Strangers Who Ask You What Day It It. Be Aware of Strangers Who Ask You What Year It Is. Be Aware of Stunned Looking Strangers Who Murmur “Mom?” in The Squeeze-In Diner When You Stop By After School For a Chocolate Malt, Though Clearly You Have Never Given Birth to Them or to Anyone At All, Thank You Very Much. Be Aware of Strangers Wearing Clothing, Footwear, or Accessories That Seem Just A Few Years Out of Fashion or Incongruent With the Season, Climate, or Weather Forecast, or Perhaps Not Gender Appropriate Because No Woman Needs to Wear Trousers Anyway. | Copyright 2022 by Sandra McDonald. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julianna Baggott | The Historiography of Loss
Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:01:01 -0000
I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so small and that some of the blood would still be wet. But I must have expected some blood because I cuffed my jeans before going in. And I didn’t expect the cats would have come back---a window was open, its screen clawed loose. I didn’t expect how they pawed through the blood. Dotting the counters with their small footprints. I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so densely packed---a family had lived here, a mother, a father, a twelve-year-old son, and all of their stuff. | Copyright 2022 by Julianna Baggott. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 03 Mar 2022 11:02:59 -0000
It’s a few minutes before seven on a cold October evening and I’m just reaching into the bottom drawer of my desk for the Old Monk and my well-thumbed copy of The Big Sleep when I hear footsteps hurrying up the stairs. A new case, has to be. I sigh, give the drawer a regretful look and shut it again. I sit up, awaiting the knock. It never comes. Instead the door swings open, slamming into the wall, sending plaster chips flying everywhere. Then I see her standing in the doorway. | Copyright 2022 by Shiv Ramdas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
P H Lee | The Honest Fox, or, A Truth Shared is Not a Truth Lost
Thu, 24 Feb 2022 11:02:54 -0000
I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in its secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you this so that you will know that the tale I tell you now is true, just as it happened and just as it was told to me, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth. | Copyright 2022 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Isabel J. Kim | Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams
Thu, 03 Feb 2022 11:01:58 -0000
The multiverse broke last week. Broke is perhaps the wrong word. More accurate would be performed a state-change or found new equilibrium, but tell that to Catalina Chang, who has been popping aspirin like M&Ms ever since last Thursday, 5:54 PM, when the Unspecified Incident in the Lab superimposed all versions of reality together like a flaky scallion pancake. Aspirin still exists. So do coffee and antidepressant commercials, except on alternate Tuesdays, except when they don’t exist at all. | Copyright 2022 by Isabel J. Kim. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vanessa Fogg | An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words
Thu, 20 Jan 2022 11:02:45 -0000
You are here because you ignored the words of your parents and elders, your more sensible peers. You have thrown away promising careers in sheepherding or law, trade or civil administration. You bribed your way here; you stole money for your passage; you broke promises and made new ones that you never meant to keep. You’ve sailed rivers and oceans, crossed mountains and plains, and now here you are at the edge of the desert. | Copyright 2022 by Vanessa Fogg. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dong | In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird
Thu, 06 Jan 2022 11:02:34 -0000
In the beginning of me, I was a bird. A magpie, although I’ve since been a jay and a red-tailed hawk and even a big, black crow, crying tok-tok-tok at every passerby. But the magpie was special: on my first day, I saw those flashing blue wingtips, and I was myself. And every day after, I woke up and flew to a shiny window, just to admire my plumage. Birds don’t last. Their hearts beat so fast, the seeds burn them out. | Copyright 2022 by Maria Dong. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko | Red is Our Country
Thu, 16 Dec 2021 11:01:44 -0000
After the incident with Grey, you have three hours of air left and the only possibility of resupply is two hours in the wrong direction. Burke has found references to an old terraformers’ cache---emergency water and oxygen and who knows what else---and now she’s acting like it’s foresight rather than blind luck. Like she can even be sure the supplies are still there. “We’ll find it. We’ll resupply.” | Copyright 2021 by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Donyae Coles | When Sri Left the Ruined City
Thu, 02 Dec 2021 11:02:34 -0000
Listen, listen, hush, listen. You’re wrong about the war. You’re wrong about why the world is changing. Why it is dying all around us. That the Gods, many and unknowable be they, wanted this: That’s what you were taught, that’s what you believe. That’s why they gave the Memra their fire beasts and the drawing light that they wield so wildly. That’s why the Reach sings those great stone men into being to crush that flaming war machine. | Copyright 2021 by Donyae Coles. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 25 Nov 2021 11:01:58 -0000
The nearest cloud cluster was sixty miles away, almost an hour’s journey if Bombay went at top speed. A fruit trader had seen it on her way to Sabon-Gari, floating lazily across the azure sky. “You don’t see that often,” the trader had said to the crowd, grappling her basket of mangoes. “A whole cluster, untethered, unbothered, what a sight! So you see why you have to buy my mangoes, they’ve been blessed by clouds!” | Copyright 2021 by Timi Odueso. Narrated by Christina Ogunade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephen Graham Jones | I Was a Teenage Space Jockey
Thu, 04 Nov 2021 10:02:40 -0000
Two days after my brother turned seventeen, he was gone, just like he’d guaranteed my dad. No sad goodbyes, no notes, no taking a knee in the hall before dawn to give me any good advice for high school when I got there. My mom’s story when anybody asked was that he’d moved out, he was old enough, he needed room, it was completely natural. My dad, if asked, would just shrug, knock back the rest of his can of beer, and say he hoped Rance was in the military. | Copyright 2021 by Stephen Graham Jones. Narrated by Scott Peterson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coral Alejandra Moore | The Right Dragon
Thu, 28 Oct 2021 10:02:12 -0000
Marisol stared into the cave, breathing in the stomach-turning scent of decay that meant a dragon’s den was inside. I held my handkerchief over my nose and mouth so that I wouldn’t gag. “You’re sure this is the one?” “Definitely.” She scratched the stub of her left arm where it tucked into the metal hinge, just above where her elbow had once been. | Copyright 2021 by Coral Alejandra Moore. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gene Doucette | Memoranda from the End of the World
Thu, 07 Oct 2021 10:01:17 -0000
Attached, please find your personal company-issued Breathing Apparatus, for immediate use within all corporate campus unfiltered air locations! This includes all outdoor locations, such as: the parking lots; the parking garage; the smoker’s hut; the paths between the buildings; the shuttlebus waiting area; the tennis court; and the corporate golf course. | Copyright 2021 by Gene Doucette. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam R. Shannon | It Begins to Snow
Thu, 23 Sep 2021 10:02:24 -0000
When it begins to snow, it never stops. Perhaps not for you, but another iteration of you---a manifestation of your wild possibilities. I hope it’s not you, for my sake. When it begins to snow, the sky comes down in sharp, precise fragments, and you press your forehead against the window and think: don’t ever stop. And it doesn’t. I don’t want it to be you, because when it begins to snow, the world ends. | Copyright 2021 by Adam R. Shannon. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 02 Sep 2021 10:01:43 -0000
She sank to the ground on a world without name. We were far from home, farther than we had ever gone, maybe farther than anyone had ever gone. It was so far away, or at least so strange for some undefinable local cause, that we could have filled volumes with all the alterations in the way things worked; in the ways that light worked, in the way that time worked, in the way that mass worked. We spoke of bringing back word to the learned of my world and hers. We talked of making our names. | Copyright 2021 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Isabel Cañas | My Sister is a Scorpion
Thu, 26 Aug 2021 10:02:02 -0000
My baby sister didn’t used to be a scorpion, but she is one now. I don’t know if that sounds weird to you, but it doesn’t to me, because right after my sister was born, Abuelita turned into a white crane and flew away. She was so sad after we buried Abuelito, you know. One winter day, she stepped outside of the faded stucco church into bright sunshine, her Bible tucked under one arm. Maybe the touch of the sun was not enough to warm her after the shadows of the church. | Copyright 2021 by Isabel Cañas. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas | Before the Haze Devours You
Thu, 05 Aug 2021 10:01:38 -0000
If time can stop, this is how it feels. 01:32:03 PLSS WARNING: Abnormal temperature detected in EMU. Yunuen was born to be trapped in this moment. She has been looking at the same alert in her helmet’s heads-up display for a perpetual instant that has become her whole existence. One billion kilometers away from home, she lies in the purgatory that is the red glow of this warning message. In front of her eyes, these petrified uppercase letters have lost all their meaning. Time does not exist anymore. | Copyright 2021 by Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas. Narrated by Kate Orsini. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lulu Kadhim | Amber Dark and Sickly Sweet
Thu, 29 Jul 2021 10:02:57 -0000
Talia sat at the edge of Eliza’s bed, her hands clasped. She was new---so was I, but she was newer. I went to her, and stroked her head, careful to avoid the honeycomb on her brow. “Daughters.” Mother Anam’s face was twisted when she came back from searching the rest of our rooms, her shoes clicking on the hard, pocked floor. It always seemed to us that she was disappointed that we hadn’t broken a rule, that she couldn’t punish us. | Copyright 2021 by Lulu Kadhim. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Everdeen Mason | Miss the Zen, but Miss You More
Thu, 08 Jul 2021 10:01:11 -0000
“Welcome to Float Isolation Therapy, an intensive twelve-day experience. You will become one with the stars. During your time in your personalized FIT pod, we encourage you to explore the deepest recesses of your mind.” Bei Bei floated in mid-air and felt the strain in her lower back, but she didn’t care. The picture had to be perfect. The lighting in the egg-shaped pod was excellent. | Copyright 2021 by Everdeen Mason. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Endria Isa Richardson | Do Nothing
Thu, 24 Jun 2021 10:01:24 -0000
From where she lay on her back, on the grass of the Presidio in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge with all its painted trusses strung from tower to tower seemed most like a red haired boy running along a jetty. She tried, objectively, to see it as they might. A span or a wing. It connected two land masses; of course it would be seen as connective. But there was no ‘of course.’ However they perceived the thing---anchored and cabled and suspended; material hung from more material---would not be objective. | Copyright 2021 by Endria Isa Richardson. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | A Tableau of Things That Are
Thu, 03 Jun 2021 10:02:40 -0000
When they ordered me down off my pedestal, I had nowhere else to go. Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or care about, anymore. You can only stand in the public garden where all the convicted are placed, and you watch with dull and distant interest at the visitors who stroll past. | Copyright 2021 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 27 May 2021 10:02:49 -0000
Besides the vedma who lived behind the stove in steam room three, the banya in Grand Lake Plaza was the same as any other budget day spa on Chicago’s West Side. It had deep-tissue massages and signature facials, plus day passes for the communal baths and steam rooms. There was a cucumber water dispenser in the lobby, and a little sign on the front desk that invited guests to “nama-stay a while.” The robes and slippers were cheap, scratchy polyester. | Copyright 2021 by Kristina Ten. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gene Doucette | Hypnopompic Circumstance
Thu, 06 May 2021 10:01:07 -0000
Thomas’s first encounter with the alien was terrifying. It happened in his bedroom. Thom was attempting to get to sleep at the time, after a long Friday night that had extended into early Saturday morning. Alcohol was involved, and a little pot, but nothing natively hallucinogenic, not unless someone slipped him something. Nothing that could explain the appearance of someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. | Copyright 2021 by Gene Doucette. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Genevieve Valentine | Blood, Ash, Braids
Thu, 29 Apr 2021 10:02:13 -0000
It didn’t take them long to find a name for us; almost as soon as they knew it was women inside the rickety biplanes they couldn’t catch, the Germans called us witches. It was because of the sounds our idling planes made from the ground, the story went, as if the German soldiers had spent a lot of time with brooms and knew what they sounded like, engineless and gliding fifty feet above them in the dark. (The wires holding the wings in place made the whistle.) | Copyright 2015 by Genevieve Valentine. Originally published in Operation Arcana, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An Owomoyela | The Equations of the Dead
Thu, 08 Apr 2021 10:01:50 -0000
The boyo working the transmitter doesn’t look like much, except his face is radiant. Radiant, like one of those pooka upworld adverts for neural templates. Dopamine-druggy, but lucid. Like he’s in love. Boyo also looks like he hasn’t spoken to a human in days, and like aside from the food allotments he doesn’t have a lick of capital. His clothes have that washed-while-wearing look, and they’re homespun; no fancy imported fabrics or styles. You’d walk away from this jondo in the market. | Copyright 2021 by An Owomoyela. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Grey | Brightly, Undiminished
Thu, 25 Mar 2021 10:02:21 -0000
Witchcraft is a gift. Imelda would wave her steel spoon at Mercer and insist on this as he measured ingredients for her, whether she was boiling potions or a pot of farfalle pasta. Watch the salt, a teaspoon only, never pour too much. Don’t overheat the sauce. Bottle the hawks’ gizzards separate from the basilisks’. Never half-ass a gift, Mercy. Her perpetual imperative. Mercer is alone now. His hands are unsteady---they’ve shaken like a drunkard’s since they held Imelda as she passed---and he is no witch. | Copyright 2021 by Sarah Grey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 04 Mar 2021 11:01:29 -0000
Only when Marlo and her mother have followed the attendants through the faux-marble foyer and into the room filled with diffusers and soft jazz and laid down on the massage tables covered in crisp, clean-smelling sheets; only when someone has placed a cool gel pack over Marlo’s eyes and set something against her skin that starts kneading, a familiar, needling motion that ignites a distant spark of recognition within her; only then does Marlo understand where her mother has taken her. She pushes back her eye mask and sits up. | Copyright 2021 by Claire Wrenwood. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexander Weinstein | Destinations of Beauty
Thu, 25 Feb 2021 11:02:34 -0000
It has become increasingly clear to your guidebook writers that the beauty of any destination should be measured not simply by the magnificence of its architecture or the lushness of its landscape, but by the splendor that its citizens collectively produce. In cities where mayors make sure flowers are planted every spring and the baker sends us off with a free roll, the streetlamps are bound to burn brightly with the warmth of welcome. In fact, the wonderful time we’ve had in any destination was due almost entirely to the kindness of those we encountered along the way. | Copyright 2021 by Alexander Weinstein. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Phoebe Barton | The Mathematics of Fairyland
Thu, 04 Feb 2021 11:01:09 -0000
If you had a warp drive, it would be easy. The mathematics are strange the way ley lines are strange, invisible yet divinable. You’ve pulled your way up sterner mountains, fingertip by fingertip. You’ve already compensated for stellar motion, spacetime curvature, hyperspatial congruences. You’ve scratched out hundreds of equations in cold blue hyacinth ink and piled them away in the knitted stocking under your bed, where only Berenice would think to look. Equations that would tell you exactly where to slice a hole between worlds, if only you had the right knife. | Copyright 2021 by Phoebe Barton. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
D. Thomas Minton | The Memory Plague
Thu, 21 Jan 2021 11:01:26 -0000
In the beginning, we are one, and we are ignorance. Our skin is chaffed tender from the womb-sac and the exit ring. Out, we writhe blindly in the grit that cuts our softness until the dryness of the air hardens us. Slowly, receptors awaken. Muted colors curve across the night, outlining the glistening ribs of the drop chamber arcing over us like planetary rings. Instinctually, we grope through the hard stillness. Our tac-pads draw against lines of unmoving flesh, cold like a memory of interstellar vacuum. A dome of skin radiates faint warmth. | 2021 by D. Thomas Minton. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Answering the Questions You Might Have About the Kharbat
Thu, 14 Jan 2021 11:02:50 -0000
You have just been attacked by a Kharbat. It has sprung on you from hiding, in some place where you foolishly imagined yourself safe; and even as its many glittering fangs sink deep into the flesh and bone of your shoulder, you know that any attempt to save yourself is futile, that you were always fated to perish in this way, and this beast was always fated to usher you screaming into the world of the dead. What is a Kharbat? I don’t know. Why am I asking you? I am the world’s leading expert. | Copyright 2021 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 31 Dec 2020 11:02:27 -0000
I have heard it on the rumors that when the tale-spinner’s guild gathers in their secret places, a full half of them are sworn to never tell the truth, and the other half to never tell a lie, even if it mean their life. Being one of that trade myself, I can tell you that that’s more or less the shape of it, and I tell you so you’ll know that this tale I tell you is true, just as I heard it and just as it happened, for I am one of the ones sworn to the truth. The name I’m called is Dusty Boots, I come from the valley of Erwhile, and I am in love with a girl that I can never have. Copyright 2020 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Dana Hudson | Your Mind is the Superfund Site
Thu, 10 Dec 2020 11:01:31 -0000
“Ever consider killing yourself?” the gecko said. “It’ll save you one hundred percent on your car insurance.” I was alone, but not. I tried to step on the creature, but my foot wasn’t there. I clenched my teeth, which felt like water. Alleyah’s Southie accent crackled a reminder of radio. “Tracey, are you paralucid yet? Need another poke of DMT?” I was back in high school---or somebody’s high school. The classrooms were vintage Sears catalogs and a spruce tree that grew sideways---not in a directional sense but just with a profound association with the concept of sideways. I climbed the tree and then fell. | Copyright 2020 by Andrew Dana Hudson and C. Y. Ballard. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:02:36 -0000
It is not the dust that brings her tears. The Lachrymist’s house is dusty, fragments of time and memory fallen everywhere, a living blanket that drapes itself over tables and chairs and things even stranger. But time and memory are to be expected anywhere the dead gather, and even in this abundance, they do not drive her to weeping. Neither is her weeping caused by the voices, calling to each other from shadowy ceiling corners, memories still embodied, repeating phrases into the cold air. | Copyright 2020 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gene Doucette | Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 2]
Thu, 12 Nov 2020 11:01:58 -0000
It took twice as long to get to the third deck from the first as it did to get to the first deck from the fifth. Alice was quite certain there was no mechanism in existence capable of adding fractional decks to the ship, and so was chalking this up to another aspect of the ongoing computer malfunction. She supposed a way to validate this was to ask that the elevator stop at, say, deck two-and-five-sixteenths, but she also didn’t want to encourage the computer’s departures from reality any more than necessary. | Copyright 2020 by Gene Doucette. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gene Doucette | Schrödinger’s Catastrophe [Part 1]
Thu, 05 Nov 2020 11:01:06 -0000
Things began to go badly for the crew of the USFS Erwin around the time Dr. Marchere’s coffee mug spontaneously reassembled itself. Dr. Louis Marchere was not, at that moment, conducting some manner of experiment. Well, he was, only not on entropy and the nature of time. He was running several other tests, of the kind that make perfect sense on a scientific vessel such as the Erwin. About half of them were biological in nature, concerning how small samples of cellular material react to certain deep-space factors. | Copyright 2020 by Gene Doucette. Narrated by Justine Eyre, Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 29 Oct 2020 10:02:49 -0000
Gopal knew before he booted up the game---a Christmas present from his dad---that his character would be some form of elf or human, because the other races were all ugly, and he didn’t play games to be ugly. And he knew too, although he didn’t say it, that his character would be a girl. He always played girls online, although he’d be ashamed if anyone knew it, precisely because it played into the online belief that most girls in most games were “really” men. | Copyright 2020 by Naomi Kanakia. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jenny Rae Rappaport | Everything and Nothing
Wed, 21 Oct 2020 10:01:19 -0000
Start with a romance: a man and a woman who are wildly and irrevocably in love with each other. Or two men. Or two women. Or two people, because life is beautiful and complex. Just know that these Lovers are important. The fate of the galaxy rests on their shoulders---because, of course, the fate of an entire portion of known space can be determined by two people in love. The laws of physics are remarkably vulnerable to the laws of love. | Copyright 2020 by Jenny Rae Rappaport. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caroline M. Yoachim | The Shadow Prisoner’s Dilemma
Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:01:53 -0000
Vivian sat at a café opposite Cass. Everything around her had a gritty, dingy quality. Even Cass looked run down, their face deeply tanned and distressingly wrinkled. They were old now, many decades past being the child that Vivian remembered. She looked down at her hands, so different than the black shadows that she’d grown accustomed to seeing during all her years as a Shade---the skin was covered in age spots and hung loose on the bones. | 2020 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Originally published in OR ELSE THE LIGHT, edited by John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephanie Malia Morris | Forty Acres and a Mule
Thu, 08 Oct 2020 10:02:38 -0000
My parents’ farm has shrunk, as old things tend to do. The shed, the workshop, the paddock with its doubled wire fences and chicken coop---all squat and rain-blackened, coming into focus as I step from the car as if I have put on glasses or wiped rain from a window. The house itself stands straight-spined beyond the pear tree, gray in the drizzle, more withdrawn than the last time I visited. The tree has not changed. | Copyright 2017 by Stephanie Malia Morris. Previously published in FIYAH. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam | Entanglement
Thu, 24 Sep 2020 10:02:12 -0000
Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Karen Joy Fowler | Persephone of the Crows
Thu, 17 Sep 2020 10:02:26 -0000
Isabelle Winters once saw a fairy. For real. It was little, like a hummingbird, with a hummingbird’s frantic wings, and it was moving through the garden, shaking the rosebuds open for the bees. She’s just told this to Polly, though not exactly in those words. The sarcastic for real, for instance, is all Polly. If there was ever a girl primed to see fairies, Isabelle Winters is that girl. | Copyright 2017 by Karen Joy Fowler. Originally published in ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caroline M. Yoachim | Shadow Prisons of the Mind
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 10:01:07 -0000
With the right overlays, the city was charming---apartment buildings done up like giant row houses, seamlessly blending Victorian and modern sensibilities, boutiques and cafés on tree-lined streets, parks bathed in sunshine. Vivian Watanabe had lived on this block, once, in a high-rise apartment painted cornflower blue with trim in teal and white. She couldn’t see it now, not the way she used to. | Copyright 2020 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Previously published in BURN THE ASHES, edited by John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant, and Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Author’s Wife vs. the Giant Robot
Thu, 03 Sep 2020 10:01:49 -0000
The year I turned five, my father got taken out by a giant robot. I was present and I took it very personally. You honestly don’t expect that kind of thing when you’re a kid, not even if you’ve seen the giant robot from a distance every day of your life and have been taught what random carnage the giant robot got up to. I had grown to that tender age knowing that the giant robot killed people at the rate of one a day. | Copyright 2020 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Katherine Crighton | Sing in Me, Muse
Thu, 27 Aug 2020 10:01:34 -0000
O Mother, dear Mnemosyne! It is I, Anisah, fifteenth of my line! Here is my song. Long have I waited for this, the end of my first shift; at last I am a daughter grown old enough to sing. I have sat at my post---I have looked out my mirrored window---I have logged my report with the cousins who keep the histories. But for you, my mother, on my first night’s watch, I will confirm that, port and starboard, there is nothing out my window but the black and endless sea. | Copyright 2020 by Katherine Crighton. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
KT Bryski | The Bone-Stag Walks
Thu, 20 Aug 2020 10:02:12 -0000
The Bone-Stag walks at midwinter, sharp-antlered, hard-hoofed. Deep white snow spreads under deep black sky. Cold air slices lungs; rivers stand as stone. Over cresting drifts comes the Bone-Stag, leaving no mark of his passing. Down in the village, they draw their curtains fast against him. They bolt tight their doors. Garlic at the lintels and holly upon the sills. | Copyright 2020 by KT Bryski. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eden Royce | Miss Beulah’s Braiding and Life Change Salon
Thu, 13 Aug 2020 10:02:41 -0000
The chime above my shop door rings. It heralds a young woman wearing a head wrap boasting a network of silvery constellations on indigo, interspersed with the occasional yellow-gold moon. The wrap itself is made of silk---not the finest grade, mind you, but sufficient to conceal what she must see as a fault. None of her hair is visible, but the contorted celestial bodies show the fabric is at the end of its tether. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caroline M. Yoachim | The Shadow Prison Experiment
Thu, 06 Aug 2020 10:01:13 -0000
The shopping district was crowded on a Sunday afternoon, and Vivian Watanabe was out running errands with her sixteen-year-old, Cass. Together they wove through throngs of shoppers wearing customized skins or the generic default. Vivian wasn’t fond of Generics---they fell into that uncanny valley between a nondescript human and a silver android. Cold and impersonal, plus it was hard to keep track of who you’ve interacted with. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ray Nayler | The Swallows of the Storm
Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:01:53 -0000
One of the Senators cleared her throat, turned on the microphone in front of her, and began. “Would you like to tell us when you first became aware of the phenomenon, Doctor? Perhaps that would be the best place to start. We can formulate our questions from there.” The hearing was not in the main Congressional building. It was in a building on another part of Capitol Hill, in a room overdue for remodeling, with drop-ceiling panels stained by leaking pipes. But the room, however humble, was crowded. Harlan sat near the front of the room. | Copyright 2020 by Ray Nayler. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mari Ness | Great Gerta and the Mermaid
Thu, 23 Jul 2020 10:02:21 -0000
That notorious ship that sailed to the wretched isle known as Neverland under the leadership of one James, self-styled Jas., Cook, called the Jolly Roger, has most naturally been a subject of intense study among historians. Yet even the most meticulous of these scholars have often failed to note that among that dreadful crew sailed at least one woman, Gerta, or, as she named herself, the Great Gerta, or, as she was named by others, Gerta the Girthy. | Copyright 2020 by Mari Ness. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The End of the World Measured in Values of N
Thu, 16 Jul 2020 10:01:03 -0000
Listen. The world ended thirty seconds ago. You greet this whisper with incredulity. After all, here you are, living and breathing. The people around you are living and breathing. You might be drinking coffee in lying in bed trying to decide whether to get up. You are reminding yourself of all the little life tasks awaiting you, things that need to be taken care of in order for you to continue going about your day. Thoughts of the apocalypse are a thousand miles away. Lunacy, they seem. | Copyright 2020 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kristina Ten | Baba Yaga and the Seven Hills
Thu, 09 Jul 2020 10:02:20 -0000
It doesn’t take long. She has few earthly possessions and her travel options are limited. There is a train that runs west through the Swamp Forest to the coast, but everyone knows and fears the old witch here, and on moving trains, she can cause quite a commotion. “Do not eat my children, Baba Yaga!” people cry when she steps onto the dining car. “Oh, please, have mercy! Do not use your pestle to grind up my bones!” She sits quietly in a booth, minding her own business. | Copyright 2020 by Kristina Ten. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 25 Jun 2020 10:01:49 -0000
The bear has been stalking the taxidermy garden for ten weeks now, ever since Raffi showed up. Sometimes it disappears for a few days or a week, but it always comes back. Prowls the perimeter, looking for weak spots. From inside the taxidermy garden, Raffi feels the bear’s presence tugging on her, as though it has become the pole of her personal compass. The taxidermy garden isn’t a real garden. It’s a ski chalet, or what used to be a ski chalet, all hand-hewn logs and wood stoves. | Copyright 2020 by Em North. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 18 Jun 2020 10:02:35 -0000
Dear Mr. Quilas: This morning, I began to read your new collection of essays, Forgotten Lives. I’ve enjoyed a number of your books previously, but this collection held a particular interest for me. Aned Heast, the subject of your third essay, “A Refuge in Juar,” held a personal interest and I looked forward to reading your piece about him. Sadly, I was disappointed. Your essay was riddled with misinformation and errors. I’m sure you do not wish to be told that. Few writers want to be told they are wrong. | Copyright 2020 by Ben Peek. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marie Vibbert | Single Malt Spacecraft
Thu, 11 Jun 2020 10:01:29 -0000
The first time Fresia tasted scotch, it was true love. She was twenty-two. Her boyfriend had just turned twenty-one and had gotten a bottle of Glen Livet from his dad. He poured a shot for himself and for his friend, but none for Fresia. “Come on,” she said, “I want to taste it.” “Girls don’t like whisky,” he said. “Trust me, you’ll hate it.” “Let me find out for myself.” “Not for what this costs, sorry.” The friend gasped over his empty shot glass. “Oh, that’s good.” Her boyfriend put the whisky on the top of the fridge where he knew Fresia was too short to reach. | Copyright 2020 by Marie Vibbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julianna Baggott | The Postictal State of Divine Love
Thu, 04 Jun 2020 10:02:46 -0000
My mother used to tell me we came from the matriarchal vampiric line that had been traced farther back than Queen Elizabeth. She only told me these things after a seizure. Many people with epilepsy talk about how, after a seizure, strange memories pop up---small but suddenly vibrant details; my mother would recall the small vibrant details of our collective vampiric past. What kind of mother would do this? Mine. And, when I was little, I loved her for it. | Copyright 2020 by Julianna Baggott. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexander Weinstein | Destinations of Love
Thu, 28 May 2020 10:02:06 -0000
Your guidebook writers are---alas---very familiar with booking tickets in search of love. How many of us haven’t packed our bags for the new continent with this foolish goal in mind? We’ve stumbled through our travels, searching cities and villages for romance. In cafés, opera houses, and hotel rooms, we felt acutely alone. Why, even the most exquisite restaurants were dulled by the empty chair across from us. | Copyright 2020 by Alexander Weinstein. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ada Hoffmann | Melting Like Metal
Thu, 21 May 2020 10:01:14 -0000
When the quantum supercomputing systems of the God called Nemesis registered the sighting of the heretic Candor Gray---already tried in absentia and slated for termination, and assigned the serial number of HA3-940QK322PF-P---Enga Afonbataw Konum of Nemesis was already waiting, as she’d waited during the last few dozen stupid assignments. Enga was an angel of Nemesis, a no-longer-human cyborg built for a singular purpose: to hunt down and destroy the Gods’ enemies. | Copyright 2020 by Ada Hoffmann. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 14 May 2020 10:02:07 -0000
Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Time Traveler’s Advice to the Lovelorn
Thu, 07 May 2020 10:01:05 -0000
Time is best described as the thing that must crawl by before even the most unlikely events finally get around to happening. A lot of it had passed in the little village we now visit, drifting down its cobblestoned streets like loose papers carried away by the wind, before the most unlikely of all developments had finally occurred. Samael, the junk collector, had fallen in love. Nobody had ever expected this, in large part because Samael was as dull and unimaginative a man who had ever lived. | Copyright 2020 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rati Mehrotra | The Witch Speaks
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:02:30 -0000
As different as earth and sky. That is what they said about us. Yet even earth and sky meet at the horizon. Shade your eyes from the sun. Look, far in the distance. Do you see that line where brown merges into blue? I’m ready to walk there. But not before having told my story. | Copyright 2020 by Rati Mehrotra. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Dana Hudson | Voice of Their Generation
Thu, 23 Apr 2020 10:01:13 -0000
On their ninth rewrite of the third act of Detective Pikachu vs. Predator, it occurred to Thicket that they might just be the voice of their generation. In a fever, they swiped together the final epic speech where Detective Pikachu refutes Predator’s cynical attempts to turn him against his human partner, arguing that the Pokémon relationship with humanity was one not of servitude but of guardianship, for every Pokémon can see within each human the potential to rise above their flawed nature. | Copyright 2020 by Andrew Dana Hudson. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Celeste Rita Baker | Glass Bottle Dancer
Thu, 16 Apr 2020 10:02:25 -0000
When de words “glass bottle dancer” come to me as I was day-dreaming, listening to music on de radio, I thought it sounded like someting I’d like to see, didn’t tink it would change me whole life. I imagine it might mean taking a bunch of soda and beer bottles, laying dem on dey sides and stepping on dem widout having dem roll away. I thought a limbo dancer might do it to add someting special to dere act. | Copyright 2020 by Celeste Rita Baker. Narrated by Celeste Rita Baker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Veronica Roth | The Least of These
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 10:01:59 -0000
Two women, Best and Least, woke in a bright room. Best did so as if surfacing in a pool of water, her eyes wide and observant. Least woke with a start, and immediately slammed her back against the wall behind her, her arms splayed. Where are we? asked Best. Who the fuck are you? demanded Least. Now, now, came a voice from the doorway. There’s no need to be coarse. A tall, graceful Being entered the room, diaphanous fabric afloat around its slender body. | Copyright 2020 by Veronica Roth. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tahmeed Shafiq | Love and Marriage in the Hexasun Lands
Thu, 26 Mar 2020 10:02:12 -0000
Every child knows the story of how King Adhamrya, Son of Suns, slew a demon to win the heart and hand of Schyan, the goddess of love and desire. But the story of what happened afterwards is not as commonly known. In this entry I will present to you the full account of that sad tale, for I believe it is one worth remembering. —Excerpt from A History of the Hexasun Lands by Imperial Historian Nananaore | Copyright 2020 by Tahmeed Shafiq. Narrated by Kate Orsini. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Many Happy Returns
Thu, 19 Mar 2020 10:01:25 -0000
Gorman was on foot, crossing a frozen continent. It was not Antarctica. That was light years away, and so over. Nobody went there anymore. This continent he had chosen for his latest adventure was bigger, broader, colder, deadlier, nastier. It was not fun. Every step was an occasion for regret. He was probably going to die. He was glad he came. | Copyright 2020 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 12 Mar 2020 10:02:52 -0000
Nora is a serial becomer. She has become many things in her life, though rarely on purpose. The first time, it just sort of happened. The second time, it was a coincidence. Now, it is a habit she cannot seem to break. In the past, she has become a rock climber and a scuba diver, a beekeeper and a gardener and a mechanic specializing in European cars. For two months last summer, she was a stand-up comedian. Her senior year of college, she amassed New England’s largest collection of antique coins. | Copyright 2020 by Kristina Ten. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 05 Mar 2020 11:01:32 -0000
The Blue Marble is shrinking; as Orion II lifts off, ripping from the grasping tentacles of Earth’s gravity, the world gets smaller, smaller, a blot on the cosmic sheet of infinite blackness, which closes in like a camera iris in a classic film’s final shot. Picture the planet’s surface, where the wonders of the old world buckle at the top of the hour under the weight of new wars; where down below, all those little people fall to their knees, desperate voices crying, crying out to their deity-du-jour for deliverance. | Copyright 2020 by Russell Nichols. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 27 Feb 2020 11:01:06 -0000
Leslie Anne Moore had known Hardy Devine since second grade, when he had bloodied her nose in a game of dodgeball and then the other boys caught him crying about it and beat him pissy. By the end of the school year, Hardy had picked a fight with each one of those boys individually and found more satisfactory results. He didn’t look Leslie-Anne square in the eye again until seventh grade when he asked her to the Boone County Middle School Homecoming Dance and she said no. | Copyright 2020 by JT Petty. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexander Weinstein | Toxic Destinations
Thu, 20 Feb 2020 11:02:55 -0000
Since the discovery of the Eighth continent, your Tour Guide writers have received many letters from travelers and concerned individuals. We have heard, for instance, from the embattled New Zealand geologists who have long attempted to gain traction for their theory of the unrecognized continent of Zealandia. These hardworking scientists argue that the collection of partly submerged fragments off the coast of New Zealand comprise a much larger landmass, claiming this fits within standard definitions of continental attributes. | Copyright 2020 by Alexander Weinstein. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Theodora Goss | A Statement in the Case
Thu, 13 Feb 2020 11:02:09 -0000
Sure, I know István Horvath. We met about a year before Eva died. That’s my wife, Eva. You knew that? Yeah, I figured you were pretty thorough. It was the year of the blizzard, when snow covered the cars parked on the streets and even the Post Office shut down. I didn’t have to go to work for a week. So one night, I think it was Thursday, Eva says, “Mike, I only have one of the blue pills left.” This was when we still thought the chemo was doing something. | Copyright 2005 by Theodora Goss. Originally published in Realms of Fantasy. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Kristoffer Tabori. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 06 Feb 2020 11:02:40 -0000
Ten months after the ark first floated, and forty days after its keel snagged on a drowned mountain peak, Noah released a raven to look for land. Her name was ungraspable by humans, but might be translated as Bessary, plus a term ravens used for the taste of three-day-dead goat when the temperatures have stayed just above freezing, plus a color at the 327-nanometer wavelength, plus a sensation along the rictal bristles in a particular sort of cool air. Her feathers rustled like silk. | Copyright 2020 by Kij Johnson. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
N.K. Jemisin | The Ones Who Stay and Fight
Thu, 23 Jan 2020 11:01:32 -0000
It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. It has little to do with birds---a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass---made for this day, and flown on no other!---waft and buzz on the wind. | Copyright 2018 by N. K. Jemisin. Originally published in How Long Til Black Future Month. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
J.R. Dawson | She’d Never Had a Name Before
Thu, 16 Jan 2020 11:01:33 -0000
I never had a sister. Okay, so I did have a sister. She just died before she was born. No one talked about her, because sometimes a family looks ahead and sees through a veil into another universe where tomorrow is a given. But then we end up not living in that reality, and it creates a terrible break in our brains. Her name was Sarah. My dad finally told me her name on the deep black road between Omaha and Chicago, on my return to college for junior year. | Copyright 2020 by J.R. Dawson. Narrated by Chloe Amen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alexander Weinstein | Destinations of Joy
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 11:02:31 -0000
Ever since the discovery of the eighth continent, we’ve all had to come to terms with the presence of a landmass we never knew existed. In this age, wherein it often feels like every inch of mountain and valley has been charted, crossed, and geocached, how could we have been blind to a continent floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We suppose, like the mapmakers of a millennium ago, we were blinded by our self-assured scientists and their navigational tools. | Copyright 2020 by Alexander Weinstein. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 02 Jan 2020 11:02:18 -0000
The pain of losing something so precious that you did not think you could live without it. Oxygen. The ice breaks beneath your feet: Your coat and boots fill with water and pull you down. An airlock blows: Vacuum pulls you apart by the eyes, the pores, the lungs. You awaken in a fire: The door and window are outlined in flames. You fall against a railing: The rusted iron slices through your femoral artery. You are dead already. | Copyright 2011 by Kij Johnson. Originally published in Eclipse Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Baker | A Bad Day in Utopia
Thu, 26 Dec 2019 11:01:58 -0000
She’d had a hard day. Earlier that morning she’d discovered that the game her company was developing, which was already months behind schedule for release, had a glitch somewhere in the code that caused the game to crash if the player character was equipped with diamond armor on the level with the meteors, and nobody could figure out why. It didn’t make any sense. It was a total nightmare. Anna, her boss, was mad at her for leaving dirty dishes in the kitchen again. | Copyright 2019 by Matthew Baker. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cat Rambo | The Silent Familiar
Thu, 19 Dec 2019 11:02:25 -0000
The Wizard Niccolo was not happy. At the age of 183---youthful for a wizard, but improbable for an ordinary human---he had thought certain things well out of his life. Sudden changes in his daily routine were one. And romance was another---even if it was his familiar’s romance, and not his own. “Could make an omelet with it, I suppose,” he grumbled to that familiar, the tiny dragon Olivia. She sat on the cluttered mantle, wrapped around her egg, still marveling at its production and entirely too pleased with herself. | Copyright 2009 by Cat Rambo. Originally published in _Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight_. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 12 Dec 2019 11:01:07 -0000
Water looks the same everywhere. It’s only the background, lighting, and impurities that differ. I peer at the silver-gray surface of Bimha’s pond, calm and still, undisturbed by wind. It’s deep and the bottom is a black abyss. Midday here is like dawn on Earth in the middle of the Kalahari. Light shines through the transparent panelling of the pressurised geodesic dome that prevents the water boiling straight into vapour. “This is where it happened,” VaMutasa says to me on the crackling open channel. | Copyright 2018 by T.L. Huchu. Originally published in AfroSF, volume 3, edited by Ivor W. Hartmann. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
KT Bryski | The Path of Pins, the Path of Needles
Thu, 05 Dec 2019 11:02:52 -0000
In the very heart of winter, the forest holds its breath. Frozen earth sleeps without dreaming; brittle sunlight breaks and scatters in gasps between the trees. The girl walks through the woods, boots crunching the crusted snow. There is always such a girl, walking alone. Little footprints point the way back to a clutch of hovels; she peers half-dazzled through shadow and snow-flash. A basket hangs dispiritedly from her arm. Sausage end. Hardened loaf. The creeping doubt in spring itself. | Copyright 2019 by KT Bryski. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Eros Pratfalled, Or, Adrift in the Cosmos With Lasagna and Mary Steenburgen
Thu, 28 Nov 2019 11:01:10 -0000
Ellis Neider met his soulmate. The End. That’s his story. The rest is annotation. We would almost skip that part, were it not for the stone knowledge that any love story not about masturbation does require at least two characters. The object of his affection does deserve something approaching equal time. Ellis was a guy. Some men are guys, other men are dudes. Ellis was a guy. As a child, he was a little guy. As an adult, he was a bigger guy. Like most guys, he gave off the vibe that he knew the universe operated by a certain set of rules. | Copyright 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Melissa Marr | Knee Deep in the Sea
Thu, 21 Nov 2019 11:02:36 -0000
I woke early---or perhaps didn’t sleep. My body is still adjusting to the time zone hop from Southern California to the islands north of the Scottish mainland. Orkney. A series of islands, many of them uninhabited, in the cold North Atlantic Sea. To the east is Norway. To the West are Iceland and Greenland. In other words, it’s chilly even in the summer when there is endless light. It’s stunning, aside from the dead guy currently at my feet. | Copyright 2019 2019 by Melissa Marr. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dominica Phetteplace | Her Appetite, His Heart
Thu, 14 Nov 2019 11:01:15 -0000
It came to Javi in a vision while he was at Burning Man. There was something calling out to him, and he’d hoped an ayahuasca ceremony would help him figure out what it was. It was during the ceremony that she appeared to him. Isla. In his vision, she was a temple priestess and he was laid out on a sacrificial stone table. She was literally eating his engorged heart out of his chest cavity. It wasn’t as frightening as it sounded. It was only when the vision disappeared that he felt an aching in his chest. Isla, come back. | Copyright 2019 by Dominica Phetteplace. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yoon Ha Lee | The Second-Last Client
Thu, 07 Nov 2019 11:02:36 -0000
Forty-six minutes and a trickle of seconds remained before the end of the world---this world, anyway---and I was trying to evacuate the second-last client on my list. Some apocalypses come in with horns blaring and guns blazing and cascades of fire. Some apocalypses like to be obvious. This wasn’t one of them. The humans had various names for their world. My partner Rawk and I called it Seedworld 722.11.15, which was our superiors’ label. We’d seen a lot of Seedworlds perish, she and I. | Copyright 2019 by Yoon Ha Lee. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ray Nayler | The Death of Fire Station 10
Thu, 24 Oct 2019 10:01:46 -0000
“The death of Fire Station 10 affected me deeply. She had not been the smartest building, but she had been a friend for as long as I can remember. She was one story tall, the sole holdover from a much earlier time in the neighborhood---a piece of cinderblock nostalgia, of high-maintenance wood and plaster from an earlier age. Her brain and smart utilities were a retrofit, cobbled onto the cinderblock building later, in a clumsy addition on the back. When she was built, buildings had no minds." | Copyright 2019 by Ray Nayler. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Isabel Yap | Windrose in Scarlet
Thu, 17 Oct 2019 10:02:21 -0000
Red slays the wolf, and another bursts through the kitchen window and bites her in the stomach. Glass gets in her hair. She smashes the chopping knife into its head, then runs out the back door, gulping for air. She doesn’t stumble. The wood must be at war with itself: Some trees let her pass, others scratch her. The howling recedes; the howling’s at her ear. Eventually her boots skid on marble and she falls, her heart a hammer against her ribs. She curls up to make herself small. At least I’m all bones. They won’t enjoy me. | Copyright 2019 by Isabel Yap. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eli Brown | Nesting Habits of Enceladan Jade Beetles
Thu, 10 Oct 2019 10:01:38 -0000
The pink frost coating my face shield is, evidently, my own blood. The gas jetting from the pea-sized hole in my wrist spins me around, and for a panicked moment, I wonder if I have somehow been shot. I think I am screaming, but that would alert Station, and Ocampo is silent. Evidently, I am holding my breath, only wanting to scream, like the nightmare of being on the wrong side of the airlock. Now the hissing has stopped and pain nails me to the ice. | Copyright 2019 by Eli Brown. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
E. Lily Yu | The Valley of Wounded Deer
Thu, 03 Oct 2019 10:02:04 -0000
Once there was a prince of Ruyastan who was born in secret and hidden behind a false wall with a nurse to hush her and soothe and give suck. The prince and her nurse lived in narrowness for ten years, reading and watching the world through a crack no bigger than a needle. During those years, the dowager queen hunted down and killed, for jealousy, every one of the prince’s half-brothers and cousins, carelessly begotten in cities and villages and forgotten apart from notes in the royal genealogies. | Copyright 2019 by E. Lily Yu. Narrated by Pandora Kew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jenny Rae Rappaport | The Answer That You Are Seeking
Thu, 26 Sep 2019 10:01:47 -0000
It’s the lollipops that break you. The thought of your child sucking on one during a lockdown drill carries enough cognitive dissonance that your brain has trouble actually comprehending it. You know the purpose---the methodology behind it all---lollipops in their mouths will keep preschoolers quiet, and surely the sugar can’t hurt. But the fact that your preschooler needs to know how to behave in case there’s an active shooter is so disturbing that you wish there was a way to retreat into your shell, like a defiant hermit crab. | Copyright 2019 by Jenny Rae Rappaport. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 19 Sep 2019 10:01:16 -0000
Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true. That was a choice, just like everything else about it: When we’d installed my sister’s new home system, we had instructed it to generate avatars that looked like they had escaped the uncanny valley by the skins of their teeth. It was creepy, but the alternative was even creepier. Tasha didn’t talk. Her avatar did. Having them match each other perfectly would have been . . . wrong. “So I’ll see you next week?” she asked. | Copyright 2015 by Seanan McGuire. Originally published in FUTURE VISIONS edited by Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Micah Dean Hicks | Flight of the Crow Boys
Thu, 12 Sep 2019 10:02:00 -0000
People around here never wanted our family. Crow boys, they called us, a flock of five brothers and our father, all of us with long black hair. Flapping our over-sized, garage sale sleeves and falling over the fences the neighbors put between us and them. And maybe too because of the feathers. Our father hung black feathers from the side mirrors of his truck, along the eaves of the house, and he dangled them from the shriveled limbs of our dying fruit trees. All those feathers spinning in the hot wind. Copyright 2014 by Micah Dean Hicks. Originally published in WITNESS. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brooke Bolander | A Bird, a Song, a Revolution
Thu, 05 Sep 2019 10:02:49 -0000
Before the flute is a flute, it is a bird. This is the first act of magic. This is the first lesson the girl learns, when the world is still young and shaggy-coated with lingering winter. Sometimes things can be other things. An axehead hides in a chunk of flint. Before it is a meal, a mammoth is a squealing calf tagging along behind its mother. A fox is a white spirit barking curses until an arrow finds it and turns it into a friend that shields your ears from the wind’s teeth. | Copyright 2019 by Brooke Bolander. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cassandra Khaw | A Leash of Foxes, Their Stories Like Barter
Thu, 29 Aug 2019 10:02:43 -0000
Lady Mary was young and Lady Mary was fair, and she had brothers who loved her and lovers who adored her. But she was savvy, sly as a vixen, with hair like the color of the butchered sun. And of all the people she knew, of all the people who’d pledged their heart to her pleasure, she cared for only one: Mr. Fox. Mr. Fox, of course, had ginger locks and sharp white teeth, freckles like a map across his fair face and when he smiled sometimes, it wasn’t hard to see why they called him Mr. Fox and not Edgar, or Edward, or Egan. | Copyright 2019 by Cassandra Khaw. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:01:51 -0000
First, I want to give you this moment. You will understand why in the end. We were walking on the trail, the way we did on Sundays: the sun-washed gully, the open air, the shadows of last night’s rain staining the earth dark and slick beneath our boots. At the river’s edge, I caught my husband’s hand and pointed at a stack of topaz-eyed turtles that had piled themselves ancient and precarious as a cairn. Here are the shapes and shades that colored my life, before. Then we looked up and saw you. | Copyright 2019 by Kendra Fortmeyer. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 15 Aug 2019 10:02:50 -0000
Like the Isle of Lenas upon which it sat, the town of Lodorest had been dying for decades. The final blow, however, came all at once. Outside of his father’s home, Manil shivered in the night air. He heard shouts and cries and screams, the roar of burning houses. Other sounds, too, drifting up the dirt streets, coming from the shadows as if the darkness itself was a monster feasting on the town: laughter; barking commands; angry bellows from deep-voiced men. Manil stood with his mother and his uncle. Manil barely came up to Uncle Janeed’s hip. | Copyright 2019 by Scott Sigler. Narrated by Scott Sigler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brenda Peynado | The Rock Eaters
Thu, 08 Aug 2019 10:02:40 -0000
We were the first generation to leave that island country. We were the ones who on the day we came of age developed a distinct float to our walk, soon enough hovering inches above the ground, afterwards somersaulting with the clouds, finally discovering we could fly as far as we’d ever wanted, and so we left. Decades later, we brought our children back to see that country. That year, we all decided we were ready to return. We jackknifed through clouds and dodged large birds. We held tight our children, who still had not learned to fly. Behind us trailed rope lines of suitcases bursting with gifts from abroad. We wondered who would remember us. | Copyright 2015 by Brenda Peynado. Originally published in EPOCH. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Senaa Ahmad | Ahura Yazda, the Great Extraordinary
Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:02:44 -0000
The sunshine brings him to his knees. Every day he thinks, I am here, I am here, in this house that we raised above ourselves, with this woman who chose me. The girls are safe. The creatures are fed. The windowsill is pearled with dew. The spiders are friendly. We have made a life for ourselves, away from the world. We live in a church of infinite light. In these hours, he is left soft-footed and silent, walking the hallways in the farmhouse that he built with his wife Roksha. In their bedroom, she is nosedived into her pillow, and in the other one, his daughters’ silk hair feathers around them. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Penn Romine | Miles and Miles and Miles
Thu, 18 Jul 2019 10:01:07 -0000
Noah Stubbs eyes the large white pill pinched between his thumb and forefinger, remembering the first time he hit golf balls on the moon with Gord. “I wonder,” Gord says to him as Noah lines up on the tee, “just how far these suckers’ll really go?” THWACK! Noah swings. The little ball hurtles into the Lunar day, a pinprick of speeding light bright against the velvet sky. Long after the ball becomes invisible to the naked eye, his suit’s visor tracks its trajectory until it drops towards the ground. They parked the hopper at the top of the Virgo Escarpment. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 11 Jul 2019 10:01:05 -0000
“Light, dust, and water are the alchemy of the universe.” Ritual words murmured softly by myriad voices, powerful as a roar, effortless as a whisper. “I will consent to be made and unmade.” An initiate must never walk in. Many elders raise the cocooned body high upon their hands and process into the open space, to lasers alight in a pin-and-string arrangement of bright green on dark velvet. “To burn to ash and dissolve in dew.” The elders guide the still, surrendered form up and into the core of the lattice of light. “I am but dust and ashes; for me the world was created.” | 2018 by Karen Lord. Originally published in PARTICULATES edited by Nalo Hopkinson. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Micah Dean Hicks | Song Beneath the City
Thu, 04 Jul 2019 10:02:00 -0000
For decades, the four plumbers had answered the call of old widows who’d dropped jewelry down their drains. Sometimes, the plumbers unscrewed the U-shaped trap under the sink, knocked out its splat of tobacco-colored crud, and fished out a golden ring. But other times, there was no reclaiming the lost diamonds and gold. They tumbled blind through the maze of pipes below the city, never to see the sun again. Whenever the plumbers left a house, the widows would ask, “Do you hear it too? The singing that comes rattling up from the pipes?” | Copyright 2018 by Micah Dean Hicks. Originally published in THE ADROIT JOURNAL. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 27 Jun 2019 10:01:01 -0000
The Warhosts sit in the lees of the starships while the sky grows less flushed with dawn, playing cards. At the same time, the regulators within the Red emissary and our own play their own game across a moist medium of flesh, chemical brew, and stench to determine where the next battle will be fought. We---the Purples---have been fighting the Reds for possession of this moon, jigsaw piece by slow jigsaw piece, as deliberately as a pavane or carved ice. The Reds have grown increasingly desperate. The moon has a certain strategic importance, and the Reds are very close to having to cede it entirely. | Copyright 2014 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in War Stories, edited by Jaym Gates and Andrew Liptak. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ellen Kushner | When Two Swordsmen Meet
Thu, 20 Jun 2019 10:02:14 -0000
When two swordsmen meet, no one knows what to expect. It’s a cold night in a cold city. Cold stone under cold starlight. He walks down a deserted street, sure of himself, sure of the weapon he bears. He’s not altogether surprised when the stranger steps out of the shadows. “Hey,” he says to the newcomer. “You hungry? I’m going to friends with a fire and a big pot always bubbling on it.” By which we see that it’s not just his sword that defends him, whatever he may think. The other stands very still. “You’re not what I thought you’d be,” he says flatly. “Why not?” the swordsman asks, curious. | Copyright 2015 by Ellen Kushner. Originally published in Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Isabel Cañas | The Weight of a Thousand Needles
Thu, 13 Jun 2019 10:02:58 -0000
A full moon silvers the stalls of the Light Markets, the bazaar of the living and the dead. Here, where jinn mix with mortals and gods, where sorcery sits thick on the air, blue as incense, a crow presides over its wares. Silver rings set with opals like apricot pits nestled in obsidian silk; human teeth peer out of the smoky glass of a tall vase. Mother-of-pearl dice wink in candlelight, their pale faces carved with symbols even the jinn are too young to know. A young man approaches the crow’s stall, gliding dark out of the shadows of the alley. His eyes and hair are jet moonless night, his shoulders bear the velvet raiment of eight heavens. | Copyright 2019 by Isabel Cañas. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Deji Bryce Olukotun | Between the Dark and the Dark
Thu, 06 Jun 2019 10:01:09 -0000
Two hundred ships moved through the stars, leaving an iridescent trail of transmission beacons in their wake. Five billion kilometers long, the beacons stretched all the way to Earth, a desiccated and shaken planet that the passengers once called home. Sometimes simple messages from the ships arrived in the data. After a long time, images came and---after an even longer time---clips of the passengers going about their lives. But the vast distances meant these clips were rare. Normally an image arriving on Earth was cause for celebration, because it meant the crew was still alive, or at least the ship’s systems were still functioning. | Copyright Deji Bryce Olukotun. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Minor Superhero, at Home after His Series Ends
Thu, 23 May 2019 10:02:12 -0000
He has a superhero name. It’s as stupid as every other superhero name. It’s not something you can comfortably call another person in casual conversation. Just try to have a normal-sounding talk with some of the guys in the Liberty Force. “So, hello, uh, Pile-Driver Man. And, how are you doing, Dynamic Woman?” You can’t. You honestly can’t. You need to have a superhero name, and so he has one, bestowed upon him by others when he lagged too long in coming up with one for himself. It still seems vainglorious to him. | Copyright 2019 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 23 May 2019 10:01:43 -0000
The boy stopped playing after his Mom and Dad chained the iron man to the Kingdom’s heart. The boy used to run alone and brave through the welt within the walls, and even ranged as far as the borders of the wood. He tossed the ball his mother gave him into the sky, gold against blue with the sun behind, and laughing, caught it again. The ball purred in his grip. Sometimes he asked it questions---how to build a puppet, how to open the castle gates, how to change the color of the sky--- and it answered. | Copyright 2016 by Max Gladstone. Originally published in THE GRIMM FUTURE, edited by Erin Underwood. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rati Mehrotra | This Way to Paradise
Thu, 09 May 2019 10:01:59 -0000
The mountains were beautiful, even though the roads that took you there were broken. Even though the whole world was broken. Tara sat on the side of the pitted road, soaking in the autumnal sun, gazing at the distant snow-capped peaks in awe. Forgetting, for the moment, the ache in her feet and the emptiness in her stomach. “The Sivalik Range, children,” said Anju, pointing at the green hills that rose around them. “The word literally means the ‘tresses of Shiva.’ Cross the valley, and you stand at the feet of Pir Panjal, the inner Himalayas.” | Copyright 2019 by Rati Mehrotra. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kathleen Kayembe | The Ocean That Fades Into Sky
Thu, 02 May 2019 10:02:15 -0000
Although it takes constant effort for Coasts to mold herself into a human body when none live on her shores, and a far greater effort---even with her mother’s help---to sustain a flight of giant sea turtles across hundreds of miles, for once she is grateful; the focus required keeps her thoughts from the empty space beside her where Obsequies should be. There are three women Coasts loves more than anyone on the whole of Uloh-la, and Obsequies, her lover, is one of them. Her mother, in the guise of the turtle beneath her, is another. Both of them are mad at her. Dwellings, the third, would be angry too, if Coasts told her the truth. | Copyright 2019 by Kathleen Kayembe. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shweta Adhyam | A Conch-Shell’s Notes
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 10:02:06 -0000
This is the story of a conch-shell, and the man who answered its call to adventure. The powerful and mysterious conch resided in a seaside temple on the outskirts of Peacetown. Whenever a resident of the town found themselves at life’s crossroads, wondering which path to take, notes from the conch-shell sounded in their ears and sang of what lay ahead in each direction. When danger lay in the town’s future, it called one of its young men, bright of mind and clean of limb, to fight it. That evening, it sounded in the ears of Kwa, a citrus-seller who was piling fruit upon fruit into neat pyramids, turning the best faces outwards. | Copyright 2019 by Shweta Adhyam. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Corradi | Gundark Island, or, Tars Tarkas Needs Your Help
Thu, 18 Apr 2019 10:01:22 -0000
When Tommy Burke took me out to Gundark Island to see the alien, I wasn’t really expecting much. Maybe I was just going because I thought it would be cool to take a ride in Tommy’s canoe. Or maybe I was just hoping Tommy might turn out to be a friend. If there really was an alien there, too, then all the better. After passing a hand-painted sign that said “Please Don’t Feed the Alien,” we came to a clearing in the middle of the island where I saw a lump in the ground. At first it looked like a small boulder, except that it had a grayish-purple tint to it. Upon closer inspection it vaguely appeared to have scales. | Copyright 2019 by Matthew Corradi. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | The Seeds of War
Thu, 11 Apr 2019 10:02:56 -0000
Hastinaga was ablaze with word of Vrath’s amazing feat. Vrath’s stepmother, Dowager Empress Jilana, while taken aback at the manner in which it had been done, nevertheless bit her tongue when she saw what he had accomplished. That the two daughters of the king of Serapi were beautiful there was no doubt. At the wedding, they were the envy of every woman in the court. Tall, with full heads of thick, lustrous blue-black hair, fingernails and toenails painted blood red, heavy of hip and breast, heart-faced with a glow to rival the moon, they walked like queens already. | Copyright 2019 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caroline M. Yoachim | The Archronology of Love
Thu, 04 Apr 2019 10:01:30 -0000
This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet. Saki Jones leaned into the viewport window until her nose nearly touched the glass, staring at the colony planet below. New Mars. From this distance, she could pretend that things were going according to plan---that M.J. was waiting for her in one of the domed cities. A shuttle would take her down to the surface and she and her lifelove would pursue their dream of studying a grand alien civilization. It had been such a beautiful plan. | 2019 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Woody Dismukes | My Children’s Home
Thu, 28 Mar 2019 10:01:10 -0000
My children do not dream and neither do I. But that does not mean our sleep is sound. Sometimes they wake in the middle of the night, eyes wide and wet, grasping for a reason they stare into the darkness. I wish I could tell them it was a nightmare, that whatever they are feeling isn’t real, but instead I tell them to close their lids and lay lightly back into sleep, which they always do. My children are good at taking orders. | Copyright 2019 by Woody Dismukes. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | A Hundred Thousand Arrows
Thu, 21 Mar 2019 10:02:42 -0000
After decades of warring, a time of peace came to the Krushan dynasty. The great armies of the Burnt Empire set aside their battle armor and weapons in exchange for flowers and rice. A great celebration lit up the streets of Hastinaga, the capital city. The marriage of Emperor Sha’ant and his unusual new Empress, Jilana. The daughter of a fisher chief married to the Emperor of the greatest empire in the known world! | Copyright 2019 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carolyn Ives Gilman | On the Shores of Ligeia
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 10:01:48 -0000
Seth Calder felt like he had barely dozed off when his alarm blared at 6:00 a.m. Level morning sunlight leaked through the blinds onto the birch and linen furniture of his Stockholm apartment. Amalia was already in the shower, so he lurched out of bed and went to check his news feed. NASA TO LAUNCH MARS CREW TODAY, said the first headline. The picture showed the ten crew members in flight suits, grinning at the camera. | Copyright 2019 by Carolyn Ives Gilman. First English language publication. Originally published in Chinese by the Future Affairs Administration. The story is inspired by “Technology and the Good Future” SF Workshop, which is jointly hosted by Future Affairs Administration (Guokr Publishing) and Ant Financial Services Group in Hangzhou, China. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Romasco-Moore | Self-Storage Starts with the Heart
Thu, 07 Mar 2019 11:02:44 -0000
You’ll notice how the commercials never mention the price. They’ve all got some lab-coated guy with chiseled cheekbones spouting dumbed-down drivel about how emotions have wavelengths, the same as light or sound, which are reflected and absorbed by the objects around us. How this discovery has the potential to revolutionize your life. Yes, you, the one glued to your screen at three a.m., binging YouTube videos. | Copyright 2019 by Maria Romasco Moore. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | Marlowe and Harry and the Disinclined Laboratory
Thu, 28 Feb 2019 11:01:15 -0000
Lieutenant James Marlowe watched a room full of grown, distinguished men act like young ladies at their first ball. Flustered, fidgeting, adjusting each others’ cravats, going back and forth from one table to another inspecting equipment and displays that were already perfect, they were exhausting to watch, and so he tried not to. He had only ever been to three balls in his life, before he ran off to join the Navy, and this was a reminder of why he hated them. | Copyright 2019 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | The Terrible Oath
Thu, 21 Feb 2019 11:02:29 -0000
The nation greeted Vrath with great warmth and approval. The Burnt Empire regarded its liege as nothing less than a demi-god; in a sense, this was not far from the truth: Whether or not the Krushan dynasty was in fact born of stonefire, they were certainly something more than human. In the Krushan tongue, which was the official language of the capitol Hastinaga and the rest of the Empire, there was no word for “lie” or “falsehood.” | Copyright 2019 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
KT Bryski | Ti-Jean’s Last Adventure, as Told to Raccoon
Thu, 14 Feb 2019 11:02:51 -0000
Okay. So. There’s a time when I’m looking for Coyote, because I need to tell him this story. So, I walk the St. Lawrence River from one end to the other, and I cannot find him. Check the Rockies---he is not there. I even paddle to Baffin Island, because he likes to sleep on it. It is Coyote-shaped, a little. He’s not anywhere. But me, I have a story to tell, and so I look for someone else. Raven is not home, and Muskrat is doing Netflix and chill. | Copyright 2019 by KT Bryski. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 07 Feb 2019 11:01:22 -0000
Home. He recognizes the name of the street. But he doesn’t remember the landscape. He recognizes the address on the mailbox. But he doesn’t remember the house. His family is waiting for him on the porch. Everybody looks just as nervous as he is. He gets out. The police cruiser takes back off down the gravel drive, leaving him standing in a cloud of dust holding a baggie of possessions. | Copyright 2019 by Matthew Baker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 24 Jan 2019 11:02:46 -0000
Meet Hermes Maleficarum, the reclusive force behind the multiverse’s biggest publishing house. A mystery generations in the making. The first thing I notice about Hermes was how unlike the rest of his family he seems. Hermes’ parents, Taliesin and his wife Morgana, were something of a power couple in the magic business, cutting a twin swath like obsidian blades at every fashionable event. | Copyright 2019 by Meg Elison. Narrated by Pandora Kew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 17 Jan 2019 11:01:56 -0000
It’s not unusual to hear music in a spaceport arrival lounge. After all, if aliens didn’t enjoy music, I’d never have been able to travel. But this sounded familiar. Disturbingly familiar. Standing in line, I felt a sinking sensation as the tune wound its way to its conclusion. It was The Beatles. Millions of light years from Earth and I was listening to The Beatles. How did I feel? | Copyright 2019 by Tony Ballantyne. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | Son of Water and Fire
Thu, 10 Jan 2019 11:02:21 -0000
Born of water, into water, the boy knew no other world. It would not always be thus. Someday, he had been told, he would leave here for another place. His mother had told him this, in a quiet time, her body swollen and expanded to its widest, spanning banks miles apart, trailing enormous skirts of silt. He loved her at these quiet times, when her icy mountain rage had mellowed to a somnolent trawl, flowing majestically down to the ocean. | 2019 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | With Teeth Unmake the Sun
Thu, 03 Jan 2019 11:01:43 -0000
Io Destiny is a rich planet, home to three billion lives, built as a faceted gem to honor the Seven Suns. All the gods are worshiped equally here in peace. Temples caress the lower atmosphere and ships dance in celestial orbit; the Seven Suns are honored in effigy in great statues and holograms that mortals adore. Io Destiny is the only neutral world. While the gods chafe and feud with each other, hovering on the cusp of war, this planet is sacrosanct. | Copyright 2019 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seanan McGuire | Under the Sea of Stars
Thu, 27 Dec 2018 11:01:50 -0000
We have traveled here, to this most innocuous of country landscapes, to make good on a promise made by my grandfather, Carlton Whitmore, to a girl he loved in his youth. How foolish that sounds, writ down so! But it is true. Grandfather met her on the banks of the Bolton Strid, where she stood naked and confused, water drying on her skin. His notes state that she knew no modesty, and that “she was pale as the belly of a deep-river fish." Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shaenon K. Garrity | Grandma Novak’s Famous Nut Roll
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:02:57 -0000
Hello, family! As everyone who follows my sister on Facebook knows (and who isn’t reading Kat’s posts? Twenty lashes with a wet noodle, and you bet it’ll be Grandma’s kluski!), last weekend she and I visited Grandma Novak for . . . baking lessons! Though Grandma’s strong as she ever was (just try to tell her otherwise) she IS getting on in years. Kat and I agreed we ought to get her recipes down in writing while we can. | Copyright 2018 by Shaenon K. Garrity. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 11:01:11 -0000
Times were strange, and those who survived the collapse had a jarring mixtape of skills. Plumbers were holy men, exorcising the encampments of the demons of human waste. They brought forth, stored and dispensed the holiest sacrament of all, clean water. Warriors emerged from the strangest of places, sex workers commanded respect and were offered it gladly. | Copyright 2018 by Lizz Huerta. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | A Love Story Written on Water
Thu, 06 Dec 2018 11:02:43 -0000
Bhi’ash was a king of the Axe clan. Truthful and courageous, he was renowned for having performed one thousand Black Horse sacrifices and one hundred Fire sacrifices. For his devotion, upon his demise he attained entrance to the heavenly realms and was honored by the Stone Gods. One day, Bhi’ash—accompanied by many other king-mages and some of the Stone Gods themselves—went to pay homage to Agar, the highest of Stone Gods. | Copyright 2018 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephen Graham Jones | Moonboys
Thu, 22 Nov 2018 11:01:06 -0000
You ask how my brother died on the moon that day, but that’s the wrong question. Ask instead what he spelled with his bootprints when we first stepped down from the platform. Ask instead the one song he listened to, the whole flight there. Ask why he wanted me there instead of Jess, his wife. It’s because we used to pretend the backyard at night was the moon. That we were astronauts. That gravity was different. | Copyright 2018 by Stephen Graham Jones. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | Hapthorn’s Last Case
Thu, 15 Nov 2018 11:02:14 -0000
My assistant said, “You have received an invitation from Holk Xanthoulian. He is embarking on a new menu and invites, and I quote, ‘a select coterie of the cognoscenti to sample its superlative assemblage of tastes, textures, and titillations.’” “He has a flair for the alliterative,” I said. “Sadly, that is true,” my assistant said. “Shall I decline?” | Copyright 2018 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Theodore McCombs | Talk to Your Children About Two-Tongued Jeremy
Thu, 08 Nov 2018 11:01:52 -0000
His name was Two-Tongued Jeremy; he was a monitor lizard with a forked tongue, thick glasses, and a wild, wagging smile meant to convince children that learning could be fun, too. He came highly rated. He updated automatically. When our promising children propped their tablets against their stacks of textbooks, their glazy angelic eyes took on that ferocious determination we liked to see in ourselves. | Copyright 2018 by Theodore McCombs. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 01 Nov 2018 10:02:00 -0000
Once upon a time, there was a princess named Little Snowdrop, who had six brothers and four sisters. Her brothers were ravens, and her sisters were swans. Whenever they wished, they would fly around the castle on their black or white wings, but Snowdrop, not having any wings of her own, could not join them. She could only wave at them from the window of a high tower as they flew by. Her father was the King, and he loved her very much. | Copyright 2018 by Theodora Goss. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mel Kassel | Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake
Thu, 25 Oct 2018 10:02:51 -0000
I’m fourteen the first time I bargain with the indigo snake. I find it basking on the rocks that are piled against the south side of our house, a lazily drawn line of black, like a cursive letter that has gotten away from itself. It lifts its head as I walk up. “Can you hurt Sam Mueller?” I ask. I’ve taken health class by this point, so I know that I’m not supposed to speak to snakes. There are videos about what happens to the kids who do. But they’re so poorly made, the actresses too peppy and the snakes no more than plastic-eyed puppets. Hardly sinister. | Copyright 2018 by Mel Kassel. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 18 Oct 2018 10:01:19 -0000
We were getting coffee, which we used to do all the time, when Tierney told me she was thinking of having it done. “Really?” I asked, half-laughing---I didn’t think she was serious. “Why?” “What do you mean, why?” Tierney looked annoyed. “Do I need a reason? Why did you get your tattoo?” I’d hurt her feelings. I hadn’t meant to. As I tried to think of what to say I followed the line of her eyes to a woman who’d just walked in and was ordering a latte. Her face was merely a suggestion, like a Cycladic head or a more abstract Brâncuși. | Copyright 2018 by Molly Tanzer. Narrated by Pandora Kew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cameron Van Sant | Super-Luminous Spiral
Thu, 11 Oct 2018 10:02:00 -0000
Even though your creative fiction professor fawns over Joyce, you don’t understand the copy of ULYSSES you checked out from the library, so you hide behind it while you stare at your classmate whose skin flickers. His blue and green skin is speckled in spirals of twinkling lights. When you stare long enough, you realize the spirals spin like galaxies. Part of your brain should tell you he is abnormal, but it does not. He stands up and reads his assignment. He reads poetry. This is not a poetry class. | Copyright 2018 by Cameron Van Sant. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dale Bailey | The Horror of Party Beach
Thu, 04 Oct 2018 10:01:09 -0000
All this happened a long time ago, in the summer when Blackboard Jungle ruled the screen, “Rock Around the Clock” shot up the charts, and Hal March asked the first $64,000 Question. That was the year our friend the atom lit up the streetlights of Arco, Idaho, the world’s first atomic city. Reddy Kilowatt had slain Bert the Turtle, who’d been telling us to duck and cover for years. | Copyright 2018 by Dale Bailey. Narrated by Norm Sherman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dahvana Headley | You Pretend Like You Never Met Me, and I’ll Pretend Like I Never Met You
Thu, 27 Sep 2018 10:02:25 -0000
The worst day of Wells the Magician’s life begins pleasantly enough, with a shot of whiskey at the Lost Kingdom bar. It’s a birthday party day, and as all low-rent magic men know, birthday party days begin with booze and move laterally through coffee, cake, and whichever divorcee can be convinced to unhook her bra, whether offsite or in a back bedroom. Onward from there into (dire case) helium, (better case) weed, or (best case) coke. | Copyright 2018 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yoon Ha Lee | The Coin of Heart’s Desire
Thu, 20 Sep 2018 10:02:55 -0000
In an empire at the wide sea’s boundaries, where the clouds were the color of alabaster and mother-of-pearl, and the winds bore the smells of salt and faraway fruits, the young and old of every caste gathered for their empress’s funeral. In life she had gone by the name Beryl-Beneath-the-Storm. Now that she was dead, the court historians were already calling her Weave-the-Storm, for she had been a fearsome naval commander. | Copyright 2013 by Yoon Ha Lee. Originally published in ONCE UPON A TIME: NEW FAIRY TALES, edited by Paula Guran. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Last to Matter
Thu, 20 Sep 2018 10:01:39 -0000
Kayn knew he was being rejected by the orgynism for almost a full year before it fully expelled him. He could easily live a million years past this humiliation and never understand what he had done to deserve such a rejection from the collective that had loved him so well, for so long. He had been one of the orgynism’s founders, the man who had provided its organizing principles and solicited the first participants. | Copyright 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 13 Sep 2018 10:02:19 -0000
Mike and Jessie were walking in the park. The trees high above their heads stretched to touch each other, their leaves letting only the tiniest slivers of light through. Mike watched the freckles of light spot Jessie’s brown face, her shirt, her arms. He tried to snub them out with his fingers. It was a long day for them. They’d spent a few hours walking around the park, just talking. About old dreams and new ones, black riots and urban decay, the secrets of their hearts and the mysteries of the universe. | Copyright 2018 by Cadwell Turnbull. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vylar Kaftan | Her Monster, Whom She Loved
Thu, 06 Sep 2018 10:01:28 -0000
Ammuya birthed five hundred gods, followed by a monster. That was her first mistake. The gods tormented the monster because they feared it. They bound it inside a black hole, and the monster’s hatred seethed. Eventually the monster raged so fiercely he escaped the event horizon. Then he hunted down his siblings, one by one. On a silent desert planet, Ammuya cried for her children. | Copyright 2018 by Vylar Kaftan. Narrated by Pandora Kew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kate Elliott | A Compendium of Architecture and the Science of Building
Thu, 23 Aug 2018 10:02:11 -0000
By the time he returned home after all his years of wandering, Magnus Diarisso had come to prefer a fire burning on cold days rather than the elaborate hypocaust system that heated the mage house. The sound of wood settling, sparks popping, and ashes sighing helped him relax. He told his nephew the mansa, the powerful cold mage who was head of Four Moons House, that he did not want to live in the main house with its comings and goings and the children’s chatter. | Copyright 2018 by Kate Elliott. Narrated by Jack Kincaid. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alex Irvine | The Atonement Path
Thu, 16 Aug 2018 10:01:56 -0000
To think we used to put young criminals in jail. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to eavesdrop. Or should I say eaveswatch? What is the comparable term for using one’s visual sense in a surreptitious fashion? Dining establishments are a superb venue for such observations. But it is true, no? What good could their example do if they were shut away from public view? Ah. I am being rude. My name is Andrew Blankenship. Esquire, in the interest of completeness. | Copyright 2018 by Alex Irvine. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Manuel Gonzales | Scavenge, Rustic Hounds!
Thu, 09 Aug 2018 10:02:16 -0000
The creatures come out at night, while we’re asleep. My husband says they are harmless. “Probably mice,” he says. “They’re not harmless,” I tell him. “They are very much not harmless,” I say. “They’re gathering information on us. They’re looking through our things, examining our lives, deciding if we are good or if we are not.” “That’s ridiculous,” my husband says. “They’re singling us out. Deciding which ones to take away.” | Copyright 2018 by Manuel Gonzales. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Grey | A Bond as Deep as Starlit Seas
Thu, 02 Aug 2018 10:01:43 -0000
Don’t sell her. The thought rises like a tide in the back of Jeri’s mind, where she’s spent three Nikutan launch cycles struggling to contain it. It leaves her breathless, drowning in guilt, and trying to hide it from the krosuta-whitened stare of the Henza abbess. This is Cleo, not a load of ore. This will break her. And how could it not break her? She’s a lumbering old Juno-class cargo beast, poor Cleo, one of the earliest models. | Copyright 2018 by Sarah Grey. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kyle Muntz | Wild Bill’s Last Stand
Thu, 26 Jul 2018 10:02:13 -0000
Wild Bill “The Buck” Williams rode into town for a drink, but he stayed for the pretty boys. He was as mean as they said but not so tall: a lean, hard man with a rocky face and a broad mustache, slicked at both sides from a tin of fat he kept in a satchel round his waist. That first night he broke a man’s jaw for cheating him at poker. I didn’t just hear the story, I saw it---how Wild Bill clocked the fucker upside the face, emptied the last of his drink, and knocked out half the man’s teeth with his mug. | Copyright 2018 by Kyle Muntz. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Greetings, Humanity! Welcome To Your Choice Of Species!
Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:01:56 -0000
Hello, there! If you have received this telepathic mailing, you are a member of the species currently self-designated Homo sapiens, as evolved on the planet locally known as Earth, orbiting the sun locally known, for some reason that escapes us, as Sol. Most of your kind is already aware of the legal proceedings just completed in Session 3,975,216.7b of the Exalted High Tribunal of the Interstellar Commission on the Minimum Standards for Worthiness of Indigenous Cultures. | Copyright 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 10:01:46 -0000
Constable Kershaw has not uttered any overrides, nor issued a warrant to access her memory logs, but Celia understands nonetheless that she is expected to stay, to sit and answer his questions like a suspect. It surprises her, this treatment. Like she’s human. “Are you chilly, Constable? Shall I light the fire?” “Yeah, all right,” he says, removing his hat and settling into the armchair her employer always favours. Favoured. | Copyright 2018 by G.V. Anderson. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Beamon | A Song of Home, the Organ Grinds
Thu, 05 Jul 2018 10:02:20 -0000
The monkeys are white-faced capuchins. Small things, their lean, black-furred bodies stand in stark contrast to the white tufts of their faces and shoulders. The Russians have cannons that can blast an airship apart in ten minutes and armored steam knights called kolotar, but of the many dangers I face on a warship a mile above the Black Sea, I fear the monkeys I tend most. “Do not tarry,” a man whispers behind me. “They eat meat as well, boy.” | Copyright 2018 by James Beamon. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 10:02:16 -0000
When I was sixteen, I sold my teeth each Thursday, and that is how I first met the doctor. This was before his celebrated school, his fame, his dogged pursuit of bodies for his collection, back when he was very young and took his income as a dentist. While the ladies of society ate cakes until their smiles were the same gappy gray cobblestone as our London streets, my own hungry mouth was full of pearls, and I let the doctor harvest them. | Copyright 2018 by Emma Törzs. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lina Rather | A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Lighthouse of Quvenle the Seer
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 10:01:29 -0000
Your guidebook says: Do not ask which ships the lighthouse guides. It’s the same old joke everyone makes when they come, and the sisters who care for their prophetess Quvenle will not laugh. The other pilgrims will not laugh. You will not feel any less uncomfortable, and you’ll feel silly for selling your house and all the memories left inside to buy your passage. To reach the edge of known space, you have shed it all. | Copyright 2018 by Lina Rather. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | The Quiltbag
Thu, 14 Jun 2018 10:02:48 -0000
Octavia was at the last gate when the alarm sounded. A small army of bristling weapons encircled her. The bag shuddered in her grip, panic rippling through its weave. She gripped it tighter, reassuring it. It’s your hair, it sent tremulously. Told you to straighten it and bind it tight; they don’t like big black hair. She squeezed it tight against her side: Hush, hush. “Step aside, ma’am,” said a man in a grey uniform. | Copyright 2018 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | I Sing Against the Silent Sun
Thu, 07 Jun 2018 10:01:24 -0000
In the Principality there rule the Seven Suns. Armored gods, they marched through the universe eons ago, wreathed in subjected angels, and left footprints of conquest on galaxies. They dragged beneath them the corpse-heat from a billion burning worlds. The sixth Sun, the Gray Sun, is a god of silence. There is no voice, no mercy, no music within the Gray Sun. Beneath the Gray Sun there is only emptiness. | Copyright 2018 by A. Merc Rustad & Ada Hoffmann. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jane Lindskold | A Green Moon Problem
Thu, 24 May 2018 10:01:16 -0000
No one had ever seen Tatter D’MaLeon’s face. Even those who thought she was just a legend agreed that she was always masked. That was about all anyone agreed upon. Although the female pronoun was usually applied to “her,” even Tatter’s sex was in doubt, as was her humanity, her age, and whether or not she existed. But believe or not, there was scarce a one who didn’t love the stories. Anthropologists had tried to pin down exactly when the first Tatter D’MaLeon stories had been told. | Copyright 2018 by Obsidian Tiger Inc. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kodiak Julian | Our Side of the Door
Thu, 17 May 2018 10:02:06 -0000
It isn’t until I realize I can’t find my son---really can’t find him---that I think of all the other things I can’t see in the starlit orchard. “Cruz!” I yell. “Buddy! You win!” There is no moon. The trees are thick with blossoms. I hear Cruz in the tall grasses, rustling, giggling. He is six years old. This wouldn’t bother my wife. Alyssa believes that Cruz should learn to use a knife, to light a match, to walk beside a river without stumbling and drowning. | Copyright 2018 by Kodiak Julian. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carolyn Ives Gilman | We Will Be All Right
Thu, 10 May 2018 10:01:51 -0000
Tomorrow is Easter, and I will have to welcome into my home the woman who is going to murder my son. I need to prepare side dishes in advance. Take a heaping bowl of injustice, mash it to a pulp, season with tears of rage, bake, and serve in a dish speckled with four-leaf clovers. The question is, should I put the rat poison in hers alone, or would it be better for all of us to go together? | Copyright 2018 by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 03 May 2018 10:02:30 -0000
The godmeat stank of hibiscus and saltwater. Its noxious divinity threaded through the kitchen, the air itself feeling suddenly buoyant in its wake. If Hark closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself on the beach where Spear had killed the Sea Mother; pale green water lapping at his feet, miles of white sand stretching into the distance, while pink blossoms bobbed in the surf. He could almost see Spear standing on top of the godthing, her weapon shimmering with the blue blood of the dying Beast. | Copyright 2018 by Martin Cahill. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steven Barnes | Mozart on the Kalahari
Thu, 26 Apr 2018 10:01:26 -0000
It took Michael “Meek” Prouder half an hour to magtube from Claremont to the Coachella Valley desert, near the Nestlé Reservoir entertainment pier. In this oasis of hot dogs, pinwheel fireworks, and whirlygigs, he could lounge and marinate himself, soak up rays as he listened to the music radiating from the dam wall, and sink under the rhythmic roar of artificial waves crashing against the artificial shore. He could walk out into the desert away from the city lights. | Copyright 2017 by Steven Barnes. Originally published in Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities, edited by Ed Finn, Joey Eschrich, and Juliet Ulman. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Timothy Mudie | The Elephants’ Crematorium
Thu, 19 Apr 2018 10:01:07 -0000
Liyana had seen elephants form into protective circles when calves were threatened, but this was different. These days, animal behavior was all but impossible to predict, of course---prey turning to predator; trees turning to stone in moonlight---but this didn’t feel random. There was intent in the way the elephants moved. The seven of them---she counted three juvenile males, two juvenile females, and two adult females---plodded into a loose formation. | Copyright 2018 by Timothy Mudie. Narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | A Place Without Portals
Thu, 12 Apr 2018 10:02:42 -0000
It was only then that she woke up in her nice warm bed and discovered that her entire adventure in the land of Nys had been nothing but a dream. Everything she had experienced from the very beginning, starting with the ancient soothsayer with the parchment skin and beclouded eyes appearing at her door to brush those gnarled fingers against her cheek and murmur, “Yes, you are the one, you are the chosen one, you are the one destined to defeat the great evil.” | Copyright 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 05 Apr 2018 10:01:30 -0000
I’d never been on a quieter school bus. Kids were whispering to each other, looking scared as hell as the bus clipped stray branches from the endless forest pressing in on both sides of us. “This isn’t even a two-way road,” I murmured to Flora, the girl sitting beside me. She was chubby and had braces. “I know. Where IS this school? My parents said this would be the greatest thing ever for my college applications, but I don’t know about this.” | Copyright 2018 by Will McIntosh. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cassandra Khaw | You Do Nothing But Freefall
Thu, 22 Mar 2018 10:02:38 -0000
Once upon a time, a fox came across a cat in the forest. Or something very similar to a cat, at least. The thing was neither flesh nor fur, but pale enamel, the tip of its nose and the insides of its ears daubed with blood. It sat on its polished haunches atop a mossy log beside a babbling brook, paw metronoming in salute. “Hello,” said the fox to the cat, drawn to its gleam and its amiable expression, its bobbing foreleg, but mostly by the golden coin at its throat. | Copyright 2018 by Cassandra Khaw and A. Maus. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 15 Mar 2018 10:01:19 -0000
Qubits resolve and superimpose; information entangles and de-couples; consciousness re-emerges. I don’t know for how long I’ve been asleep. There’s so little energy left in the island-ship’s reservoir that I’ve been conserving as much as possible. A faint glow in the abyss, perhaps several thousand kelvins. It’s why I’ve been awakened. I change course and head straight for perhaps the last star in the universe. | Copyright 2018 by Ken Liu. First English language publication. Originally published in Chinese by the Future Affairs Administration on Weibo and WeChat as part of their “Spring Festival Gala” celebration in February 2018. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thu, 08 Mar 2018 11:02:11 -0000
There once lived a man who was stolen from the sea. Rare and magnificent, he lived in his cave, rising to the surface every so often to pluck the strings of his violin for the birds before retreating into the water to play for his kin. They spent their days enthralled by the doleful songs of the man who lived in the littoral cave. But there came a day when the songs ceased and the people stopped going and the man was nowhere to be seen. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bryan Camp | The Independence Patch
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 11:01:32 -0000
It is exam week, and Donny is 14 years 10 months 15 days 10 hours 16 minutes old. He is bored and hungry and his scalp itches and he hates school more than he’s ever hated anything before in his life. He hates exams in particular, and he hates his math exam most of all. 54 minutes and 20 seconds are left before he can leave, before he can take the damned dunce cap off and be himself again. | Copyright 2018 by Bryan Camp. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | The Goddess Has Many Faces
Thu, 22 Feb 2018 11:01:46 -0000
Pillai expected Kali border security to be much tighter than it was. All he got was a body search that was routinely thorough, and a few old-fashioned tests and checks. It reminded him of a visit he had made as a very young rightwing Hindu activist to an Indian nuclear weapon testing facility back in 1998, after the Pokhran atomic tests. His briefings had been correct in this respect: Kali did not seem to have much use for twenty-first-century Safe Care. | Copyright 2018 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Rajan Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Naomi Kanakia | A Coward’s Death
Thu, 15 Feb 2018 11:02:42 -0000
Well, the 101,201st Emperor needed some levies to build a huge statue of himself, so he said, “Okay, all of my recently subjugated peoples: If you’ve got at least two sons, you need to give me your first-born. But don’t worry, I’ll give him back, assuming he can survive ten years of lifting these big heavy stones.” In some places, people weren’t happy about this. The city of Yashar revolted, and in response the Emperor’s legions killed the men, castrated the boys, and sold all the survivors into slavery. | Copyright 2018 by Rahul Kanakia. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bogi Takács | Four-Point Affective Calibration
Thu, 08 Feb 2018 11:01:58 -0000
Of course I can be angry. But I wear a headscarf. The moment I’m angry, you put me in your mental box labeled “TERRORIST” in neat, tidy small capitals. You store me under “Potential Danger” in the warehouse of your mind. When I cross the parking lot to the grocery store, sometimes people hit the gas, not the brakes. And this is a university town, supposedly liberal---or is it? I’m not a Muslim, but it’s not like most people around here can spot the difference. | Copyright 2018 by Bogi Takács. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cassandra Khaw | The Quiet Like a Homecoming
Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:02:15 -0000
Travel to Scandinavia if you can, the older cats told me, the queens in their raftered kingdoms. The coffee there, they said, is bitter as an old lie. The Norsemen are beautiful, their women even more sublime, but most importantly, they are quiet. Preoccupied only with Nordic things, disinterested in the outside world. This is crucial. This is what makes them safe. But this is not the only reason I am here. | Copyright 2018 by Cassandra Khaw. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Pinsker | The Court Magician
Thu, 25 Jan 2018 11:02:36 -0000
The boy who will become court magician this time is not a cruel child. Not like the last one, or the one before her. He never stole money from Blind Carel’s cup, or thrashed a smaller child for sweets, or kicked a dog. This boy is a market rat, which sets him apart from the last several, all from highborn or merchant families. This isn’t about lineage, or even talent. He watches the street magicians every day, with a hunger in his eyes that says he knows he could do what they do. | Copyright 2018 by Sarah Pinsker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Susan Jane Bigelow | The Eyes of the Flood
Thu, 18 Jan 2018 11:01:09 -0000
The river’s in flood again, and it feels like a blessing from God. You emerge from your home, built with wood and plastic scraps of ancient towns, and stand on the green hill high above the rushing waters. You remember from when you were young that the river would spill over its banks every year, submerging the low-lying land, turning fields that had lain fallow through the darkness and bitter cold of winter into lakes of rushing, wild water. And then when the waters had drained away, the corn could be planted in the deep sediments left behind. | Copyright 2018 by Susan Jane Bigelow. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
José Pablo Iriarte | The Substance of My Lives, the Accidents of Our Births
Thu, 11 Jan 2018 11:02:31 -0000
I seem to make an outcast of myself every time I’m a teenager. Which is fine, I guess. I’ll take one good dog and one good friend over being a phony and fitting in. Alicia points. “There he is, Jamie!” A couple hundred feet away, our trailer park’s newest resident grabs a box from the van parked in front of his single-wide. He’s gray-haired and buff, like if The Rock were an old man. Alicia and I are sprawled on top of a wooden picnic table in the park’s rusted old playground. | Copyright 2018 by José Pablo Iriarte. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Streets of Babel
Thu, 04 Jan 2018 11:01:50 -0000
The city surrounded him while he slept. He had been fleeing it for four days. Long before its walls became visible, it was a grayish smudge on the horizon, beneath which the air shimmered in silent testimony of its radiant heat. It was one of about ten living cities he knew of and he had avoided it for as long as he could, staying out of their usual migratory paths, contenting himself with the company of the small tribes who had also managed to keep out of the reach of the cities, living on roots and the small animals that fell to his bow. | Copyright 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mari Ness | You Will Never Know What Opens
Thu, 28 Dec 2017 11:02:56 -0000
One of the doors in the closet, behind the boxes, leads to a harsh desert world. The first time you stepped through, you didn’t bring water, and nearly died as you crouched beneath the sun, waiting for the door to open again. You were saved only by the unexpected appearance of someone draped in gray, who gave you water before showing you a mottled face of lizard skin. You screamed. By the time you returned, you could barely stand. Your head pounded; your skin was badly burnt. | 2017 by Mari Ness. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cadwell Turnbull | A Third of the Stars of Heaven
Thu, 21 Dec 2017 11:01:36 -0000
Henrietta followed the receptionist down the hall of Schneider Hospital. The woman’s keys jangled as she walked, mixing with the echoing clicks of Henrietta’s blue church shoes. No other noises greeted them. Henrietta watched her shadow stretch itself in each unlit room, her form made large by the ultra-bright fluorescent lights of the hallway. One of the lights in the hall blinked on and off. Henrietta pinched her eyes closed to ward off dizziness. Her lower belly throbbed and she stifled a groan. | Copyright 2017 by Cadwell Turnbull. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | The House at the End of the Lane Is Dreaming
Thu, 14 Dec 2017 11:02:54 -0000
Your name is Alex and you live in a small town at the edge of the sea. You have a sister and two parents and no pets. In your town, everyone follows their destiny: They cross the street, cook endless meals, stand in the same room, deliver the same mail every day. You can’t remember most of their names. It’s the way it’s always been. You’re different. You wake up one morning and know something’s wrong. It’s an unsettled ache in your chest. Bad things will happen soon. Unfortunately, you can’t articulate these feelings. No one but you knows anything is different about today. | Copyright 2017 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rachael K. Jones | The Greatest One-Star Restaurant in the Whole Quadrant
Thu, 07 Dec 2017 11:01:00 -0000
Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything. | Copyright 2017 by Rachael K. Jones. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Charlie Jane Anders | Cake Baby (A Kango and Sharon Adventure)
Thu, 23 Nov 2017 11:01:40 -0000
Kango and Sharon first met at a party, one of those lavish debauch-fests where people fly in from all over the galaxy wearing sentient fetishwear that costs a whole asteroid belt. The specially grown building had melted, causing toxic fumes that killed a few hundred people, and then the canapés on the appetizer table came to life and started mutilating bystanders with their razor-sharp mandibles. The party was going according to plan, in other words. The only thing that nobody could have predicted, even the most OCD of the party-planners, was that two of the party’s minor entertainers ended up standing around near the Best Dressed Dead Guest lineup. | Copyright 2017 by Charlie Jane Anders. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Max Wynne | A Wound Like an Unplowed Field
Thu, 16 Nov 2017 11:02:46 -0000
When the witch came across the man whose leg had been shot through by the arrow he was hollering and disorderly and seemed like a bit of a nuisance. Still it could be said honestly that the man had a particular charm about him. For example when the witch asked if he was all right the man responded with only an agonized groan but beyond the groan there was also a look he gave her like the groaning in agony was a joke they alone were in on and she felt an immediate conspiratorial intimacy with the man with the shot leg. | Copyright 2017 by Max Wynne. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | A Vortal in Midtown
Thu, 09 Nov 2017 11:01:36 -0000
A Vortal ripped open in the heart of Manhattan. It began as a microscopic dot, invisible to the naked eye. Just hung there in midair, almost two meters above the street. People walked, drove, biked, rollerbladed, skateboarded, jogged, and one dude on his way to a Broadway audition even tap-danced by without noticing it. It grew. A day later, it was the size of a pea. A Metro bus struck it. It was still barely visible and the Sikh driver was hardly expecting to collide with a nearly invisible pea-sized obstacle suspended six feet up in the air. Narrated by Deepti Gupta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kathleen Kayembe | The Faerie Tree
Thu, 02 Nov 2017 10:02:52 -0000
There’s a faerie tree in my front yard. Its branches are gnarled like an old woman’s fingers, knobbed like her knees, and the trunk hunches down like she’s reaching for my house. Mamaw said the hole at the base of faerie trees is where faeries come out or rush in or leave gifts if it’s big enough, though I was too young to remember. She says I was fussy in any arms that weren’t hers or the tree, least ’til I got used to everything. When I was real little, Sister says she could always find me curled half in the tree if I’d toddled off, like I fell asleep tryin’ to find Mamaw’s faeries. | Copyright 2017 by Kathleen Kayembe. Narrated by Jayme Joseph. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | What I Told My Little Girl About the Aliens Preparing to Grind Us Into Hamburgers
Tue, 24 Oct 2017 10:01:23 -0000
Pretty much everybody made peace with it very early on in the process. It wasn’t the most pleasant prospect in this world, or any other. But it had been explained to us in the most rational and persuasive terms imaginable, in sentences so simple that even the dumbest among us were capable of getting it; and once we swallowed that pill and incorporated it into our daily lives, it really didn’t make much of a difference in the scheme of things. We were adults about it. But that doesn’t make much of a difference when your four-year-old daughter looks up at you with her big brown eyes and asks you, “Daddy? Why are the space men going to grind us into hamburgers?” | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | The Dragon of Dread Peak (Part 2)
Tue, 17 Oct 2017 10:02:04 -0000
Back in originspace, Basher sobbed in Doom Maiden’s arms. Sparks stared at the ground. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I wanted to punch something. Mostly I wanted to punch myself. Or maybe Domino. If only he had listened to me! Why did I ever think I could be a leader? Not even my best friend listened to me when it counted. How could I have been so stupid? How could he? “We’ll get him back,” Basher said. She was frantic. “He’s still alive. Right, Sparks? He’s still alive.” | Copyright 2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | The Dragon of Dread Peak (Part 1)
Tue, 10 Oct 2017 10:02:40 -0000
When I made the decision to take up an after-school job closing trans-dimensional portals into pocket-worlds full of dangerous monsters and traps, I thought it would be easier—or at least more fun—than working the counter at a fried cockatrice joint or selling newssheets on a street corner at the crack of dawn. My team’s first outing into dungeonspace—when we defeated The Cavern of the Screaming Eye on our first try—had gone pretty good. Since then, we’d been running low threat level, poorly synced dungeons as practice, the kind that don’t actually kill you if you take damage inside them. | Look for the thrilling conclusion on 10/17/17! | Copyright 2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | Longing for Stars Once Lost
Tue, 03 Oct 2017 10:01:28 -0000
The ship dies in orbit above an abandoned world. Kitshan curses. Metal bones shudder around him as the last of the ship’s breath is sucked into vacuum. His skill at the helm and hasty patch jobs have kept the engines together, but luck is scarce out here, and his is gone. The ship is unminded. Lifeless metal, basic programming, and manual flight operations are things he can tolerate better than another consciousness wrapped against his. The viewscreen flickers and a cold vista stretches across the interior curve of the cockpit: the small star, bright and distilled against the void. | Copyright 2017 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 26 Sep 2017 10:01:19 -0000
That’s how Cynthia and Ugo met. The Easter egg hunt had just started when little Cynthia noticed a dark, short-haired nine-year-old boy, all alone, sitting by the church steps. Her first impression of him was his quietness, and the way he stared at her. When she told him (well, shouted) that it was impolite to stare at strangers, and why wasn’t he running like all others?---the dark-haired boy walked quietly over and told her that they didn’t need to hurry. | Copyright 2017 by Giovanni De Feo. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tony Ballantyne | A Pound of Darkness, a Quarter of Dreams
Tue, 19 Sep 2017 10:02:13 -0000
There was something sinister about the representative’s perfection. The oiled and combed dark hair, the even white teeth, the polished fingernails. His immaculate dark jacket and trousers, the pressed collar and cuffs of his shirt. He looked as if he’d dressed in the shop itself, not ridden up the damp valleys from Manchester on some dirty, smoking steam train, inevitably acquiring the grime and the dust from the tired upholstery of a grubby carriage. No one who had undertaken the walk down the wet high street should have kept their shoes so polished and shiny. | Copyright 2017 by Tony Ballantyne. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Timothy Mudie | An Ever-Expanding Flash of Light
Tue, 12 Sep 2017 10:01:23 -0000
“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone you know---the entire world you know---is now dead.” Murmurs ripple through the assembled cadets. Not because they’re shocked---everyone knew what they were signing up for---but because it all happened without fanfare, a jump across light-years of space unaccompanied by any grand orchestral swell or roaring engine thrusts. The wiry guy with a shaved head standing next to Tone mutters, “Jesus, I didn’t even feel anything.” | Copyright 2017 by Timothy Mudie. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jaymee Goh | The Last Cheng Beng Gift
Tue, 05 Sep 2017 10:02:17 -0000
There was definitely something to be said about being Mrs. Lim, even into the Underworld: something about comfort, something about privilege, something about a status quo carried into the afterlife. The previous matriarch that bore the title of Mrs. Lim had moved on long before Mrs. Lim got there, but since Mrs. Lim had not liked the domineering nature of her predecessor, this did not bother her overmuch. One of things to be said about being Mrs. Lim was that during Cheng Beng, she received many, many presents. | Copyright 2017 by Jaymee Goh. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 22 Aug 2017 10:02:30 -0000
The American boy, whose name was David, had always collected things. Coins, minerals, seashells, insects, and even house-brand bars of soap from hotels in his family’s travels. His collections helped him know who he was when so much of life did not; and the things he collected did not make him bleed, when so much of the world—the sharp, angular things of it—did. When you bought an old coin in a store, the coin didn’t bruise your skin or scratch your fingers. | Copyright 2017 by Bruce McAllister. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher East | An Inflexible Truth
Tue, 15 Aug 2017 10:01:30 -0000
As the commuter jet descended toward the ruins of Las Vegas, Roland Zhang craned his neck at the window, watching the skeleton towers grow nearer. Billowing clouds of dust clogged the air, and wind-blown dunes partially buried the filthy, abandoned buildings. He’d viewed footage from the far corners of the Earth, every remote hellhole imaginable, but this was the first time he’d ever seen the real deal in person. He tugged at his collar, sweating in spite of the air conditioning. | Copyright 2017 by Christopher East. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Susan Palwick | The Shining Hills
Tue, 08 Aug 2017 10:02:12 -0000
“Are you all right?” The voice, sharp and worried, shot out of the pocket of shadow to her left. Startled, she turned and found herself blinking at a cop, one of the ones who patrolled the park on foot. In the last light of dusk, she could just make out his half-frown, his badge, the hand resting on a nightstick. He reminded her of her father. She shivered and pulled her sweatshirt more tightly around her. She should have brought warmer clothing, but she wasn’t going to be here long. | Copyright 2017 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 01 Aug 2017 10:01:27 -0000
Namaste, helloji, please to come in. First time visit, so nice you came. Thank you for removing gravity shoes. Please be comfortable, no formality. It is like your home only. What for I can get you? Mineral tea? Carbon Filter coffee? Gel Cola? If it is not in our supply ration, we can send Senthil to fetch from company concessionary on main asteroid. Senthil is our homebot, see, he is understanding our language fully now. Beginning time he was little confuse. Now he is fully understand. | Copyright 2017 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Pooja Batra. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Debbie Urbanski | How to Find a Portal
Tue, 25 Jul 2017 10:02:24 -0000
I remember as children we were warned about the women who drove the unmarked white vans that circled around our neighborhood during those long hot summers, in particular creeping slowly down the boulevard which ran alongside the park, where if you positioned yourself at the right angle, I suppose in front of the swings, you might be able to see a flash of a child’s private yellow underwear as they pumped their legs upward. | Copyright 2017 by Debbie Urbanski. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
E. Catherine Tobler | Mix Tapes From Dead Boys
Tue, 18 Jul 2017 10:01:27 -0000
The derelict hangs in Neptune’s blue orbit, a chip of shadowy flint from a distance. Up close, it’s old and rusting, myriad old systems cobbled together, and Hadley swallows her nervous and exhilarated heart a dozen times as she latches the pod to its belly, makes a hard seal at the airlock, and geckos her team inside. The exterior of their spatulae suits—hands and knees and hips—permits them freedom of movement even in zero gee. Especially in zero gee. She glances back at their pod once. | Copyright 2017 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alvaro Zinos-Amaro | A Touch of Heart
Tue, 11 Jul 2017 10:02:19 -0000
Many years ago, in Shangdong Province, there lived an unfortunate farmer by the name of Dou Zhuo. Like most of us who walk this teeming Earth, he was trapped in the circumstances that fortune had provided him. He owned a patch of land that supported crops only after backbreaking effort, and then with results that betrayed its resentment of the demands he put on it. His cucumbers were bitter, his cowpeas difficult to boil, his leeks over-pungent, his pak choi stiff, and his edible amaranth hardly deserving of its name. | Copyright 2017 by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Grant | The Law of Conservation of Data
Tue, 04 Jul 2017 10:01:49 -0000
“Slots Palace,” says Suze. You all stare at her. Staring at her is worth doing. She’s moved into a new bod since coming here, and the change has been a big improvement. There wasn’t exactly anything wrong with the one she initially adopted for the pentagon’s pre-consensuality union, but she became dissatisfied with it and the dissatisfaction affected the rest of you---especially Kagura, who said it reminded him in all the wrong ways of a past consensual of his who turned out badly. | Copyright 2017 by John Grant. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Kressel | Love Engine Optimization
Tue, 27 Jun 2017 10:01:37 -0000
I rooted her system on the first day. It was the only way to be sure. Sure that she’d love me. Step by matching step, I walk her under the boughs of great elms in Prospect Park, while the slanting sun passes through the tangled mesh of leaves to dapple her smiling face. When her heart rate spikes, I know she’s excited. When it slows, she’s bored. | Copyright 2017 by Matthew Kressel. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Elizabeth Bear | The Heart’s Filthy Lesson
Tue, 20 Jun 2017 10:01:45 -0000
The sun burned through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and---despite the nagging desire to keep traveling---had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. | Copyright 2015 by Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in OLD VENUS, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scott Dalrymple | Marcel Proust, Incorporated
Tue, 13 Jun 2017 10:01:27 -0000
It’s 12:15, and Monica West is late for our lunch. We’re meeting at a trendy Greenwich Village bistro, one of the few to survive the depression that bankrupted the City, and so many of its residents, nearly two decades ago. There are few reminders of those trying times here now. The place is packed with the young power elite, the air thick with talk of mergers and screenplays and spring designer collections. I order a glass of Cabernet and wait. | Copyright 2017 by Scott Dalrymple. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shweta Narayan | World of the Three
Tue, 06 Jun 2017 10:02:32 -0000
Then the Bird of A Hundred and Eight Names gathered together her three new children, and she said, “You have passed our people’s tests and joined our ranks, and may leave if you wish. But leaving will take you among the Alabar, who collect salt in their bare hands and have no fear of rust, and call themselves merely people. Some among us speak slightingly of them, for their lives are short and easily ended, and they don’t protect one another as we do. You should be more wary." | Copyright 2017 by Shweta Narayan. Narrated by Twinkle Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Susan Jane Bigelow | The Heart’s Cartography
Tue, 23 May 2017 10:01:58 -0000
Jade was the sort of backwoods girl who had a map of the countryside tattooed on her heart, and she could feel it in her bones when the pieces of her world shifted. So when the new family moved into the house across the road that late summer, she felt ripples of wrongness radiating out from them and their too-bright clothes, their bizarrely old-fashioned wood-paneled station wagon, and their rolling words. | Copyright 2017 by Susan Jane Bigelow. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kendra Fortmeyer | Octopus vs. Bear
Tue, 16 May 2017 10:02:59 -0000
You woke up female this morning, so now you have a choice: do what other people want, or be a bitch. It is a thing you know without precisely knowing it. The knowledge is built into the muscle memory of this miraculous new body; it is draped across the bones like a weight. You shudder, stretching your delicate female limbs beneath the unfamiliar, sun-drenched sheets. Female for a day, you think. | Copyright 2017 by Kendra Fortmeyer. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bruce McAllister | This Is for You
Tue, 09 May 2017 10:01:51 -0000
There was one girl I really liked in school when I returned to Earth, but it took me three months to say hello. I wasn’t good with human beings. We’d just gotten back from Pitipek (a red-dwarf star system “just left” of Tau Ceti, as the joke goes). My father had been stationed there for two years with the TU’s Planetary Safety Agency, and living with the slow, enigmatic, bipedal Pitipeki---especially in one of their villages, and under those endless clouds---tends to make you lose your people skills. | Copyright 2017 by Bruce McAllister. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | James, In the Golden Sunlight of the Hereafter
Tue, 02 May 2017 10:02:09 -0000
It took James Washington forever, almost literally forever, to remember that his wife and children were as dead as he was. For a while, he barely even realized that he was dead himself. Heaven, for lack of a better word, is bliss, and as anybody who has known euphoria can tell you, bliss doesn’t always allow room for rational thought. | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:02:08 -0000
You’re just stepping into the crosswalk when the SUV screeches to a stop with its bumper six inches from your hip. It’s sleeting. It wasn’t sleeting when you left your apartment, so you’re wearing canvas sneakers with holes beside the little toes, where all of your sneakers always get holes, and you haven’t been able to feel your feet for six blocks. It’s been weeks since you got more than four hours of sleep. | Copyright 2017 by Jess Barber. Narrated by Bonnie MacBird. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lina Rather | Seven Permutations of My Daughter
Tue, 18 Apr 2017 10:01:52 -0000
I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own. Sun, of course, improves mental health. And a more developed pharmaceutical industry implies a more liberal outlook towards chemical intervention, a more specific range of treatment plans. It isn’t easy to write equations for these variables. | Copyright 2017 by Lina Rather. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Susan Palwick | Remote Presence
Tue, 11 Apr 2017 10:02:08 -0000
As usual, Win was late to work. Since he hadn’t had time to eat breakfast at home, he arrived at his office—tucked into the old wing of the hospital, now a maze of ancient files and obscure personnel—clutching a styrofoam vat of cafeteria coffee, a donut balanced atop it. He wore jeans and hiking boots and a wrinkled pinstripe dress shirt, from which his ID badge hung crookedly. “Winston Z, MDiv, LCSW, BCC,” it read. | Copyright 2017 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Violet Allen | Infinite Love Engine
Tue, 04 Apr 2017 10:01:39 -0000
Beeblax beats its wings against a superlumic slurry of time and space, and the universe turns to liquid starlight in its periphery; inside rides Aria Astra---Stellar Champion of the Star Supremacy, Wielder of the Sister Ray, Spacetrotting Coolgal, and Humanity’s Last Hope---nestled within a blob of translucent pink jellymeat, and it is totally cool and only a little disgusting. | Copyright 2017 by Violet Allen. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Greg Kurzawa | Soccer Fields and Frozen Lakes
Tue, 28 Mar 2017 10:02:21 -0000
Dear Sara: The official verdict that I am no longer classified as human arrived in a windowed envelope bearing the return address of the Bureau of Lineage Affairs. There is one envelope for me and one for you, although I haven’t opened yours. Except for the return address, these envelopes look like something from the bank, or perhaps an offer for home insurance, the kind we throw away. | Copyright 2017 by Greg Kurzawa. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Death Every Seventy-Two Minutes
Tue, 21 Mar 2017 10:01:52 -0000
Negelein is at his workstation working on the Lafferty file when the bone spear arcs over the sea of cubicles and strikes just above his right ear, penetrating his skull with a wet crunch. Oblivion is not quite instantaneous; his neurons all fire at the moment his brain goes soggy with blood, giving him, in his last instant, an overwhelming taste of peppermint. | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marta Randall | The Stone Lover
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 10:02:53 -0000
When word came that the king had died, Kyros began packing his tools. Agathon had been a fine patron, commissioning statues and friezes for his capital’s many temples and his own palace, but his wife had no reputation for piety or art. He was surprised, then, when one of her pages delivered a scroll requesting his services. | Copyright 2017 by Marta Randall. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Indrapramit Das | The Worldless
Tue, 07 Mar 2017 11:01:08 -0000
Every day NuTay watched the starship from their shack, selling satshine and sweet chai to wayfarers on their way to the stars. NuTay and their kin Satlyt baked an endless supply of clay cups using dirt from the vast plain of the port. NuTay and Satlyt, like all the hawkers in the shanties that surrounded the dirt road, were dunyshar, worldless—cursed to a single brown horizon. | Copyright 2017 by Indrapramit Das. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jack Skillingstead | The Last Garden
Tue, 28 Feb 2017 11:01:06 -0000
The Surrogate walked past Casey’s window. She watched its shadow slip across the shade, then she stood and zipped up her flight suit. This was the day. No matter what. The doorbell rang. It was polite, the Surrogate. It had manners. It rang the doorbell. It said please and thank you. It had saved Casey’s life, twice, and the first time she had been grateful. | Copyright 2017 by Jack Skillingstead. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ashok K. Banker | Six-Gun Vixen and the Dead Coon Trashgang
Tue, 21 Feb 2017 11:02:20 -0000
Dead Gulch lived up to its name. A two-bit hick town that was little more than a dirt track flanked by a couple dozen wood shacks. My beast growled low and mean as I started through and then reared up in yet another fool attempt to unseat me. I had to dig those rusty spurs in long and hard, twisting the boot heel like I was squishing a scorpion. My Halfie let out that familiar nerve-gnashing howl and settled down real quick. | Copyright 2017 by Ashok Banker. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | Later, Let’s Tear Up The Inner Sanctum
Tue, 14 Feb 2017 11:01:03 -0000
Still in the hospital. Radiation burns suck. Mom came to see me, though, which was nice. She probably had to argue with that dick of a boss she works for to let her off early. You’d think since I nearly died because superheroes were fighting above my school that I’d get some sort of benefits or medical insurance, but noooo, it’s all on me and Mom to foot the hospital bills because fights are not a novelty anymore. | Copyright 2017 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kelly Barnhill | Probably Still the Chosen One
Tue, 07 Feb 2017 11:02:03 -0000
“You must wait here,” the Highest of the High Priests told her. “We will return and bring you back to the Land of Nibiru once we have found the circlet to place upon your head.” The very mention of the circlet made the High Priest tremble with joy. Though the journey through the portal had been brief, the Land of Nibiru was many universes away from where Corrina now stood—in her own small kitchen, in her own small house. | Copyright 2017 by Kelly Barnhill. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Molly Tanzer | Nine-Tenths of the Law
Tue, 24 Jan 2017 11:01:12 -0000
Donna had picked up Jared’s favorite--Romano’s to go, he liked the rosemary bread and the penne rustica---and was just putting it in the oven to keep warm when they brought him in. _They_ being EMTs, after pounding urgently on the door, and _brought him in_ meaning he was on a stretcher. He had an IV in his arm and his eyes were bandaged with thick layers of gauze. | Copyright 2017 by Molly Tanzer. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | The West Topeka Triangle
Tue, 17 Jan 2017 11:02:06 -0000
As much as the other kids in my neighborhood like to tell me I’m a know-it-all, I realize just how short the list of things I actually know is one cold winter morning in 1987. I know my vocabulary words, everything that can be known about the Bermuda Triangle, and how well-liked a kid is by who they walk to school with. | Copyright 2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Whole Crew Hates Me
Tue, 10 Jan 2017 11:01:07 -0000
They hate me. They have told me this, again and again, starting from almost the first day of the mission, and continuing every day since then, carrying their hostility well outside the confines of the solar system and into the realm of bentspace. Their hatred does not quite extend to the realm of murder, at least not yet; but it does include telling me every day, in every possible way, that they find my presence intolerable. | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 03 Jan 2017 11:02:12 -0000
When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories of the sea. When I couldn’t sleep, when I was restless, when I burned with some childhood fever, she would sit by my side, and conjure something wonderful and strange, something half-magic, from the ocean for me. “Mara,” she would say, smoothing the hair from my forehead as she tucked the covers around me, “did you know that to summon a selkie, you must shed seven tears into the ocean?” | Copyright 2017 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Bonnie Burgess. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Charles Payseur | The Death of Paul Bunyan
Tue, 27 Dec 2016 11:02:17 -0000
Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north. Not for vengeance, like Paul would have wanted. Not to beat the hills red or divert a river over those responsible for killing the legend, but because it finally seems time to revisit old scars, old pains. “We were the fire in the night,” Johnny remembers Paul saying one night, so long ago. | Copyright 2016 by Charles Payseur. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Violet Allen | The Venus Effect
Tue, 20 Dec 2016 11:01:36 -0000
This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside. | Copyright 2016 by Violet Allen. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carlie St. George | Every Day Is the Full Moon
Tue, 13 Dec 2016 11:02:00 -0000
There are things you know and things you don’t know. You find it helpful to make lists. For example: THINGS YOU KNOW: — A Wrinkle in Time is bullshit. You don’t care if it’s Riley Chu’s favorite childhood book, because she also identifies with Holden Caulfield, and thinks spiders are adorable. Riley’s opinions are not to be trusted. | Copyright 2016 by Carlie St. George. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rich Larson | The Cyborg, the Tinman, the Merchant of Death
Tue, 06 Dec 2016 11:01:57 -0000
Sarge knew before I did, of course, but I still had to take him the transfer orders. I didn’t know how to feel on my way to the officers’ mess. I would miss my unit and I would miss my Sarge, but it was an honor, everyone said, to get shifted up to Incisive Maneuvers. To work with the Cyborg. The Tinman. The Merchant of Death. | Copyright 2016 by Rich Larson. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Helena Bell | I’ve Come to Marry the Princess
Tue, 22 Nov 2016 11:02:29 -0000
Before Jack can apologize to Nancy, she has to believe that dragons exist. Nancy’s mad at him because they were supposed to perform a skit at the talent show and he stood her up. They’ve been practicing it for two summers. It’s called “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess.” When Jack didn’t show, Nancy had to go on stage all by herself. He didn’t ditch her on purpose; his dragon egg was hatching and he needed to be there. | Copyright 2016 by Helena Bell. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 15 Nov 2016 11:01:17 -0000
As I shrug on my jacket, moving across the carpet as quietly as I can, my sister Xuemei pushes her blankets aside and rolls over onto her belly with a soft murmur. “Liin jie. Where are you going?”Fuck. I glance at her across our shared bedroom, her pale skin glimmering in the near darkness. My shoes are already on; no use lying about it now. “Go back to sleep, kiddo.” | Copyright 2016 by Alyssa Wong. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 08 Nov 2016 11:02:05 -0000
It took a while, but in the end we bargained it down to a shot right on my chest, with his mom’s gun. I didn’t know anything about guns, but the thing he showed me looked safe enough, a little pistol that was smaller than the palm it rested on. Then we ran into another problem: Nick wanted to bring his buddies, or at least the ones he trusted. | Copyright 2016 by J.B. Park. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chris Kluwe | Dinosaur Killers
Tue, 01 Nov 2016 10:01:15 -0000
Another rock fell today. Jaurez, on 54b. Pretty sure that’s who it was. Maybe. Didn’t talk much during the daily vidcalls, brown eyes peering out from beneath his shaggy black hair, floating every which way in zee-g. Supposed to keep it short, but company regs don’t apply. Not anymore. His kids were on Croia Hab. Partner too. Three of thousands, now just clouds of matter joining all the other debris. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 25 Oct 2016 10:01:22 -0000
Three families ahead of them in line. Many more behind, stretching along the beach; it had taken most of the day to get this far, and Eris’s sun was now setting, casting red-gold rays across the sand. Gwen resisted the urge to remind Jon to stand up straight. Their hosts--potential hosts--couldn’t stand up at all, and there was no reason cetaceans would even notice a human’s posture, much less care. | Copyright 2016 by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Narrated by Adenrele Ojo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | The Key to St. Medusa’s
Tue, 18 Oct 2016 10:02:33 -0000
My parents knew I was a witch before I was born. The signs were there, they told me. They were unmistakable. Well. Not all of the signs, or they never would have kept me as long as they did. But enough: My mother’s hair, previously sedate and well-mannered, turned curly and wild during her pregnancy, sometimes even grabbing forks from other people’s hands at meals. | Copyright 2016 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Stephen S. Power | Fade To Red: Three Interviews About Sebold’s Mars Trilogy
Tue, 11 Oct 2016 10:01:09 -0000
I’ll be the first to admit that my homemade rover didn’t do the original justice and my color treatment was a better reflection of my Hollywood thinking than of the Martian landscape. What appealed to JPL was how I captured the tension of driving the rover across Gale, where every pebble can put years of training to the test. They were also impressed that I left my Curiosity outside Hanksville, Utah, not far from the Mars Desert Research Station, then controlled it and its cameras from a van several miles away. And they were amazed that my route for approaching the Mars Light almost perfectly mirrored their own. | Copyright 2016 by Stephen S. Power. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki; Jim Freund; Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | The Cavern of the Screaming Eye
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 10:02:19 -0000
“Is that the collapsible, carbon fiber ten-foot pole from TrunchCo?” I slammed my locker door and spun the combo lock, but it was too late; the fanboy already seen my gear. I didn’t know what his interest was, but I didn’t want to encourage him. I said nothing. He continued: “I’ve got the one from a couple of years ago that folds up. It sucks." Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An Owomoyela | Unauthorized Access
Tue, 27 Sep 2016 10:01:17 -0000
Prison 17 had been built long enough ago that it got next to no natural light—before all the studies that said that light was good for prison behavior and morale. And of course the rest of its district had been remodded in the past ten years, so the view from outside was a phalanx of solar panels over heat-reflecting paint, making a headache-inducing pattern of black and white. Prisons and hydroponics. Narrated by Jayme Grant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 20 Sep 2016 10:02:08 -0000
Everything we crocodiles taste in the water has meaning. It tells us about the people who live here: who does the washing, who harvests the water crops, what they are growing in their fields and belukar. We even know littler details: who is pregnant, who is dying, what couple has been frolicking in the river, heedless of the risks we pose to them. | Copyright 2016 by Jaymee Goh. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sean Williams | The Lives of Riley
Tue, 13 Sep 2016 10:01:09 -0000
The sirens are growing louder. Riley doesn’t know how the peacekeepers found out---he was so careful, so sure he’d covered every trace of his existence, all of it---but that’s less important now than getting away. He cannot afford to make any more mistakes. The night seems dark and empty as he leaves the warehouse through the back door. | Copyright 2016 by Sean Williams. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dahvana Headley | See The Unseeable, Know The Unknowable
Tue, 06 Sep 2016 10:02:10 -0000
There are woods, and the woods are dark, though there are lights hung from the trees. Many of the lights no longer light up. Around the edge of the clearing, someone has strung a long chain of origami animals on barbed wire, some gilded paper and some newsprint, some pages torn out of books, some photographs, each animal snagged on its own spike. The animals have been rained on, and more than once. | Copyright 2016 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tristina Wright | The Siren Son
Tue, 23 Aug 2016 10:02:35 -0000
The day the dragons came, Neal kissed a boy. This span of months would later be remembered as the Awakening and condensed to precisely three pages in a tenth-cycle history text. Those three pages would lie nestled between twelve pages on the War of the Sea (when the merfolk rose up and attacked the trade ships in retaliation for an attack against their king) and twenty-four pages on the Reconstruction Age. | Copyright 2016 by Tristina Wright. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | Taste the Singularity at the Food Truck Circus
Tue, 16 Aug 2016 10:01:21 -0000
“There’s a stall in the new market where they cook just about anything on a stick.” These were the words, spoken by coworkers returning to the office from an early lunch, that drew me from my cubicle and onto the streets one late April afternoon. Everyone has their weaknesses, and mine has always been food. Anything? I thought. We’ll see about that. | Copyright 2016 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Assassin’s Secret
Tue, 09 Aug 2016 10:02:41 -0000
The world’s greatest assassin lives on a private island. That’s so much a given that you must have known it already. You’ve seen all those movies about master thieves, brilliant scammers, unflappable secret agents, dangerous people who live on their own tropical islands and must be lured into one last job. He was the source of the cliché. | Copyright 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mercurio D. Rivera | Those Brighter Stars
Tue, 02 Aug 2016 10:01:29 -0000
The call came through as I paced outside the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, puffing on an e-cig and watching my breath turn to vapor in the chill. “Hello?” The bald, skeletal image of a stranger stared back at me on my phone. “Ava,” he whispered. “Oh, Ava.” It took me a few seconds to regain my composure. “Dad?” I said. | Copyright 2016 by Mercurio D. Rivera. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 26 Jul 2016 10:01:10 -0000
Dear Scully, I should’ve been suspicious of the girl in the lab coat offering me psychic ice cream. But with you and your ponytail, the psychic ice cream just seemed so harmless. After it gave me a brain freeze that’d make the Sierra Nevada Mountains jealous, imagine my surprise when I started hearing people’s thoughts—thank science it’s only temporary! Good call on that, by the way. | Copyright 2016 by Jilly Dreadful. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kenneth Schneyer | Some Pebbles in the Palm
Tue, 19 Jul 2016 10:02:34 -0000
Once upon a time, there was a man who was born, who lived, and who died. We could leave the whole story at that, except that it would be misleading to write the sentence only once. He was born, he lived, and he died, was born, lived, died, bornliveddied. The first few words of a story are a promise. We will have this kind of experience, not that one. Here is a genre, here is a setting, here is a conflict, here is a character. We don’t know what is coming next, but we do know what is coming next. | Copyright 2016 by Kenneth Schneyer. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ted Kosmatka | The One Who Isn’t
Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:01:42 -0000
It starts with light. Then heat. A slow bleed through of memory. Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum---and then it happens. Change of state. And what comes out the other side is something new. The woman held up the card. “What color do you see?” | Copyright 2016 by Ted Kosmatka. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz | Magnifica Angelica Superable
Tue, 05 Jul 2016 10:02:44 -0000
A woman from the street came in laughing from the cold. It was funny to see her with her black hair blowing all about her face. Her face was red. Red from the cold, red from the laughing, red from the rage that fueled that laughter. There are funnier things than a woman like that, but, well, she was the only one we got to look at that afternoon. Her name was some kind of long. It was Magnifica Angelica something at the end. | Copyright 2016 by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 28 Jun 2016 10:03:51 -0000
Tonight he is intensely aware of the city: its ancient stones, the flat-roofed brick houses, threads of clotheslines, wet, bright colors waving like pennants, neem tree-lined roads choked with traffic. There’s a bus going over the bridge under which he has chosen to sleep. The night smells of jasmine, and stale urine, and the dust of the cricket field on the other side of the road. A man is lighting a bidi near him: face lean, half in shadow, and he thinks he sees himself. | 2004 by Vandana Singh. Originally published in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, edited by Uppinder Mehan and Nalo Hopkinson. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Steven Barnes | Fifty Shades of Grays
Tue, 28 Jun 2016 10:01:50 -0000
Terrorist. That’s what they call me, but I am something worse: both successful traitor and failed saboteur. I want to die, for all of this to be over. For my last request, I asked to have paper and pen to write my last will and testament. They won’t let me have it, forcing me to use the mindsynch. Damned Traveler tech. Maybe they’re scared I’ll ram the pen up my nose, scribble on my brain, and cheat the hangman. | Copyright 2016 by Steven Barnes. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Terence Taylor | Wilson’s Singularity
Tue, 21 Jun 2016 10:03:31 -0000
Wilson woke in bed, back to back with his husband, as warm morning sunlight crept around the room and settled on his face like a lazy cat. He tried to stay asleep, tried to block it out by nestling deeper under the covers, but it was no use. Now that he was awake, Unity would pop up the time and temperature in midair before him, and offer news updates and messages. The news would be filled with his name and today’s ceremony, and he’d heard enough about that for the last week. | Copyright 2016 by Terence Taylor. Narrated by Miebaka Yohannes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sofia Samatar | The Red Thread
Tue, 21 Jun 2016 10:01:00 -0000
Dear Fox, Hey. It’s Sahra. I’m tagging you from center M691, Black Hawk, South Dakota. It’s night and the lights are on in the center. It’s run by an old white guy with a hanging lip—he’s talking to my mom at the counter. Mom’s okay. We’ve barely mentioned you since we left the old group in the valley, just a few weeks after you disappeared. She said your name once, when I found one of your old slates covered with equations. “Well,” she said. “That was Fox.” | Copyright 2016 by Sofia Samatar. Narrated by Lisa Renee Pitts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:03:19 -0000
Skaters in black practice outfits swerved around Shelly. Her music was playing over the PA system. She had right of way. A scattering of figure skating fans sat in the rink’s hard, blue, plastic seats. Even to a practice session, some had brought their flags. Her mom sat near the boards and waved her US flag as though if only it had shook more fiercely last night, Shelly would have landed her triple Lutz-triple toe jump combination in the short program. | Copyright 2014 by John Chu. Originally published in Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Letty Valladares. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kevin Jared Hosein | Hiranyagarbha
Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:02:32 -0000
Remember when I first see it while boating through the mangroves in Caroni Swamp. Was early morning—you coulda still see the flicker of a candlefly here and there. I was following a trail of dead tilapia floating belly-up in the water. Wasn’t the first time I see something like that—but not to this extent. Their lifeless bodies was washing up on the silt. Black halos of corbeaux circling overhead, like angels of death. | Copyright 2016 by Kevin Jared Hosein. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 07 Jun 2016 10:03:50 -0000
Three days ago, Paul had thrown Mary onto the kitchen floor and kicked her everywhere except her face. For the first two days, the only time she left her bed was to go to the bathroom, drops of clotted blood from her insides deposited like coins in the toilet bowl. On the third day, high on oxycodone, Mary dreamed about the lucha libre. She hadn’t thought about wrestling since she’d left Mexico, but the hallucination was as bright and sharp as grief. | Copyright 2016 by Nick T. Chan. Narrated by Jeannette Godoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 07 Jun 2016 10:01:48 -0000
I brought him home from the VA shelter and sat him in front of the window because the doctors said he liked that. The shelter had set him in safe mode for transport until I could voice activate him again, and recalibrate, but safe mode still allowed for base functions like walking, observation, and primary speech. He seemed to like the window because he blinked once. Their kind didn’t blink ordinarily, and they never wept, so I always wondered where the sadness went. | Copyright 2016 by Karin Lowachee. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Wole Talabi | Wednesday’s Story
Tue, 24 May 2016 10:02:40 -0000
My story has a strange shape to it. It has a beginning and middle and, of course, I need not tell you that it has an end because it is the nature of all things to end, especially stories. But this story . . . well, it bunches up in places and twists upon itself in ways that no good story should. The sharpness of its arcs flare and wane in unexpected places because it is a story made of other stories. | Copyright 2016 by Wole Talabi. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 May 2016 10:01:40 -0000
Els wondered again if she should start recording her final words. If she could start recording her final words. There was cold, and then there was cold, and the Tolstar was cold. Dun had shut off every heating system that wasn’t absolutely needed to keep systems running outside of the main control room, and even that he left cold enough to let ice crystals form. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seanan McGuire | The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch
Tue, 10 May 2016 10:02:05 -0000
Mist flowed through the Tulgey Wood like treacle, slow and thick and unyielding. Squeaks and muffled chitters came from the underbrush as rabbits, foxes, and adolescent toves that hadn’t sensed the weather changing were caught and drowned in the gray-white mire. It would clear by noon, burnt off by the sun, and then the scavengers would come, making a feast of the small mist-struck creatures. | Copyright 2016 by Seanan McGuire. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An Owomoyela | Three Points Masculine
Tue, 03 May 2016 10:01:51 -0000
I was serving in Baxon just north of Hescher, guard-dogging a queue of first responders heading into the riot zones, and John caught my eye. Her beard caught my eye. Some troublemaker flaunting the rules, I thought, or a guy sneaking in under cover of audacity, thinking the Womens Volunteer Corps was a good place to get laid. If that was the case, he was looking to get roughed up, and it was my job to oblige. | Copyright 2016 by An Owomoyela. Narrated by Andrea Thompson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Bailey | The Birth Will Take Place on a Mutually Acceptable Research Vessel
Tue, 26 Apr 2016 10:01:03 -0000
When they inform you the birth will take place on a mutually acceptable research vessel, you nod and smile as if it was your choice all along. Because smiling and nodding is what you’ve been doing since the beginning. Because this is bigger than you. Because at least this way it feels like you’re being honored and feted instead of herded and controlled. Mr. Kagawa, courteous and diplomatic by profession, does his best to make it all seem like a request. | Copyright 2016 by Matthew Bailey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rudy Rucker | The Knobby Giraffe
Tue, 19 Apr 2016 10:02:28 -0000
My name’s Irit Ziv. I have a low-rent apartment in the East Village that I used to share with my girlfriend, Shirley Chen. It’s April now, and Shirley died four months ago. Ever since then, I’ve been visiting visit Ma and Pa’s flat in Brooklyn Heights a lot. An awesome spot, with a full view of lower Manhattan. The trees by the river are turning green. I’m a grad student at NYU, trying to finish a PhD thesis in the physics department. Physics was probably a bad choice for me, but it’s too late to change. | Copyright 2016 by Rudy Rucker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 12 Apr 2016 10:01:59 -0000
Living in Commerce City, odds are you’re going to get caught up in something someday---pinned down in the crossfire of some epic battle between heroes who can fly and villains with ray guns, held captive in a hostage crisis involving an entire football stadium, or even trapped by a simple jewelry heist or bus hijacking. When my turn came, I got stuck in a bank robbery. | Copyright 2016 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 05 Apr 2016 10:02:25 -0000
Dragon brides are notoriously difficult women. We have lived with dragons, after all, those strange and terrible animals with their curiously human eyes, and some of us come back down from the broken mountains with their hisses still in our ears. I was taken by the green dragon of Mahr when I was fifteen, and it was a full year before my lord brought me back down. Forty years would pass before I would come to those steep paths again. | Copyright 2016 by Nghi Vo. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marie Vibbert | Michael Doesn’t Hate His Mother
Tue, 22 Mar 2016 10:02:23 -0000
At rest, coiled up, Michael’s mother is about the size of a riding mower. Michael’s living room is not much bigger than her. With a shudder, she rises. Her little piston feet march, pulling her out of her coil. Lifters above the feet kick out like dancers in a line. She snakes into the kitchen. Julie shrieks in horrified delight. Their mother opens the refrigerator. Julie and Michael watch as she prepares them lunch. She nudges them into chairs at the table. They haven’t eaten at the table in a long time. Maybe she’s getting better. | Copyright 2016 by Marie Vibbert. Narrated by Larry Nemecek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 15 Mar 2016 10:01:40 -0000
Tain held a pistol toward me. The black gel of the handle pulsed, waiting to be gripped. “Better take this,” she said. I shook my head. “I never use them.” We sat in an unmarked police cruiser, the steering wheel packed away in the dashboard. Tain’s face was a pale shimmer in the cool blue light of the car’s entertainment system. “Your file says you are weapons trained.” “Yeah,” I said, “I got one of those cannons at home, locked in my kitchen drawer.” | Copyright 2016 by Craig DeLancey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 08 Mar 2016 11:02:42 -0000
“There’s a dark side to sloths,” she said, using her straw to plumb the ice at the bottom of her glass, flicking red-blonde hair out of blue-blue eyes. “Sometimes they go to grab a branch, but accidentally grab their own arm, and then fall to their deaths.” “Because of the mossy fur?” I guessed, also guessing at the best way to put my hand onto hers on the bubbled-glass patio table. I could see her suntanned legs underneath and it put sparks under my skin. | Copyright 2016 by Rich Larson. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 01 Mar 2016 11:01:52 -0000
You take a shortcut through the hydroponics bay on your way to work, and notice that the tomato plants are covered in tiny crawling insects that look like miniature beetles. One of the insects skitters up your leg, so you reach down and brush it off. It bites your hand. The area around the bite turns purple and swollen. You run down a long metal hallway to the Medical Clinic, grateful for the artificially generated gravity that defies the laws of physics and yet is surprisingly common in fictional space stations. | Copyright 2016 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 23 Feb 2016 11:02:38 -0000
On the third day of the sightseeing trip, among walrus-laden icebergs, they run into slurry. At the fore, Skipper sticks a boat hook into the water. “There are plenty of critters here,” he says. “It’s like playing grab bag. You’ll always catch something on the hook.” He thrusts the boat hook up and down a couple of times, stirs it in the slush, and pulls it out again. A transparent little rag is impaled on the tip. | Copyright 2016 by Karin Tidbeck. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Pinsker | Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea
Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:01:44 -0000
The rock star washed ashore at high tide. Earlier in the day, Bay had seen something bobbing far out in the water. Remnant of a rowboat, perhaps, or something better. She waited until the tide ebbed, checked her traps and tidal pools among the rocks before walking toward the inlet where debris usually beached. All kinds of things washed up if Bay waited long enough. | Copyright 2016 by Sarah Pinsker. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | Not by Wardrobe, Tornado, or Looking Glass
Tue, 09 Feb 2016 11:02:35 -0000
The scent of fresh lilacs and the boom of a cannon shot muffled by distance prefaced the arrival of the rabbit hole. Louisa jerked upright in her seat, and her book fell from her lap to slap against the cold pavement of the station floor. Dropping a book would normally cause her to cringe, but instead she allowed herself a spark of excitement as a metal maintenance door creaked open on rusty hinges. Golden light spilled out onto dazed commuters. Was this it? Was this finally it? | Copyright 2016 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rachael K. Jones | Charlotte Incorporated
Tue, 02 Feb 2016 11:01:43 -0000
At night she pores over the corpus catalogues online: Incorporated Incorporated, Modern Anatomy, and Shoulders, Knees, & Toes. She weighs the merits of femur length and belly fat, redundant kidneys, attached earlobes, and pronated feet. Most people buy pre-configured corpi with symmetrical faces and standard organ kits, but she wants a custom build. Something completely unique. | 2016 by Rachael K. Jones. Narrated by Karyn O'Bryant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Keith Brooke | Beyond the Heliopause
Tue, 26 Jan 2016 11:01:42 -0000
As soon as the recorded message pinged in her peripheral vision, she accepted and listened to the call on her cochlear implant. “Suzanne, I need to see you. It’s urgent. I . . . well, I’ll tell you when I see you. All my love.” | Copyright 2016 by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown. Narrated by Bonnie MacBird. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | Maiden, Hunter, Beast
Tue, 19 Jan 2016 11:02:39 -0000
She had never intended to be a nineteen-year-old virgin. She wasn’t opposed to the idea of sex, didn’t think the simple act of having sex with someone had to be a big deal, and sure, she went to Mass and knew what the priests taught, but she figured God was actually a lot less concerned about that sort of thing than they were. She just hadn’t ever wanted to badly enough. | Copyright 2016 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 12 Jan 2016 11:01:43 -0000
“Admit it, the only option left for that body is getting rid of it.” Cousin Aloysius says this as he sprawls uninvited along the length of my bed, and I hate him for that. | Copyright 2016 by JY Yang. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Will McIntosh | The Savannah Liars Tour
Tue, 05 Jan 2016 11:02:40 -0000
My essence, my soul, whatever you wanted to call it, burst into that place beyond places. After dozens of trips, the ecstasy of the reverse-explosion was as intense as the first time. | Copyright 2016 by Will McIntosh. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 22 Dec 2015 11:02:31 -0000
Beatrice’s heart skipped and skipped again, the tiny pistons clattering in their brassbound prison. Her ribs ached, and there were narrow darts of pain throughout her chest. She was dying. | Copyright 2015 by Jay Lake. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aidan Doyle | Beneath the Silent Stars
Tue, 15 Dec 2015 11:01:31 -0000
Jean-Paul crawled out of storage and stretched his arms and legs. He avoided going into storage whenever he could help it, but the ship had insisted this time. “Hello, Jean-Paul,” Unattributed Source said. “I woke you as soon as we arrived within visual range of Amala.” | Copyright 2014 by Aidan Doyle. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 08 Dec 2015 11:02:20 -0000
Begin at the beginning: His many hats. Felt derbies in charcoal and camel and black. Sporting caps and straw boaters. Gibuses covered in corded silk for nights at the theatre. Domed bowlers with dashingly narrow brims. The ratty purple silk top hat, banded with russet brocade, that he keeps by his bedside. | Copyright 2015 by Rachel Swirsky. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merc Fenn Wolfmoor | Tomorrow When We See the Sun
Tue, 01 Dec 2015 11:01:32 -0000
Wolflord (title): nomadic, nameless survivors of destroyed warships; those who did not accept ritual immolation during the Decommission. No allegiance to the Principality; outlaws. The antiquated title is self-taken from the first deserter, whose name and memory were erased upon execution; precise origin unknown. | Copyright 2015 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kameron Hurley | The Light Brigade
Tue, 24 Nov 2015 11:01:54 -0000
The war has turned us into light. Transforming us into light is the fastest way to travel from one front to another, and there are many fronts, now. I always wanted to be a hero. I always wanted to be on the side of light. It’s funny how things work out. | Copyright 2015 by Kameron Hurley. Originally published on Patreon.com/KameronHurley. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Nov 2015 11:02:57 -0000
Sometimes I set stories in San Francisco because I have friends who live there. No family yet, sadly. I like to imagine them reading what I write and maybe smiling. I’m setting this story in Tokyo-Tokyo for the same exact reason. Greg, for one, lives in Tokyo-Tokyo. | Copyright 2014 by Toh EnJoe (translated by David Boyd). Originally published in GRANTA. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Helena Bell | When We Were Giants
Tue, 10 Nov 2015 11:02:56 -0000
There was a game we played at my primary school called “Giant in the forest.” Every day, even if it rained, the fourth and fifth grade teachers took us to this small playground with a jungle gym, swings, and a big grassy space where we could run if we wanted to. | Copyright 2015 by Helena Bell. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Naomi Kanakia | Here is My Thinking on a Situation That Affects Us All
Tue, 03 Nov 2015 11:01:45 -0000
I am a spaceship. My insides are oozy, and my outsides are metal. If you were to cut me open with a laser-gun, then it would not precisely hurt, but it certainly wouldn’t be a nice thing to do. | Copyright 2015 by Rahul Kanakia. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nike Sulway | The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club
Tue, 27 Oct 2015 10:03:36 -0000
Ten years ago, Clara had attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: "We are living in a science fictional world." During the workshop, Karen Joy also kept saying, "I am going to talk about endings, but not yet." But Karen Joy never did get around to talking about endings, and Clara left the workshop still feeling as if she was suspended within it, waiting for the second shoe to drop. | Copyright 2015 by Nike Sulway. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 20 Oct 2015 10:01:53 -0000
It had all gone very well, Brooks told himself. Very well indeed. He hurried along the side corridor, his black dress shoes clicking hollowly on the old tiles. This was one of the oldest and most rundown of the Smithsonian’s buildings; too bad they didn’t have the money to knock it down. Funding. Everything was a matter of funding. He pushed open the door of the barnlike workroom and called out, “John? How did you like the ceremony?” | Copyright 1979 by Gregory Benford. Originally published in UNIVERSE 9, edited by Terry Carr. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kevin Brockmeier | The Invention of Separate People
Tue, 13 Oct 2015 10:03:11 -0000
Once, not so long ago but before our time, all people were the same person. That’s not to say that they weren’t immersed in their own lives; they were, of course, as people always have been—millions of fish in their millions of bowls. It’s just that they were equally immersed in everyone else’s. | Copyright 2014 by Kevin Brockmeier. Originally published in UNSTUCK 3. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dahvana Headley | Solder and Seam
Tue, 06 Oct 2015 10:01:42 -0000
There was a man who built a whale out of wood. He built it in the middle of a field out in the dry country, where nobody bothered him but birds and a couple of farm cats. The whale was white, and it took two years to build. He made it out of planks from old barns, which he stole in the night. He didn’t steal them from anyone who’d miss them. Most people were gone. There were a lot of things falling down. | 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley. | Art © 2015 by Reiko Murakami. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Heather Lindsley | Werewolf Loves Mermaid
Tue, 22 Sep 2015 10:03:29 -0000
How They Met: They met at a wedding. He was in the wedding party. She was serving canapés at the reception. On some level, reclining in a fountain while holding a tray of canapés is more efficient than circulating through a crowd with them. On most levels, it isn’t. “Canapé?” the mermaid asked the werewolf when he wandered near the fountain. “Isn’t this just garnish?” said the werewolf, picking up a wilted stem of parsley. | Copyright 2015 by Heather Lindsley. Narrated by Harlan Ellison®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Arkenberg | All in a Hot and Copper Sky
Tue, 15 Sep 2015 10:01:28 -0000
I have written a thousand letters to her in my head. Part of me is always writing to her, while I sit in front of the dusty yellow windows in the coffee shops on Market Street, or roll sticky cinnamon dough on my cold granite counter, or stand in the smooth gray sand at the very edge of the sea. I never wrote to her while she was alive, not even at the end, when letters might have comforted us both. | Copyright 2015 by Megan Arkenberg. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sean McMullen | The Ninth Seduction
Tue, 08 Sep 2015 10:03:26 -0000
The sun had descended behind Lakefell as seven times seven goblin artisans gathered before the throne of Castellerine Lynder in the Serpentine Garden, their choicest and most enchanting creations for the year past held high. Chancellor Arrender walked slowly along the lines of scarlet cushions that glowed softly around the delights placed upon them, inspecting what the castellerine would soon consider. | Copyright 2015 by Sean McMullen. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caroline M. Yoachim | Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World
Tue, 01 Sep 2015 10:01:25 -0000
Mei dreamed of a new Earth. She took her telescope onto the balcony of her North Philadelphia apartment and pointed it east, at the sky above the Trenton Strait, hoping for a clear view of Mars. Tonight the light pollution from Jersey Island wasn’t as bad as usual, and she was able to make out the ice caps and dark shadow of Syrtis Major. | Copyright 2015 by Caroline M. Yoachim. Narrated by Karyn O'Bryant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sam J. Miller | Ghosts of Home
Tue, 25 Aug 2015 10:03:46 -0000
The bank didn’t pay for the oranges. They should have — offerings were clearly listed as a reimbursable expense — but the turnaround time and degree of nudging needed when Agnes submitted receipts made the whole process prohibitive. If she bugged Trask too much around the wrong things she might lose the job, and with it the gas card, which was worth a lot more money than the oranges. | Copyright 2015 by Sam J. Miller. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Pinsker | And We Were Left Darkling
Tue, 18 Aug 2015 10:01:24 -0000
I don’t remember her birth. My dream baby, the baby I have in my dreams, the one who crashed into my head one night and took roost. She is a day old, a week old, a year old, eight years old, three weeks old, a day old. She has fine blond hair, except when she has tight black curls. Once she had cornrows that lengthened every time I looked away. “Her hair grows faster than I can cut it,” I said to my dream family. | Copyright 2015 by Sarah Pinsker. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Genevieve Valentine | Given the Advantage of the Blade
Tue, 11 Aug 2015 10:03:20 -0000
Put them all in a room together, and give them each a knife. They’ll hardly notice the change of circumstances. Their tales are nothing but this struggle, and they’re well enough used to being run through. You begin. At first it would be chaos. Fragile beauty and a kind heart does you no good here. (Never does; that’s what made it fairy stories, that so many people would help them just for kindness.) | Copyright 2015 by Genevieve Valentine. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chen Qiufan | The Smog Society
Tue, 04 Aug 2015 10:01:57 -0000
Lao Sun lived on the seventeenth floor facing the open street, nothing between him and the sky. If he woke in the morning to darkness, it was the smog’s doing for sure. Through the murky air outside the window, he had to squint to see the tall buildings silhouetted against the yellow-gray background like a sandy-colored relief print. The cars on the road all had their highbeams on and their horns blaring, crammed one against the other at the intersection into one big mess. | Copyright 2015 by Chen Qiufan. Translated by Ken Liu and Carmen Yiling Yan. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Taiyo Fujii | Violation of the TrueNet Security Act
Tue, 28 Jul 2015 10:01:40 -0000
The bell for the last task of the night started chiming before I got to my station. I had the office to myself, and a mug of espresso. It was time to start tracking zombies. I took the mug of espresso from the beverage table, and zigzagged through the darkened cube farm toward the one strip of floor still lit for third shift staff, only me. Zombies are orphan Internet services. They wander aimlessly, trying to execute some programmed task. | English translation copyright 2015 VIZ Media. Translated by Jim Hubbert. Japanese version copyright 2013 by Taiyo Fujii. Originally published in SF MAGAZINE in Japan. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrea Hairston | Saltwater Railroad (Part 2)
Tue, 21 Jul 2015 10:03:57 -0000
For the next few weeks Delia wrestled with hope. She walked the Island talking with Rainbow, who always lashed the tube to her back and stuffed cornbread in one pocket and a peach in another. Delia didn’t show Rainbow the hidden valley, just the inhospitable perimeter. An occasional ship passed in the distance. Nothing got close to the Island. | Copyright 2015 by Andrea Hairston. Narrated by Lisa Renee Pitts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrea Hairston | Saltwater Railroad (Part 1)
Tue, 14 Jul 2015 10:03:56 -0000
Miz Delia’s Island was protected by deadly reefs on the Georgia/Florida side and nine hundred feet of jagged cliffs on the other. Indians called it Thunder Rock, a place where the wind and sea played rough and tumble. Spaniards named it Ghost Reef because of whirlpools, deadly fog, and wailing drowned folk who wouldn’t rest. English sailors claimed that Delia was a vengeful slave haint, howling demon talk and luring men to a bloody death. | Copyright 2015 by Andrea Hairston. Narrated by Lisa Renee Pitts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 07 Jul 2015 10:01:35 -0000
George was about to declare his undying love for Annabell when the front of the train station fell over. Ross, the actor playing George, yelped and dashed away, his army cap flying off. Arlene — Annabell — merely put her hands on her hips and glared at the offending backdrop, a piece of dressed-up plywood that looked very much like the front of a train station, until it collapsed and revealed the braces behind it. | Copyright 2015 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 23 Jun 2015 10:03:04 -0000
Hinahon didn’t belong in that hotel. On that Monday, she should have been at her apartment on East Bradford Street preparing to meet Natalie at a cozy restaurant downtown. It was their two year anniversary, and she was expected in a few hours. | Copyright 2014 by AMJ Hudson. Originally published in ARDEN, VOLUME XVI. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 23 Jun 2015 10:01:01 -0000
Madeleine remembers being a different person. It strikes her when she’s driving, threading her way through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future. | Copyright 2015 by Amal El-Mohtar. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chaz Brenchley | The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Red Coal
Tue, 16 Jun 2015 10:03:40 -0000
“Paris? Paris is ruined for me, alas. It has become a haven for Americans — or should I say a heaven? When good Americans die, perhaps they really do go to Paris. That would explain the flood.” “What about the others, Mr. Holland? The ones who aren’t good?” “Ah. Have you not heard? I thought that was common knowledge. When bad Americans die, they go to America." | Copyright 2015 Chaz Brenchley. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
K.M. Szpara | Nothing is Pixels Here
Tue, 16 Jun 2015 10:01:06 -0000
“System Error ahead. Please turn around,” the Concierge’s voice speaks over the metallic growl of my dirt bike. I rev the throttle and lean into the warm wind. My seat bounces as mud ricochets up around me. Ahead, knobby limbs and crisp leaves dissolve into broken pixels. The SimGrid mutes as the soft voice fills the space between my ears, again. “System Error ahead. Please turn around.” | Copyright 2015 by K.M. Szpara. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 09 Jun 2015 10:03:43 -0000
“What do you think it would feel like to die in a black hole?” Joey asked, then immediately added, “Not being morbid.” Kant laughed. He had a loud belly laugh that made the bare bedroom feel full and bright. The mattress they were lying on had no bed frame, and, at the moment, no sheets. The only set not being used as makeshift curtains were drying in the basement. | Copyright 2012 by RJ Edwards. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 09 Jun 2015 10:02:44 -0000
Gramophone music crackles out over the quad. “Read that last part again, Jay,” Professor Norris says. I raise my voice. “‘They’ has been used as a singular pronoun since Chaucer: whoso fyndeth hym —” A champagne cork pops, the drinkers cheer. I can’t compete. “Oh, for goodness’ sake.” “You don’t approve?” asks the Prof. “This college isn’t a theme park.” | Copyright 2015 by E. Saxey. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Chu | 勢孤取和 (Influence Isolated, Make Peace)
Tue, 02 Jun 2015 10:01:10 -0000
Jake acquired his target as soon as he stepped into the cafeteria. For the good of the war, he had passed without a trace through forests and mountains to reconnoiter and assassinate. For the good of the subsequent peace, Jake now needed to have lunch with a random stranger and emulate a human being. | Copyright 2015 by John Chu. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kate M. Galey | Emergency Repair
Tue, 02 Jun 2015 10:00:54 -0000
I work the tip of a flathead screwdriver into the barely visible notch along the sternum and pry up the aluminum polymer casing covering the android’s chest. My fingers burn when they make contact with the exposed skeletal components — no time to let it cool down. If I were back in the R&D lab at Hess Industrial, I’d spray the unit with a liquid nitrogen compound to get it down to temperature quickly and use therma flec gloves to handle the carbon-nanotube motors. | Copyright 2015 by Kate M. Galey. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | The Blood of a Dragon
Tue, 26 May 2015 10:03:21 -0000
The moment Erm Kaslo’s flesh touched the substance of the entity, he understood everything — but only for that moment. Then it turned out that everything was far, far too much for a human brain to take in all at once. He felt as if his skull was straining not to burst its seams, and as if the mind it housed was a thimble into which someone had crammed a barrel’s worth of knowledge. Just sorting all the information into gross categories would be the work of several lifetimes; subdividing it into manageable portions would take millennia. | Copyright 2015 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seanan McGuire | The Myth of Rain
Tue, 19 May 2015 10:01:20 -0000
Female spotted owls have a call that doesn’t sound like it should come from a bird of prey. It’s high-pitched and unrealistic, like a squeaky toy that’s being squeezed just a little bit too hard. Lots of people who hear them in the woods don’t even realize that they’ve heard an owl. They assume it’s a bug, or a dog running wild through the evergreens, beloved chewy bone clenched tightly in its jaws. | Copyright 2015 by Seanan McGuire. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Annie Bellet | Goodnight Earth
Tue, 12 May 2015 10:01:18 -0000
Karron leaned over the rail of her boat, the Tarik, and watched the meteor shower from its reflection in the river below. The bright streaks of light looked like underwater fireflies and the Ring more like a soft blue disk, a monochromatic rainbow that ruled their lives in constant reminder of how broken the world was. “Water, water, everywhere,” she murmured to herself. | Copyright 2015 by Annie Bellet. Originally published in THE END HAS COME, edited by John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Merrie Haskell | Sun’s East, Moon’s West
Tue, 05 May 2015 10:03:32 -0000
I shot the sparrow because I was starving. Though truthfully, I was aiming at a pheasant; the silver snow and the silver birches played tricks with the light, and as if by magic, pheasant turned into sparrow. When I saw what my arrow had done, I cried with empty eyes, too dry to make tears. | Copyright 2009 by Merrie Haskell. Originally published in ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dale Bailey | The Ministry of the Eye
Tue, 28 Apr 2015 10:03:53 -0000
Mornings were queues and cigarettes. Queues for the underground turnstiles and queues for the train, queues for stale bagels and queues for lukewarm coffee at the kiosk outside the station. By the time he queued up at the west gate of the pit, Alexander Gerst — tall and grizzled at forty-five, slope-shouldered and running slowly to fat — was lucky if he wasn’t already halfway through his daily ration of tobacco. | Copyright 2015 by Dale Bailey. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 21 Apr 2015 10:01:06 -0000
She was in the laundry room, bent over a basket of Benjamin’s muddy trousers and grass-stained T-shirts and particularly odorous socks, when a rap sounded on the screen door. She didn’t hear at first; she’d noticed, bent over there, a cluster of webbed, purplish veins just below her thigh, beside her knee. She didn’t like seeing them there. They were like a slow-moving car wreck, those veins, a little darker, a little more severe each time she looked. | Copyright 2015 by Jason Gurley. Narrated by Kimberly Farr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Violet Allen | We’ll Be Together Forever
Tue, 14 Apr 2015 10:03:48 -0000
Audrey took her dinner quietly, without words beyond the obligatories (please, thank you, no, work was fine), and I obliged her the silence. We just ate, together but not together, in that way that you do when there are too many things to say. The meal in question was on the bad side of decent, days-old stir-fried noodles from the Japanese place down the street from her apartment, reheated and reconstituted into a slimy Pan-Asian gruel with the addition of fish sauce, soy sauce, sriracha, curry powder, chili powder, and neglect. | Copyright 2015 by Violet Allen. Narrated by Peter Alzado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | The Universe, Sung in Stars
Tue, 07 Apr 2015 10:01:03 -0000
There is music in the stars. The stars, the planets, the asteroids, the galaxies. Everything that is flung, whirling in orbit through space and time. We dwell inside an enormous, ever-changing symphony, and each of the many universes sings a song of its own. I replicate them. | Copyright 2015 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ursula K. Le Guin | The New Atlantis
Tue, 24 Mar 2015 10:01:16 -0000
Coming back from my Wilderness Week, I sat by an odd sort of man in the bus. For a long time we didn’t talk; I was mending stockings and he was reading. Then the bus broke down a few miles outside Gresham. Boiler trouble, the way it generally is when the driver insists on trying to go over thirty. It was a Supersonic Superscenic Deluxe Longdistance coal-burner, with Home Comfort, that means a toilet, and the seats were pretty comfortable. | Copyright 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally published in THE NEW ATLANTIS AND OTHER NOVELLAS OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Robert Silverberg. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Mar 2015 10:01:13 -0000
The winds blow pretty regular across the dried-up lake. Traction's good — when luck's on your side you can reach three hundred KPH or faster. Harper watches the hot rods race on thick white salt so pure and bright the satellites use it for colour calibration. Harper doesn't care about souped-up hot rods. | Copyright 2015 by Cat Sparks. Narrated by Cassandra de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | A Face of Black Iron
Tue, 10 Mar 2015 10:03:11 -0000
Diomedo Obron and the Archon Filidor passed the evening and much of the night in the latter’s study, discussing the next day’s journey into the wastes of Barran and the expected confrontation with whatever survivor of the Nineteenth Aeon wizards’ cabal still lurked in the Seventh Plane. Erm Kaslo struggled to try to understand the concepts the two thaumaturges threw onto the table — sometimes literally. | Copyright 2015 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 11:03:08 -0000
The demon, like all the others before it, appeared first in the form of a horizontal plume of rust-red grit and vapor. Almost a kilometer away, it moved low to the ground, camouflaged by the waves of hot, shimmering air that rose from the desert hardpan. Lieutenant Matt Whitebird watched it for many seconds before he was sure it was more than a mirage. Then he announced to his squad, “Incoming." Copyright 2015 by Linda Nagata. Originally published in OPERATION ARCANA, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Barr Kirtley | Veil of Ignorance
Tue, 24 Feb 2015 11:01:05 -0000
Something strange is happening to me. We’re at Conrad’s vacation house, a sprawling mansion that orbits the gas giant Hades-3. (His father owns both the house and the planet.) Conrad is in the living room watching sports. His girlfriend Alyssa is standing by the mirror in the bathroom, fixing her hair. Her friend Kat is sitting near the bay windows, watching the stars and the roiling vermeil clouds on the world below. | Copyright 2004 by David Barr Kirtley. Originally published in ALL THE RAGE THIS YEAR, edited by Keith Olexa. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Cerile and the Journeyer
Tue, 17 Feb 2015 11:03:24 -0000
The journeyer was still a young man when he embarked on his search for the all-powerful witch Cerile. He was bent and gray-haired a lifetime later when he found a map to her home in the tomb of the forgotten kings. The map directed him halfway across the world, over the Souleater mountains, through the Curtains of Night, past the scars of the Eternal War, and across a great grassy plain, to the outskirts of Cerile’s Desert. | Copyright 1995 by Adam-Troy Castro. Originally published in 100 WICKED LITTLE WITCH STORIES, edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dahvana Headley | And the Winners Will Be Swept Out to Sea
Tue, 10 Feb 2015 11:03:23 -0000
I’m in your house, wearing one of your shirts. I’m sitting on your floor, with all the drawers of every desk and dresser open. I have them poured out and I’m looking at what you’ve kept. Your old laptops and love letters, your hard drives full of photos and emails, your string and wire tangled into little knots, hard and tiny, twisted so tightly that I can’t crush them more than they’ve already been crushed. | Copyright 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brooke Bolander | And You Shall Know Her By The Trail Of Dead
Tue, 03 Feb 2015 11:01:57 -0000
The mobster has a gun pressed to Rack’s forehead. The mobster has a god-shitting GUN pressed to her partner’s fucking forehead, and the only thing Rhye can do is watch and scream as the man smiles at her and pulls the trigger and blows Rack’s perfect brains out from between his ears. | Copyright 2015 by Brooke Bolander. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | Men of Unborrowed Vision
Tue, 27 Jan 2015 11:01:22 -0000
We are not terrorists. We have not done this because we wish to terrify or instill fear. We do what we have done in order to bring the truth to everyone, a truth that burns away the lies and leaves only itself. We are no more terrorists than the invisible hand of the market is a terrorist. | Copyright 2015 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Jamye Grant and Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 20 Jan 2015 11:03:50 -0000
“What do we call this thing?” Erm Kaslo said, gesturing to the smooth opaque walls. “It’s not a spaceship.” Diomedo Obron tapped the green leather-bound tome he was studying. “Testroni’s Impervious Conveyance, it says here.” They were inside an object that had looked to Kaslo like nothing so much as an oversized version of the silver dome that a butler would whisk away from an aristocrat’s meal. It even had a large ring on top — a ring that was now grasped by the talons of an honest-to-goodness dragon. | Copyright 2015 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aliette de Bodard | The Lonely Heart
Tue, 13 Jan 2015 11:03:50 -0000
It was towards mid-afternoon that Chen became aware of the girl. She stood before Chen’s stall, watching the fake-jade effigies of the Buddha and the coloured incense sticks, her eyes wide in the sunlight — she was no more than thirteen or fourteen, with the gangly unease of that age. To her left, children shrieked as they passed the Bridge of Impossibility, holding each other’s hands, and went into the temple complex. | Copyright 2009 by Aliette de Bodard. Originally published in BLACK STATIC. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Theodora Goss | Beautiful Boys
Tue, 06 Jan 2015 11:01:06 -0000
You know who I’m talking about. You can see them on Sunday afternoons, in places like Knoxville, Tennessee or Flagstaff, Arizona, playing pool or with their elbows on the bar, drinking a beer before they head out into the dusty sunlight and get into their pickups, onto their motorcycles. Some of them have dogs. Some of their dogs wear bandanas around their necks. | Copyright 2012 by Theodora Goss. Originally published in ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Damien Angelica Walters | A Lie You Give, and Thus I Take
Tue, 23 Dec 2014 11:03:46 -0000
Don’t be fooled by the breadcrumbs in the forest. This is not a fairy tale. The first lie is pretty and spirals from your mouth like candyfloss; sweet, so sweet, and I’m melting under your tongue. Baby, baby, baby, you say, and I gobble it up, unaware that every word you say comes with a candy thermometer and you’ve made me your latest caramel bonbon. | Copyright 2014 by Damien Angelica Walters. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 16 Dec 2014 11:01:00 -0000
This is a story from the time before she was famous. In the early days, she was known as Leli, or Lelia, a tease-name that had stuck. On her first mission for the revolution, she sat cramped, fists clenched with tension, waiting in the tiny scabship Tinka, out of sight in a radar deadzone. The salvage ship Gathering Moss, which she was stalking, lay like a giant, rusting silver slug in the docking bay. | Copyright 2014 by Vandana Singh. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nik Houser | The Drawstring Detective
Tue, 09 Dec 2014 11:03:51 -0000
The Drawstring Detective is heavier than he appears. When Char picks him up off the shelf, she almost drops him. He is a foot tall and made entirely of tin. He is dressed in charcoal-colored slacks, a white shirt and black tie, a black greatcoat, loafers, and a bowler hat, all of which are also made of tin. White gloves hold a folded umbrella. A small, tightly curled mustache stands in place of a mouth. | Copyright 2014 by Nik Houser. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 02 Dec 2014 11:01:50 -0000
8:00 PM: Congratulations! Your MindPlant has been successfully updated to version 5.0. You can now enjoy enhanced versions of all of your favorite think-apps, including text, email, social networking, and GPS, all delivered directly to your brain at lightning speeds. Platinum users enjoy access to our full library of XP technology apps: movies, games, books, and TV shows you can “experience” with all five senses. | Copyright 2014 by Shale Nelson. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Annalee Newitz | Drones Don’t Kill People
Tue, 25 Nov 2014 11:01:59 -0000
I was always already a killer. There was no hazy time in my memory before I knew how to target a person’s heart or brain for clean execution. I did not develop a morbid fascination with death over time; I did not spend my childhood mutilating animals; I was not abused by a violent parent; I did not suffer social injustice until finally I broke down and turned to professional violence. From the moment I was conscious, I could kill and I did. | Copyright 2014 by Annalee Newitz. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | Enter Saunterance
Tue, 18 Nov 2014 11:03:04 -0000
Back in Obron’s workroom, Kaslo told the wizard his theory that the reason their enemy had sent a fire elemental against them was because he wanted the fiery spirit to seize the noubles the op had originally acquired from the murderous thaumaturge, Asrat Gozon. “Fire cannot harm them,” he finished. | Copyright 2014 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | A Flock of Grief by Kat Howard
Tue, 11 Nov 2014 11:03:58 -0000
The woman’s dress was perfectly correct. Indeed, it, and she, would have been utterly unremarkable, were it not for the bird perched upon her shoulder, black-feathered, eyes with the seasick luminosity of moonstones. “Vulgar,” Sofie said to me under her breath. “Why go out in society at all, if you are going to appear like that? No one wishes to have a party disturbed by such reminders of grief and mortality." | Copyright 2014 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sunny Moraine | What Glistens Back
Tue, 04 Nov 2014 11:01:51 -0000
Come back. You hear the call as the lander breaks up around you. You’re aware of the entirely arbitrary concepts of up and down before you realize what’s happening, and then they’re a lot less arbitrary. Down is not so much a direction as a function of possibility, of what might happen to you, of what is happening now. You finally get down as an idea. | Copyright 2014 by Sunny Moraine. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Kurashige | The Quality of Descent by Megan Kurashige (narrated by Stefan Rudnicki)
Tue, 28 Oct 2014 10:03:23 -0000
The trick begins like this: The magician throws an egg up into the air, where it flies — small and white and full of import — up and up, high into the black reaches of the proscenium. We await the descent, holding our breaths, expecting at any moment the crash of slapstick hilarity, exploding like a bomb. But the egg simply vanishes. | Copyright 2014 by Megan Kurashige. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marie Vibbert | Jupiter Wrestlerama
Tue, 21 Oct 2014 10:01:21 -0000
Two-Ton Tony had a hard body, and though Karen knew the facts of life cold and backward by the time she got her chance to push him against a wall, she’d never had anything so sweet. Biceps like boulders, arms to swing on and hips to ride: a body like a playground. She’d held on to him and never quite believed her luck that he let her. | Copyright 2014 by Marie Vibbert. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 14 Oct 2014 10:03:08 -0000
As long as we’re waiting, why don’t I tell you a little story? You look like the kind of man who could profit by it. Don’t take offense, now. I meant that as a compliment. You remind me of me, that’s all. I’m a cowhand myself. Or was, anyway. I’ve been up and down the Chisholm Trail so many times I could walk it blindfolded from Brownsville to Abilene. | 2014 by Steve Hockensmith. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 07 Oct 2014 10:01:14 -0000
Very late at night, when the buzz of drill dozers has died out, I can hear her breathing. I know that sounds crazy. I don’t care. Tonight, I have to concentrate extra hard because there’s a man lying beside me; he’s snoring with the contented abandon of the well-fucked and all that panting has heavied up the air in my quarters. | Copyright 2014 by Daniel José Older. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sam J. Miller | We Are the Cloud
Tue, 23 Sep 2014 10:01:19 -0000
Me and Case met when someone slammed his head against my door, so hard I heard it with my earphones in and my Game Boy cranked up loud. Sad music from Mega Man 2 filled my head and then there was this thud like the world stopped spinning for a second. I turned the thing off and flipped it shut, felt its warmth between my hands. Slipped it under my pillow. Copyright 2014 by Sam J. Miller. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | Under the Scab
Tue, 16 Sep 2014 10:03:31 -0000
It was too late in the day to start back to Indoberia. Kaslo tried to find ways to busy himself about the castle, but his thoughts would not leave him alone. Finally, he went up to the flat roof of one of the larger towers and leaned against the parapet as the planet’s sun sank below a horizon no longer broken by the Commune’s skyline. In the opposite direction, the stars were coming out, but Kaslo saw only a handful of the glittering orbitals that used to stretch in a sparkling, glinting arc across the night sky. | 2014 by Matthew Hughes. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 09 Sep 2014 10:01:12 -0000
KV-62 went supernova today. Well, according to the news, it went supernova on March 14, 1592, but we’re just now finding out about it. Other things that happened on this day in history: Eli Whitney got a patent for the cotton gin, Charles I granted a royal charter to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and I was fished out of a trash can in the Union Square subway station. | Copyright 2014 by Saundra Mitchell. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Pinsker | No Lonely Seafarer
Tue, 02 Sep 2014 10:03:07 -0000
On the nights Mrs. Wainwright let me work in the barn instead of the tavern, I used to sing to the horses. They would greet me with their own murmurs, and swivel their ears to follow my voice as I readied their suppers. That was where Captain Smythe found me: in the barn, singing a song of my own making. | Copyright 2014 by Sarah Pinsker. Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | A Meaningful Exchange
Tue, 26 Aug 2014 10:03:19 -0000
Quentin told lies to people for money. Or drugs. Or kittens. Or anything, really. The particular currency didn’t matter, so long as what was being offered had value to the person who needed the lie. | Copyright 2014 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
E. Catherine Tobler | A Box, a Pocket, a Spaceman
Tue, 19 Aug 2014 10:01:29 -0000
The spaceman shows up on a hot summer afternoon, not in the dead of night when you’re crouched in the garden peering through a telescope that shows you the endless glories and wonders of the night sky. There’s no spaceship making a bright arc against a star-spangled sky. Just a man in a spacesuit, standing at the edge of your hammock. | Copyright 2014 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tahmeed Shafiq | The Djinn Who Sought To Kill The Sun
Tue, 12 Aug 2014 10:03:47 -0000
They travelled all day, and at night came to rest by one of the large rocks that jut from the desert. The last caveat to voyagers before the plains of windswept sand. Here is what the boy heard: “Long ago, almost fifty years by official counting, there was a boy named Alladin." | Copyright 2014 by Tahmeed Shafiq. Narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An Owomoyela | Undermarket Data
Tue, 05 Aug 2014 10:01:19 -0000
A drink arrived that Culin hadn’t ordered. No one sent drinks to the crowded annex where Culin sat, crammed in with seven other people, all with contagion bands on their sleeves and matching tattoos on their arms. Sending drinks was an affectation Culin didn’t see much in the Dead Engine at all. | Copyright 2014 by An Owomoyela. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:03:11 -0000
The piano player drums away with her left hand, dropping all five fingers onto the keys as if they weigh too much to hold up. The rhythms bounce off the rhythms of what her right hand does, what she sings. It’s like there’s three different people in that little skinny body, one running each hand, the third one singing. But they all know what they’re doing. | Copyright 2004 by Emma Bull. Originally published in THE FAERY REEL: TALES FROM THE TWILIGHT REALM. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Howard Waldrop | All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Tue, 15 Jul 2014 10:01:35 -0000
It’s all over for humanity, and I’m heading east. On the seat beside me are an M1 carbine and a Thompson submachine gun. There’s a special reason for the Thompson. I traded an M16 and 200 rounds of ammo for it to a guy in Barstow. | Copyright 1980 by Howard Waldrop. Originally published in SHAYOL. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Theodora Goss | Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology
Tue, 08 Jul 2014 10:01:17 -0000
Remembering Cimmeria: I walk through the bazaar, between the stalls of the spice sellers, smelling turmeric and cloves, hearing the clash of bronze from the sellers of cooking pots, the bleat of goats from the butcher’s alley. Rugs hang from wooden racks, scarlet and indigo. In the corners of the alleys, men without legs perch on wooden carts, telling their stories to a crowd of ragged children, making coins disappear into the air. | Copyright 2014 by Theodora Goss. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The New Provisions
Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:01:10 -0000
Phil called the toll-free number he’d been given, and after the usual twenty-minute hold time, reached a human being who explained that the tow truck driver really did have the right to haul away his car. It didn’t matter that the car had been parked in his driveway or that it had been completely paid for, and it certainly didn’t matter that it was the only form of transportation he and his wife had for getting back and forth from work. | Copyright 2014 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tananarive Due | Like Daughter
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 10:03:00 -0000
I got the call in the middle of the week, when I came wheezing home from my uphill late-afternoon run. I didn’t recognize the voice on my computer’s answer-phone at first, although I thought it sounded like my best friend, Denise. There was no video feed, only the recording, and the words were so improbable they only confused me more. | Copyright 2000 by Tananarive Due. Originally published in DARK MATTER, edited by Sheree R. Thomas. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Heather Clitheroe | Cuts Both Ways
Tue, 24 Jun 2014 10:01:53 -0000
The kids know he’s coming to visit. They’ve been texting him to tell him about the snow and how cold it is, and they helpfully send links to their Amazon wish lists with pages of moon-eyed dolls and odd sets of dueling robots and creatures sold according to series. The things they like are incomprehensible to him, but they know he’s good for it. | Copyright 2014 by Heather Clitheroe. Narrated by Grover Gardner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rhonda Eikamp | The Case of the Passionless Bees
Tue, 17 Jun 2014 10:06:53 -0000
Of all the strange sights I had been privy to during my acquaintanceship with that illustrious detective, none was as disturbing as seeing my old friend covered in bees. Naturally I was not concerned; his manaccanite skin was impervious to harm and I myself was at a safe distance, ensconced behind the clerestory window at Shading Coil Cottage. | Copyright 2014 by Rhonda Eikamp. Narrated by Jonathan L. Howard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Jun 2014 10:03:54 -0000
“You two ready?” I ask. “Yes, ma’am,” Gert says with forced brightness, and Rally nods quickly, a shake of motion behind her helmet’s faceplate. She’s nervous, but she always seems to be a little nervous, so I’m not too worried. | Copyright 2014 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:03:15 -0000
The Master who came for Enri was wearing a relatively young body. Sadie guessed it was maybe fifty years old. It was healthy and in good condition, still handsome. It could last twenty years more, easily. | Copyright 2014 by N. K. Jemisin. Narrated by Bahni Turpin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Tiptree, Jr. | Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death
Tue, 10 Jun 2014 10:01:07 -0000
—I am hugely black and hopeful, I bounce on six legs along the mountains in the new warm! . . . Sing the changer, Sing the stranger! Will the changes change forever? . . . All my hums have words now. Another change! | Copyright 1973, 2001 by the Estate of Alice B. Sheldon. Previously published in THE ALIEN CONDITION and HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER. Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey D. Smith and the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 03 Jun 2014 10:03:31 -0000
Condensation covers the walls, dimpling into tiny individual drops that follow an almost fractal pattern, like someone has been writing out the secrets of the universe in the most transitory medium they can find. The smell of damp steel assaults my nose as I walk the hall, uncomfortable boots clumping heavily with every step I force myself to take. The space is tight, confined, unyielding; it is like living inside a coral reef, trapped by the limits of our own necessary shells. | Copyright 2014 by Seanan McGuire. Narrated by Janis Ian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kris Millering | A Word Shaped Like Bones
Tue, 03 Jun 2014 10:01:16 -0000
The dead man sits in the corner of the chamber enclosed by spaceship on all sides. He takes up a lot of space. He has been there for three days. | Copyright 2014 by Kris Millering. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 27 May 2014 10:01:39 -0000
If you ask me, I’m more like my mom than my dad. She and I love astronomy and the mysterious origins of the universe. Dad’s not only stuck on the past, he literally would move there if he could. Every summer he drags me along on his research trips to eras where sweaty-smelling people with wool bathing suits hole up in seaside deathtraps. | Copyright 2014 by Sandra McDonald. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Fred Van Lente | Willful Weapon
Tue, 20 May 2014 10:03:12 -0000
The torch of the Statue of Liberty blazed with an unearthly light. The steamship lumbered through the retina-stinging nimbus which draped the colossal lady and her fortress pedestal in a luminescent haze. Cellach mac Rath crowded with the rest of the bedraggled masses on the deck and watched his destiny loom ever closer: the towers of Manhattan, garlanded with gargoyles and lit with the fires of a million lanterns. | Copyright 2014 by Fred Van Lente. Narrated by Sile Bermingham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 13 May 2014 10:03:45 -0000
Quentin Ketterly stood in the Gold Star Saloon and lit his cheroot with one hand, the other resting lightly on his hip, very close to his waistcoat pocket. He stared across the room at the five men playing poker at a nearby table. His eyes tracked the movement of the cards that they held and played, though his mind was on another set of Cards entirely. | Copyright 2014 by Rajan Khanna. Originally published in DEAD MAN'S HAND, edited by John Joseph Adams. Reprinted by permission of the author. | Podcast Audio courtesy of Brilliance Audio, publisher of the audiobook edition of DEAD MAN'S HAND. Narrated by Phil Gigante. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Seth Dickinson | A Tank Only Fears Four Things
Tue, 06 May 2014 10:01:30 -0000
The surgery makes Tereshkova into a tank. In the war, she never showed any fear, not at Fulda, not even in the snows of Vogelsberg when the Americans dropped the first bomb. When Clinton and Yeltsin shook hands at Yalta, when the word came down to the 8th Guards Army to yield Frankfurt and withdraw to Soviet soil, Tereshkova spat into the dirt and said: “Too bad." | Copyright 2014 by Seth Dickinson. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Thomas Olde Heuvelt | The Day the World Turned Upside Down
Tue, 29 Apr 2014 10:03:18 -0000
That day, the world turned upside down. We didn’t know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. But it wasn’t like that—the world simply turned upside down. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Shaenon K. Garrity | Francisca Montoya’s Almanac of Things That Can Kill You
Tue, 22 Apr 2014 10:01:29 -0000
If you get ill after eating or touching something that didn’t make anyone else sick, you may be allergic to it. Especially if there’s a rash. Allergies are caused by your body rejecting substances it doesn’t like. There is no treatment but to avoid those substances. Fortunately, only a few types of allergies can kill you. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Linda Nagata | Codename: Delphi
Tue, 15 Apr 2014 10:01:24 -0000
“Valdez, you need to slow down,” Karin Larsen warned, each syllable crisply pronounced into a mic. “Stay behind the seekers. If you overrun them, you’re going to walk into a booby trap.” | Copyright 2014 by Linda Nagata. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 08 Apr 2014 10:03:12 -0000
1. Lord, it’s hot in this cabin. I could hard-boil an egg inside my mouth. What’s your name? 2. Have you ever poached an egg? The trick is white vinegar. Everyone forgets the white vinegar, and the blasted thing falls apart, and then they miss one of the greatest wonders of the world. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
RoboNinja | The Legend of RoboNinja
Tue, 01 Apr 2014 10:01:54 -0000
RoboNinja. A name for garbled tongues and garbled times. Interstate mudlarks peer at him from beneath grotty brows as he passes, eyes the size of headlamps reflecting the gelid glow of his visor. He once tried obscuring the light with handfuls of ash, smeared across LEDs and his shining silver carapace like the penitential marks of a sect long forgotten. It had worked for a time, until the monsoon came mocking once more. Copyright 2014 by Lightspeed Magazine. Narrated by Lex Wilson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | Phalloon the Illimitable
Tue, 25 Mar 2014 10:03:06 -0000
The estate of Phalloon the so-called Illimitable was in most respects much like that of the budding thaumaturge Diomedo Obron, Erm Kaslo’s new employer: It had a large, solid house, some remote outbuildings, lawns and a lake, clumps of mature trees, and an all-enclosing wall. What made it different, Kaslo saw as he surveyed it from a hill in the middling distance, was a rocky prominence that stood in the estate’s northeast corner. Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 18 Mar 2014 10:01:02 -0000
I still remember that evening: In the heavy air, the plastic dragonflies hovered just below the eaves like miniature helicopters, drifting about slightly even though there was no wind. I came home, and Dad was already in the house but kept the lights off. The setting sun came in through cracks in the window, and his face seemed indescribably thin in the dim, yellow light, like a stranger’s. | Copyright 2014 by Chen Qiufan (translated by Ken Liu). Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sofia Samatar | How to Get Back to the Forest
Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:01:49 -0000
“You have to puke it up,” said Cee. “You have to get down there and puke it up. I mean down past where you can feel it, you know?” She gestured earnestly at her chest. She had this old-fashioned cotton nightgown on, lace collar brilliant under the bathroom lights. Above the collar, her skin looked gray. Cee had bones like a bird. She was so beautiful. She was completely beautiful and fucked. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 04 Mar 2014 11:03:54 -0000
We are one. We are three. We are sisters, together and individual. Past, present, future. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. One of us must have been born first, but the stories say there were always three, and so there were. Fate is too weighty a thing to be dealt by only one. | Copyright 2014 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 25 Feb 2014 11:03:14 -0000
“Push! Push! Damn it, put your backs into it!” Kino Ye’s voice rose to a panicked screech as the four sweat-drenched soldiers strained against the spokes of the giant winch. “Push!” But one of the spokes snapped as the man leaning against it fell face-first into the sand, and the winch whipped around and tossed the other three men through the air to land sprawling on the beach a few paces away. | Copyright 2014 by Ken Liu. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | Harry and Marlowe and the Intrigues at the Aetherian Exhibition
Tue, 18 Feb 2014 11:01:35 -0000
Finally, Harry arrived at the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington with her mother and her older sister Victoria. Once they entered through the great gilt doorway, a friendly attendant waited to show them to the royal salon. Harry glimpsed, through another ornate archway, the main hall and the exhibition installed there. | © 2014 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sunny Moraine | So Sharp That Blood Must Flow
Tue, 11 Feb 2014 11:03:13 -0000
In the end, the water goes black with the witch’s blood. Before this happens, the little mermaid understands that a deal is a deal, a bargain a bargain, and there can’t be reneging. But this isn’t reneging, she tells herself as she sinks down, down, down into water so black that in truth it would be difficult to discern witch’s blood within it even had a hundred witches been slaughtered in its depths. | © 2014 by Sunny Moraine. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 04 Feb 2014 11:01:14 -0000
So I guess the story begins, fittingly, with someone handing me a Coma rig and saying, play me. Two a.m. and I’m at this party in somebody’s trailer out in the trashy part of town. I’m stoned out of my mind and there’s something on the television, either one of those cheesy infomercials or some sort of comedy thing making fun of those cheesy infomercials, and I’m trying to figure out which. | © 2014 by Jessica Barber. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Thing About Shapes to Come
Tue, 28 Jan 2014 11:03:02 -0000
Monica’s new baby was like a lot of new babies these days in that she was born a cube. She had no external or internal sexual organs, or for that matter organs of any kind, being just a warm solid filled with protoplasm. But she was, genetically at least, a girl, and one who resembled her mother as much as any cube possibly could. That wasn’t much in that she had no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no chin, no hair, nothing that could be charitably called a face or bodily features, not even any orifices larger than pores. | ©2014 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ursula K. Le Guin | Elementals
Tue, 21 Jan 2014 11:03:07 -0000
No one knows how many airlings there are, most likely not a great many, whatever a great many means. They inhabit the atmosphere, generally between a hundred and ten or twelve thousand feet above the ground, seldom clearly visible to human eyes, and leaving almost no trace of their presence. They swim in air as we do in water, but with far more ease, air being their native element. Slight motions of the whole body and the arms and legs move them gracefully through their three dimensions. | © 2012 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally published in TIN HOUSE. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Terry Bisson | Bears Discover Fire
Tue, 14 Jan 2014 11:01:25 -0000
I was driving with my brother, the preacher, and my nephew, the preacher’s son, on I-65 just north of Bowling Green when we got a flat. It was Sunday night and we had been to visit Mother at the Home. We were in my car. The flat caused what you might call knowing groans since, as the old-fashioned one in my family (so they tell me), I fix my own tires, and my brother is always telling me to get radials and quit buying old tires. | © 1990 by Terry Bisson. Originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | In the Dying Light, We Saw a Shape
Tue, 07 Jan 2014 11:01:29 -0000
.@neiltyson calls them “space diatoms,” but I say “space whales.” They’re beaching themselves on our interstellar shores. Question is: why? —Tweet by @lilmeyer, January 7, 2021 | © 2014 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
William Browning Spencer | The Foster Child
Tue, 24 Dec 2013 11:03:19 -0000
I came, the hope of my tribe, to the City of Absolutes, in the year of the zero plus two big and a nine. I sought Lena, the girl I had dreamed of as my fingers grew back and I drifted in the waters of Nagoda. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Dec 2013 11:01:00 -0000
The dead have fads. I work in Deadtown, at a bar mostly frequented by the Dead. They call me PD for Pre-Dead. The Dead tip for shit because they just aren’t all that interested. That’s what I think. Cory, one of my regulars, says it isn’t like that. The Dead are interested fine, he said. They’re just poor. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Patrick Kelly | Miss Nobody Never Was
Tue, 10 Dec 2013 11:03:09 -0000
Everybody thinks that bartenders steal. You know what? They’re right. Maybe there’s an upright bartender someplace where it’s all parking lots and cornfields and traffic lights flashing yellow, but I doubt it. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hao Jingfang | Invisible Planets
Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:01:49 -0000
Chichi Raha is a fascinating place, its flowers and lakes unforgettable to all visitors. There, you cannot see a single inch of exposed soil because the land is covered by vegetation: the anua grass, as fine as silk thread; the kuqin tree, tall enough to scrape the clouds; and many varieties of unnameable, unimaginably strange fruits, exuding seductive aromas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Stoddard | The Battle of York
Tue, 26 Nov 2013 11:03:13 -0000
Young General Washington rode alone on his white stallion through the vast forest of Yoosemitee. His battle-axe, Valleyforge, hung glistening from the pommel of his saddle, the blood fresh-scrubbed from its edge. He had slain too many soldiers in the war against the Gauls and American Natives, and was glad to be going home. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 19 Nov 2013 11:01:21 -0000
It’s the particular metallic rattle of the football slamming the garage door that is like a nail driven into Chester Barnes forehead. Slap badoom, slap badoom: that he can cope with. His hearing has adjusted to that long habituation of the rhythm of wall-to-foot-to-ball-to-wall. Slap baclang. With a resonating twang of internal springs in the door mechanism. Slap baclang buzz. Behind his head where he can’t see it. But the biggest torment is that he never knows when it is going to happen. A rhythm, a regular beat, you can adjust to that: The random slam of ball kicked hard into garage door is always a surprise, a jolt you can never prepare for. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kelly Barnhill | The Insect and the Astronomer: A Love Story
Tue, 12 Nov 2013 11:01:17 -0000
The Insect has never been in love. The Astronomer has never been alive. It is important that you understand this. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sean Williams | Death and the Hobbyist
Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:03:03 -0000
It wasn’t enough for my mother Juliet to be crazy. Of course not. She was always going to find a uniquely inconvenient way to drive us mad along with her. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 22 Oct 2013 10:01:59 -0000
Ona watched her Teacher turn around. The helmetless Ms. Coron wore a dress that exposed the skin of her arms and legs in a way that she had taught the children was beautiful and natural. Intellectually, Ona understood that the frigid air in the classroom, cold enough to give her and the other children hypothermia even with brief exposure, was perfectly suited to the Teachers. But she couldn’t help shivering at the sight. The airtight heat-suit scraped over Ona’s scales, and the rustling noise reverberated loudly in her helmet. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Charlie Jane Anders | The Master Conjurer
Tue, 15 Oct 2013 10:02:24 -0000
Peter did a magic spell, and it worked fine. With no unintended consequences, and no weird side effects. Two days later, he was on the front page of the local newspaper: “The Miracle Conjurer.” Some blogs picked it up, and soon enough he was getting visits from CNN and MSNBC, and his local NPR station kept wanting to put him on. News crews were standing and talking in front of his house. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dylan Otto Krider | The Five Deaths of Marvin Dimitri
Tue, 08 Oct 2013 10:02:20 -0000
I first met Marvin several years ago, but you don’t have to know Marvin to know his story. That’s the sort of thing that’s just understood, that comes from living in Beaumont, Texas, where Marvin lived most all of his lives. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Keffy R. M. Kehrli | HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY!!!
Mon, 30 Sep 2013 16:25:50 -0000
As late as ten years ago, a mad scientist with a dream could expect to turn a decent profit with his lesser inventions and build enough capital to put his (or her!) real plans into play. Those days are sadly over, although my father, fool that he was, claimed that they never existed. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Hughes | And Then Some
Tue, 24 Sep 2013 10:03:06 -0000
Erm Kaslo came to Cheddle on the Adelaine, a tramp freighter that didn’t mind taking passengers who didn’t mind the quality of the accommodations. He could have come on a liner, but he preferred, when working, to make his entrances unnoticed. Narrated by Barry J. Northern (for StarShipSofa). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 24 Sep 2013 10:01:08 -0000
Josephine had been up all night, her heart pounding, thinking about this day, about whether she would survive it. Now, out on the road and exposed on all sides, she was so scared she could barely breathe. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Sep 2013 10:01:58 -0000
Last night, after a short struggle, I went out. It’s like that most evenings, the slow, silent battle between my desire to stay in, with my thoughts and dreams and memories, and the need to go where other people gathered. Much as I preferred my own company, no one, these days, was paying me to keep it. I lived as frugally as I could on what I’d saved, but the price of electricity had soared recently, and I was in the red again. If I went out, there was at least the chance of making money. Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 10 Sep 2013 10:03:14 -0000
The locker room is always tense before a game. Alisa is trying to get her uniform to stay in place, counting more on safety pins and prayer than she probably should, and Birdie—true to her name—keeps whistling, which is probably going to get her slapped if she doesn’t stop soon. Cram twenty girls from opposing squads into one small space and tensions are going to flare. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 03 Sep 2013 10:03:19 -0000
As I was reading last night—reading a book, I should explain, which was otherwise merely commonplace; one of those somewhat political, somewhat philosophical, somewhat historical books which can now be bought by the pound each month—I was struck by a certain remark of the author’s. It seemed to me at the time an interesting, if almost self-evident, idea; and afterward, when I had turned the page, and many other pages, and was half through a new chapter bearing very little relation to what had gone before, this idea found its way back into my consciousness and there acted as a sort of filter between my mind and the book until I put it down and, still thinking, went up to bed. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 27 Aug 2013 10:03:29 -0000
News of the disappearance of inventor Felix Frey spread through the Air with electric ease. It was exactly the kind of distraction I needed. There are only so many quaint old thefts and counterfeit scams I can pluck from policing archives while my girlfriend Billie works in her studio, adjusting facial nerves, muscles, and skin cells to fit her clients’ desires. Narrated by Alex Hyde-White. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cory Skerry | Breathless in the Deep
Tue, 20 Aug 2013 10:01:38 -0000
When Jantz spotted a black skeleton jutting up above the water, at first she thought it was just a tide-battered tree, but before long she could make out the shredded ropes and scraps of sail. The wooden bones were the charred yardarms of a sunken ship. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ken Liu | The Litigation Master and the Monkey King
Tue, 13 Aug 2013 10:01:41 -0000
The tiny cottage at the edge of Sanli Village—away from the villagers’ noisy houses and busy clan shrines and next to the cool pond filled with lily pads, pink lotus flowers, and playful carp—would have made an ideal romantic summer hideaway for some dissolute poet and his silk-robed mistress from nearby bustling Yangzhou. Narrated by John Chu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yoon Ha Lee | The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars
Tue, 06 Aug 2013 10:03:48 -0000
The tower is a black spire upon a world whose only sun is a million starships wrecked into a mass grave. Light the color of fossils burns from the ships, and at certain hours, the sun casts shadows that mutter the names of vanquished cities and vanished civilizations. It is said that when the tower’s sun finally darkens, the universe’s clocks will stop. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ursula K. Le Guin | The Stars Below
Tue, 23 Jul 2013 10:03:22 -0000
The wooden house and outbuildings caught fire fast, blazed up, burned down, but the dome, built of lathe and plaster above a drum of brick, would not burn. What they did at last was heap up the wreckage of the telescopes, the instruments, the books and charts and drawings, in the middle of the floor under the dome, pour oil on the heap, and set fire to that. The flames spread to the wooden beams of the big telescope frame and to the clockwork mechanisms. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 16 Jul 2013 10:01:14 -0000
This certifies that HELEN FRANCES LAWRENCE, sex FEMALE was born to JOHN DENISON LAWRENCE and VIRGINIA MATILDA LAWRENCE on SATURDAY at SIX TEN PM, this EIGHTEENTH day of AUGUST, 1990 at the MONTFORT HOSPITAL in OTTAWA, ONTARIO and will die of CANCER. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | The Boy and the Box
Tue, 09 Jul 2013 10:03:07 -0000
The boy looked like any other boy his age, except that, thanks to him, there had been for some time now no other boys his age, or of any other age. The elimination of all others had transformed him into the entirety of a subset that had once numbered billions. He was now the platonic ideal of his type, not just a boy, but the boy. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Benjamin Roy Lambert | Division of Labor
Tue, 02 Jul 2013 10:01:19 -0000
No one said anything, but Sull could tell they were all a little jealous when he lost his arms and legs. The arms went first, the left one during a bath and the right one a few days later, while he was being fed. Then both legs went at once, which was rare, and Sull was proud of it. He was sitting in a marketing meeting with Glenda and Farook when suddenly his legs quivered and then turned into a slightly viscous liquid that ran out of his trousers like toothpaste from a tube. The liquid ran down the drain under the table with a soft slurping sound. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley | Alive, Alive Oh
Tue, 25 Jun 2013 10:03:13 -0000
The waves crash onto the blood-red shore, sounding just like the surf on Earth: a dark rumbling full of power. It’s been seventeen years since we left. Narrated by Sile Bermingham. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:03:10 -0000
Here’s how I found out: I was in a bar called Dave’s on East 14th Street. It wasn’t my usual place. I had been dating a woman in Stuyvesant Town. One night after I left, I still wasn’t eager to go home. So on my way I stopped in. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Arkenberg | The Huntsman
Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:01:37 -0000
“It’s the best bargain you’ll get in this town,” the faery woman says. She’s standing by a cracked kitchen sink with mold between the tiles, rinsing diced tomatoes and crooked green jalapeño rings. “A heart for a heart. And my heart’s more than what she’s used to, I’ll tell you that. You couldn’t find better if you went door-to-door from every house in the tithe-projects.” Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Theodora Goss | Princess Lucinda and the Hound of the Moon
Tue, 04 Jun 2013 10:01:34 -0000
When the Queen learned that she could not have a child, she cried for three days. She cried in the clinic in Switzerland, on the shoulder of the doctor, an expert on women’s complaints, leaving tear stains on his white coat. She cried on the train through Austria, while the Alps slipped past the window of her compartment, their white peaks covered with snow. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dennis Danvers | Leaving the Dead
Tue, 28 May 2013 10:03:32 -0000
Darwin thought he might be more alive than other people. Not a whole lot, but ever increasingly, until finally, in a checkout line at Target, he was the last person left alive but his checker. Gabriella, her nametag said, and she was drifting off. Good for her he was the sort of person who reads nametags. Good for them both. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Holly Black | The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue
Tue, 21 May 2013 10:03:29 -0000
There is a werewolf girl in the city. She sits by the phone on a Saturday night, waiting for it to ring. She paints her nails purple. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sean Williams | The Missing Metatarsals
Tue, 14 May 2013 10:01:40 -0000
His head swiveled to track me as we walked in lockstep through security. A birth defect called Möbius syndrome inherited from distant Nepalese ancestors left him with underdeveloped VI and VII cranial nerves, so he can’t blink, bite, or form expressions without the help of a series of tiny implants. My girlfriend Billie is a muscle artist, and she’s tweaked the inspector’s presets a couple of times, giving him conscious control of his face, but that’s not the same as the real thing. Not the same at all. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dahvana Headley | The Traditional
Tue, 07 May 2013 10:01:35 -0000
By your first anniversary, the world’s stopped making paper, and so you can’t give your boyfriend the traditional gift. You never would have anyway, regardless of circumstances. You’re not that kind of girl. You pride yourself on your original sin. It’s the hot you trade in. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hugh Howey | Deep Blood Kettle
Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:03:20 -0000
They say the sky will fill with dust in a bad way if we don’t do something soon. My teacher Mrs. Sandy says that if the meteor hits, it’ll put up enough dirt to block the sun, and everything will turn cold for a long, long while. When I came home and told Pa about this, he got angry. He called Mrs. Sandy a bad word, said she was teaching us nonsense. I told him the dinosaurs died because of dust in the sky. Pa said there weren’t no such thing as dinosaurs. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Karin Tidbeck | A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain
Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:01:37 -0000
On a beach by the sea stands a gutted stone tower. A man is climbing up the remains of a staircase that spirals up the tower’s interior. Vivi sits on the roof, oblivious, counting coins that have spilled from her breast pocket: one fiver, three ones, one golden ten. She’s only wearing a worn pair of pajamas, and the damp breeze from the sea is making her shiver. She has no memory of how she arrived, but is vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps. Narrated by Kelly Catey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kathleen Ann Goonan | A Love Supreme
Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:03:24 -0000
Ellie Santos-Smith grabs a clean white coat as spring dawn brightens her worn Oriental rug and streaks with sun her only luxury, a grand piano. She runs a comb through her jet-black hair, cut short because she thinks that makes her look older. Her smooth skin glows with 20-ish health, though she is 47. Narrated by Claire Bloom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christopher Barzak | Smoke City
Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:01:33 -0000
One night, I woke to the sound of my mother’s voice, as I did when I was a child. The words were familiar to my ear, they matched the voice that formed them, but it was not until I had opened my eyes to the dark of my room and my husband’s snoring that I remembered the words were calling me away from my warm bed and the steady breathing of my children, both asleep in their own rooms across the hall. “Because I could not stop for death,” my mother used to tell me, “he kindly stopped for me.” Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Angélica Gorodischer | The Sense of the Circle
Tue, 26 Mar 2013 10:01:29 -0000
Have you seen those houses on Oroño Boulevard, especially the ones that face east, those dry, cold, serious, heavy houses, with grilles but without gardens, maybe at the most a tile patio paved like the sidewalk? In one of those houses lives Ciro Vázquez Leiva, Cirito. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rich Larson | Let’s Take This Viral
Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:01:38 -0000
Default hadn’t been down in the nocturns for some time, probably half an orbit, but he had just dissolved the geneshare contract with his now-ex-lover and needed to get completely fucking perforated to take his mind off things. His lift was full of revelers all laughing and widecasting the same synthesized whalesong from Old Old Earth. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarena Ulibarri | The Bolt Tightener
Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:03:50 -0000
“There are one thousand eight hundred bolts total,” the old man said. “You’ll work every night until sunrise. Always go in order. Never skip a bolt.” Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:03:58 -0000
One day Lily decided to be someone else. Someone with a past. It was an affliction of hers, wanting this. The desire was seldom triggered by any actual incident or complaint but seemed instead to be related to the act or prospect of lateral movement. She felt it every time a train passed. Narrated by Kimberly Farr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
M. Bennardo | The Herons of Mer de l’Ouest
Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:03:41 -0000
A loon called this morning, loud and clear in the cold hours before dawn, but it was not that which woke me from my sleep. As I opened my eyes, the bay and the beach were wrapped in heavy blackness, invisible clouds shutting out any hint of starlight above. For a moment, I lay in my lean-to, breathing heavily under the shaggy bison skin blanket. Narrated by Adam Paul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | Harry and Marlowe Escape the Mechanical Siege of Paris
Tue, 19 Feb 2013 11:01:23 -0000
Harry looked out the window and thought: At least I saw Paris one more time before it was destroyed in the bombardment. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:01:10 -0000
With minimal fanfare and next to no audience, Invasion of a Small World debuted in the summer of 2016, and after a brief and disappointing run, the series was deservedly shelved. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marly Youmans | Prolegomenon to the Adventures of Chílde Phoenix
Tue, 05 Feb 2013 11:03:35 -0000
Perhaps you’ve heard an anecdote about a child named Cresencio who was skipping barefoot between hills of corn when a shallow bowl in the field, long turbulent with mutterings, broke into pieces. Cresencio spied a tongue of smoke, like the mockings of a demon; he bent, staring into the jagged mouth that was about to spatter the nearby trees with sparks and set his childhood on fire. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kristine Kathryn Rusch | Purity Test
Tue, 22 Jan 2013 11:01:40 -0000
My feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them close and sell them in whatever town I find myself in. Provided I find a town. Provided I ever leave these woods. I have traveled for two days, surviving on puddle water and berries, hoping that the sounds I hear behind me aren’t my father, Roland, and the dogs. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:01:37 -0000
You’ve heard of bottled cities, no doubt—society writ miniscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pin-prick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins. Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament might reclaim the land, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal. Narrated by Christian Beeman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cherie Priest | Addison Howell and the Clockroach
Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:03:26 -0000
Addison Howell didn’t so much arrive in the town of Humptulips as appear there sometime around 1875. He had money, which set him apart from everybody else—because everybody else was working for the logging company, and mostly they didn’t have a pot to piss in, as my Daddy put it. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Kressel | The Sounds of Old Earth
Tue, 01 Jan 2013 11:03:30 -0000
Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Langan | Family Teeth (Part 6): St. Polycarp’s Home For Happy Wanderers
Tue, 25 Dec 2012 11:01:07 -0000
Sheila Halpern got her looks from her Momma, who died pushing her out. Died before, even, but still kept pushing. “You’re the prettiest thing in the whole darn world,” her daddy told her the day he put her on the train for the St. Polycarp’s Home for Happy Wanderers, his age-soft teeth all chipped so everything sounded muffled. She was eight years old, lice riddled, and 90% liar like her daddy. Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
D. Thomas Minton | Dreams in Dust
Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:03:48 -0000
The arrival of the dust-covered girl caught Keraf by surprise. The girl’s slender face, sun-beaten to a deep brown, blended seamlessly into the cloth wrapped around her head. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but she wielded her rifle with ease. Narrated by Rajan Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
JT Petty | Family Teeth (Part 5): American Jackal
Tue, 11 Dec 2012 11:01:59 -0000
He watched her legs approach in the mirror and smiled down at the butter melting on his pancakes when she sat on the stool beside him. “You’re free to sit anywhere you like, but I can’t much promise to be good company,” he said. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:03:57 -0000
Sai woke to the rousing first movement of Vivaldi’s violin concerto in C minor, “Il Sospetto.” He lay still for a minute, letting the music wash over him like a gentle Pacific breeze. The room brightened as the blinds gradually opened to the sunlight. Tilly had woken him right at the end of a light sleep cycle, the optimal time. He felt great: refreshed, optimistic, ready to jump out of bed. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tobias S. Buckell | A Game of Rats and Dragon
Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:01:35 -0000
Moonlighting as a non-player character was a hell of a way to earn a living. Never made much sense to spend all that time garbing up in a virtual uniform that matched gamespace, but Overton took pride in the details. So getting punched in the stomach by someone so caught up in an augmented reality fantasy they couldn’t tell real from script, that left him in a foul mood. All the man had to do was ask the right questions, get Overton’s responses, and move on. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | A Princess of Spain
Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:03:35 -0000
Catherine of Aragon, sixteen years old, danced a pavane in the Spanish style before the royal court of England. Lutes, horns, and tabors played a slow, stately tempo, to which she stepped in time. The ladies of her court, who had traveled with her from Spain, danced with her, treading circles around one another—floating, graceful, without a wasted movement. Narrated by Karesa McElheny. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jeremiah Tolbert | La Alma Perdida de Marguerite Espinoza
Tue, 13 Nov 2012 11:03:30 -0000
Marguerite Espinoza took her last breath as the sun slipped behind the Salt Mountains outside the expansive windows of her third floor bedchamber. Alvardo nearly missed the moment, eavesdropping to the gathered family’s whispered conversations. He had falsely predicted her passing four times in the past three days, but the passing was unmistakable. As Maestro Eusebio had said many times, “When the moment comes, you will know.” And he did. Narrated by Steven Memel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sandra McDonald | Searching for Slave Leia
Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:01:29 -0000
A slip, slide, falling through icy coldness, white noise like TV static. A breeze of hot buttery popcorn. Giddy laughter, sweaty bodies, fanfare music over the intercom, and what’s this? A ten-foot-wide movie poster of young, pale, undernourished Carrie Fisher, posed seductively in a gold metal bikini with a collar and chain around her neck. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Arkenberg | The Suicide’s Guide to the Absinthe of Perdition
Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:01:46 -0000
You cannot stop an angel who truly wants to fall. This is the first thing you learn in Pandemonium. The second thing you learn in Pandemonium is how to drink absinthe. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:03:04 -0000
“Return fire!” the colonel ordered, bleeding on the deck of her ship, ferocity raging in her nonetheless controlled voice. Narrated by Rajan Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Barr Kirtley | The Black Bird
Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:01:31 -0000
The black bird on the mantelpiece spoke. It said, “Nevermore.” Spade looked up from cleaning his pistol. The bird, a black-lacquered falcon statuette, sat motionless. Spade placed the pistol down on his desk, pushed back the brim of his hat, and approached the bird. “You talk?” Narrated by Arte Johnson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Reed | Flowing Unimpeded to the Enlightenment
Tue, 02 Oct 2012 10:03:40 -0000
Kartar is forty and Irish-Indian, blessed with an avatar’s sterling looks and a fine deep voice that lingers in the mind. He wears a piezosuit and a bright necktie advertising Chinese wetware, and a new Everything is pinned to his broad lapel. Twenty admirers have him surrounded. Narrated by Nathan Dana Aldritch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nina Kiriki Hoffman | Monster, Finder, Shifter
Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:03:42 -0000
My father’s family had produced monster-finders for several generations. More monsters were being born than ever; our village didn’t have enough finder power to track them all, or shaper power to abort or fix those the finders found, so many people had to offer their offspring to the Shadows. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Peter Sursi | The Seven Samovars
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 10:03:36 -0000
“The first samovar, the silver one at the end with the little bird perched atop the key, is filled to the top with Life,” she says, “freshly brewed each morning at sunrise exactly. A few drops will perk up most customers on a Monday morning, to be sure. And most of them need it, don’t you think?” Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Harry Harrison | The Streets of Ashkelon
Tue, 11 Sep 2012 10:01:22 -0000
Somewhere above, hidden by the eternal clouds of Wesker’s World, a thunder rumbled and grew. Trader Garth stopped suddenly when he heard it, his boots sinking slowly into the muck, and cupped his good ear to catch the sound. It swelled and waned in the thick atmosphere, growing louder. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | My Wife Hates Time Travel
Tue, 04 Sep 2012 10:01:17 -0000
From the very beginning—which I guess is also the middle and the end if you follow the bent logic involved and arrange events by some scheme other than strict chronological order—there was never any way of knowing which one of us, my wife or myself, was going to invent time travel. Narrated by Rajan Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kat Howard | Breaking the Frame
Tue, 28 Aug 2012 10:01:55 -0000
The photograph is of a woman at the center of a forest. She is slim and tall and pale as the birches she stands among. The shadows turn her ribs and spine into branches, into knots in the wood. Around her arms, the peeling white bark of the birches, curved in bracelets. Between her thighs, the hair is dense and springy like moss. She is turning into a tree. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Charlie Jane Anders | Love Might Be Too Strong a Word
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 10:03:52 -0000
Here’s how I remember it: A touch shocked me. I was reaching for a flash-seared bog-oyster, and then a fingertip, softer than I’d ever felt, brushed my knuckle. The softness startled me so much, it took me a moment to realize the hand had seven fingers, three more than mine. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Linda Nagata | A Moment Before It Struck
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:01:43 -0000
He felt death coming a moment before it struck. In the lingering gray twilight, Smoke lay on his bedding, eyes not quite closed and mind adrift, only half-aware of the sounds of the encampment around him: steel on whetstone, the rattle of dice, a soft song, and loud bragging. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ken Liu | The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species
Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:03:40 -0000
There is no definitive census of all the intelligent species in the universe. Not only are there perennial arguments about what qualifies as intelligence, but each moment and everywhere, civilizations rise and fall, much as the stars are born and die. Time devours all. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maria Dahvana Headley | Give Her Honey When You Hear Her Scream
Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:03:59 -0000
In the middle of the maze, there’s always a monster. If there were no monster, people would happily set up house where it’s warm and windowless and comfortable. The monster is required. The monster is a real estate disclosure. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Peter S. Beagle | Gordon, the Self-made Cat
Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:03:56 -0000
Once upon a time, to a family of house mice there was born a son named Gordon. He looked very much like his father and mother and all his brothers and sisters, who were gray and had bright, twitchy, black eyes, but what went on inside Gordon was very different from what went on inside the rest of his family. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joe Haldeman | Four Short Novels
Tue, 10 Jul 2012 10:01:42 -0000
Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money. When you started to feel the little aches and twinges that meant your body was running down, you just got in line at Immortality, Incorporated, and handed them your credit card. As long as you had at least a million bucks—and eventually everybody did—they would reset you to whatever age you liked. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jake Kerr | Requiem in the Key of Prose
Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:01:40 -0000
There is such a thing as an antifuse. This device is used to maintain the ongoing flow of electricity when there is local failure. The antifuse works similarly to a fuse in that it is designed to be sacrificed for a specific goal. But while a fuse is sacrificed to stop electricity from flowing, an antifuse is sacrificed to guarantee that the electricity does not stop. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki & Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
George R.R. Martin | The Way of Cross and Dragon
Tue, 26 Jun 2012 10:03:39 -0000
“Heresy,” he told me. The brackish waters of his pool sloshed gently. “Another one?” I said wearily. “There are so many these days.” Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kelsey Ann Barrett | My Teacher, My Enemy
Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:03:06 -0000
My enemy’s body is still warm when I take my knife to him. Stripped to his skin and lain upon his back, he looks much less frightening than he had when he was alive, armed, and desperate to kill me. But there is still power in the shape of his relaxing muscles and the size of his cooling frame, and, as he is a foot taller than I am, I feel a surge of pride in my accomplishment that is even greater than the hot pleasure of the kill. Narrated by Emily Janice Card. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Langan | Renfrew’s Course
Tue, 12 Jun 2012 10:03:09 -0000
Six feet tall, the statue had been carved from wood that retained most of its whiteness, even though the date cut into its base read 2005, seven years ago. Jim thought the color might be due to its not having been finished—splinters stood out from the wood’s uneven surface—but didn’t know enough about carpentry to be certain. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Simon McCaffery | The Cristóbal Effect
Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:03:45 -0000
The wooden detour barricade is barely in place when I spot the car closing fast from the east. Just a glint of light against the desert hills, yet I know it is his car. I ignite the last flare and toss it onto the centerline of the lonely rural two-lane highway. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Melanie Rawn | Mother of All Russiya
Tue, 22 May 2012 10:03:26 -0000
She paced the stones, her feet separated from the chill by sable-lined slippers. She was cold despite them, cold from her toes to her crown. Perhaps it was the vengeance of the fire, that she had not joined her husband in its embrace. Long ago, he had decided that he wished to be immolated in the manner of their ancestors. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
C.C. Finlay | The Cross-Time Accountants Fail To Kill Hitler Because Chuck Berry Does The Twist
Tue, 15 May 2012 10:01:47 -0000
Mabel blurred through the Doorway and stumbled into a wall. She groped for a fingerhold, anything to prop herself up until the gut-twisting vertigo passed. Every time she experienced the blur it got a little worse. All that worse added up to worst because she had made hundreds of auditing trips to the past during her thirty-nine year career in cross-time accounting. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Catherynne M. Valente | A Hole to China
Tue, 08 May 2012 10:03:20 -0000
Tristram was certain she would never have made the attempt had she not heard that it was a thing other children often did. She did so want to be like other children—lolling about like great striped cats, batting at moths with oversized paws, snapping at dust-motes with wet pink jaws. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Linda Nagata | Nightside on Callisto
Tue, 01 May 2012 10:01:25 -0000
A faint, steady vibration carried through the igloo’s massive ice walls—a vibration that shouldn’t have been there. Jayne heard it in her sleep. Age had not dulled her soldier’s reflexes, honed by decades spent on watch against incursions of the Red. Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath. The vibration hummed in the walls, in the bed frame, in the mattress, perceivable even over Carly’s raspy breathing. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kim Stanley Robinson | Our Town
Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:03:34 -0000
I found my friend Desmond Kean at the northeast corner of the penthouse viewing terrace, assembling a telescope with which to look at the world below. He took a metal cylinder holding a lens and screwed it into the side of the telescope, then put his eye to the lens, the picture of concentrated absorption. How often I had found him like this in recent months! It made me shiver a little; this new obsession of his, so much more intense than the handmade clocks, or the stuffed birds, or the geometric proofs, seemed to me a serious malady. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:01:52 -0000
The apartment was in his name, and the Accord was in hers. It took Lauren less than a minute to step out one door and into the other. She put her suitcase in the floorboard and her laptop bag in the passenger seat. Her container garden fit snugly in the back. Narrated by Heather Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Caitlín R. Kiernan | The Steam Dancer (1896)
Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:01:11 -0000
Missouri Banks lives in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains, here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly up towards the western sky. She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison’s electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and elixirs. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vandana Singh | Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:03:38 -0000
Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, Birha laid her hand on the dog’s neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was revisit what had happened all those years ago. Yet her irritation subsided before the memory. She could still see it with the shocking clarity of yesterday: the great, closed eyelid set in the enormous alien stronghold, opening in response to her trick. Narrated by Vikas Adam. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:01:51 -0000
Something is eating the starship Stephen W. Hawking, chewing it slowly and efficiently to pieces. Hurtling through hyperspace, or merely hanging suspended therein (who can really tell about hyperspace?), the vessel has become entangled with an unknown entity that exhibits at least one recognizable attribute: curiosity.stev Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:03:31 -0000
Nicole Sanders was beautiful. One night after work, she stopped off at a bar downtown, which is where she met the beast. “Hi,” the beast said, in a gentle voice. “Can I buy you a drink?” Narrated by Janis Ian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kathleen Ann Goonan | Electric Rains
Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:01:28 -0000
Ella sat by Nana’s body for two days before she pushed it out the window. She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do. It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains. Narrated by Christie Yant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:01:44 -0000
I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:03:28 -0000
My curse is that I set off alarms. Smoke alarms. Car alarms. House alarms. It doesn’t matter what kind; I set them all off as soon as I get close to them. Close is usually about thirty feet. I don’t know why I set them off. I haven’t always been like this. I used to be fairly normal. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carrie Vaughn | Harry and Marlowe and the Talisman of the Cult of Egil
Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:03:34 -0000
Carefully, with gloved hands, she removed the object from its stone niche, where it had rested for centuries deep underground, inside the dormant volcano where the mysterious Icelandic cult that guarded it made its home. It hardly weighed anything. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Gregory Benford | Dark Sanctuary
Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:03:53 -0000
In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next. Narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brooke Bolander | Her Words Like Hunting Vixens Spring
Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:02:43 -0000
The fox shoulders and wriggles from between her jaws, first the whiskery, pointed muzzle and then all the rest. Finally free, it shakes its sodden coat and shoots Rosa a disgusted look. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ken Liu | The Five Elements of the Heart Mind
Tue, 24 Jan 2012 11:00:48 -0000
The Dandelion lost structural integrity so quickly that I doubt the bridge even had time for a distress call, and this escape pod’s radio is only sub-light. Narrated by Ted & Heather Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Marissa Lingen | On the Acquisition of Phoenix Eggs (Variant)
Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:00:23 -0000
Lloyds was not willing to insure a phoenix egg, not even of the most impeccable pedigree. Hence the inspection of the purchase became a great deal more important. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sarah Monette | Blue Lace Agate
Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:01:24 -0000
Jamie Keller and his partner hadn’t found the shoggoth larva smugglers yet, but his boss, the head of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation’s southeast hub, had other things on his mind. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Megan Arkenberg | How Many Miles to Babylon?
Tue, 03 Jan 2012 11:00:28 -0000
It’s getting harder and harder to pretend we aren’t racing along the edge of a knife, one box of flashlights and a fistful of batteries away from the mercy of the things in the darkness. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Andrew Penn Romine | The Parting Glass
Sat, 03 Dec 2011 11:01:05 -0000
I gulp the whiskey and it burns my plastic throat, sets my nutrient sac on fire. I've got filters, but they haven't been changed in six months. Too expensive. Narrated by Joe Barrett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vylar Kaftan | The Sighted Watchmaker
Thu, 01 Dec 2011 11:01:22 -0000
The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship's net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:01:55 -0000
Georgie got rid of most of what she'd inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn't really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lisa Nohealani Morton | How Maartje and Uppinder Terraformed Mars (Marsmen Trad.)
Tue, 01 Nov 2011 07:01:04 -0000
As her breath hissed out it thickened and spread and wrapped around the planet. Before long it was pushing everything down; my mother's breath became the atmosphere of Mars. Narrated by Claire Bloom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Farland | Against Eternity
Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:01:25 -0000
The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields. Narrated by Stephan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam-Troy Castro | Her Husband’s Hands
Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:01:22 -0000
They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ursula K. Le Guin | The Island of the Immortals
Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:01:07 -0000
Somebody asked me if I'd heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:01:00 -0000
Serena still felt the heat of her passage through Kaluza space. That incandescent journey via the bowels of a singularity had raised her temperature dangerously near the fatal point. Narrated by Harlan Ellison®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Genevieve Valentine | The Nearest Thing
Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:01:45 -0000
We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you've asked for more information about us, which means you're thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all: You. Narrated by Arte Johnson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John Varley | Just Another Perfect Day
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:01:21 -0000
I know how you’re feeling. You wake up alone in a strange room, you get up, you look around, you soon discover that both doors are locked from the outside. It’s enough to unsettle anybody. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:41 -0000
When it came time for her restructuring on her sixteenth birthday, she was going to walk into the room, and ask to be made a Tiffany. Narrated by Taylor Meskimen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:01:51 -0000
I miss you already. But you know that. What you don’t know is just how proud I am of you. You were born for this, and no one could possibly be able to handle such a demanding job as well as you. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Heather Scott, Gabrielle de Cuir, Ted Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:01:04 -0000
The following transcript details the last known use of the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor, once a mandatory install on all craft equipped for interstellar travel. Narrated by Amanda Carlin, with Stefan Rudnicki and Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
K.C. Ball | Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole
Tue, 07 Jun 2011 07:01:28 -0000
No one knows what happens when an object crosses the point around a black hole known as an event horizon and falls into the singularity. Narrated by Stefan Rudniki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 May 2011 10:01:39 -0000
Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry. Copyright 2011 by Nancy Kress. Narrated by Jim Meskimen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 03 May 2011 07:01:43 -0000
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Anne McCaffrey | Velvet Fields
Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:01:38 -0000
Of course we moved into the cities of the planet we now know we must call Zobranoirundisi when Worlds Federated finally permitted a colony there. | Copyright 1973, 2001 by Anne McCaffrey First appeared in Worlds of If, from The Girl Who Heard Dragons Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, The Virginia Kidd Agency. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tom Crosshill | Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son
Tue, 19 Apr 2011 10:01:11 -0000
Narrated by Stefan Rudniki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Robert Reed | Woman Leaves Room
Tue, 22 Mar 2011 07:01:50 -0000
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Maggie Clark | Saying the Names
Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:01:52 -0000
Narrated by Emily Janice Card. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
James Patrick Kelly | Breakaway, Backdown
Tue, 22 Feb 2011 08:01:43 -0000
Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 15 Feb 2011 08:01:46 -0000
Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cat Rambo | Long Enough and Just So Long
Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:01:27 -0000
Narrated by Susan Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Orson Scott Card | The Elephants of Poznan
Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:01:13 -0000
Narrated by Orson Scott Card. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:01:23 -0000
Narrated by Rosalyn Landor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ursula K. Le Guin | The Silence of the Asonu
Tue, 28 Dec 2010 11:01:21 -0000
The silence of the Asonu is proverbial. We know now that the Asonu are not dumb, but that once past early childhood they speak only very rarely, to anyone, under any circumstances. | Copyright 1998 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Originally published in Orion. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Tallerman | Jenny’s Sick
Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:01:13 -0000
Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kristine Kathryn Rusch | The Observer
Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:01:09 -0000
Narrated by Sarah Tolbert (via Drabblecast). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:01:31 -0000
Narrated by Sheri Mann Stewart (via Escape Pod). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alice Sola Kim | Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters
Tue, 16 Nov 2010 11:01:35 -0000
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Charles Yu | Standard Loneliness Package
Tue, 02 Nov 2010 10:00:22 -0000
Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who’s doing it to you. A migraine is two hundred. Not that I get the money. The company gets it. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus reimbursement for painkillers. Not that they work. I feel pain for money. Other people’s pain. Physical, emotional, you name it. Copyright 2010 by Charles Yu. Narrated by Christian Rummel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John R. Fultz | The Taste of Starlight
Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:00:57 -0000
Narrated by Kristoffer Tabori. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joe R. Lansdale | Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back
Tue, 12 Oct 2010 10:00:06 -0000
(Boom!) That’s a little scientist joke, and the proper way to begin this. As for the purpose of my notebook, I’m uncertain. Perhaps to organize my thoughts and not to go insane. | Copyright 1986 Joe R. Lansdale. First appeared in Nukes edited by John MacLay. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cat Rambo | Amid the Words of War
Tue, 21 Sep 2010 07:01:23 -0000
Narrated by Don Leslie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Yoon Ha Lee | Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain
Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:01:20 -0000
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joe Haldeman | More Than the Sum of His Parts
Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:01:24 -0000
21 August 2058. They say I am to keep a detailed record of my feelings, my perceptions, as I grow accustomed to the new parts. To that end, they gave me an apparatus that blind people use for writing, like a tablet with guide wires. It is somewhat awkward. But a recorder would be useless, since I will not have a mouth for some time, and I can't type blind with only one hand. | Copyright 1985 by Joe Haldeman Originally appeared in Playboy. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 17 Aug 2010 04:01:29 -0000
Narrated by Christie Yant (for StarShipSofa). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Catherynne M. Valente | How to Become a Mars Overlord
Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:01:09 -0000
Welcome, Aspiring Potentates! We are tremendously gratified at your interest in our little red project, and pleased that you recognize the potential growth opportunities inherent in whole-planet domination. Of course we remain humble in the face of such august and powerful interests, and seek only to showcase the unique and challenging career paths currently available on the highly desirable, iconic, and oxygen-rich landscape of Mars. | Copyright 2010 by Catherynne M. Valente. Narrated by Robin Sachs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Genevieve Valentine | The Zeppelin Conductors’ Society Annual Gentlemen’s Ball
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:01:41 -0000
Narrated by Rosalyn Landor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carol Emshwiller | No Time Like the Present
Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:01:40 -0000
Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tue, 22 Jun 2010 10:00:39 -0000
I never knew my mother, and I never understood why she did what she did. I ought to be grateful that she was crazy enough to cut out her implant so she could get pregnant. But it also meant she was crazy enough to hide the pregnancy until termination wasn't an option, knowing the whole time that she'd never get to keep the baby. That she'd lose everything. That her household would lose everything because of her. | Copyright 2010 by Carrie Vaughn. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Barr Kirtley | Cats in Victory
Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:01:03 -0000
Narrated by Rajan Khanna (from Starship Sofa). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jack McDevitt | The Cassandra Project
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:01:10 -0000
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vylar Kaftan | I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno
Tue, 01 Jun 2010 07:02:50 -0000
Narrated by Mur Lafferty of Escape Pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices