by Lord Dunsany
Read by Steve Anderson
There was a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx.
Read by Anna Schwind
Originally Published in Shimmer
The bearded Spaniard says little to her. He prefers to kiss her and mount her and have her pour his drink for him.
But the priests speak often, furiously. They show her drawings, they explain. The priests have images of martyrs drenched in blood, holding their own heads on a platter, their bodies pierced by arrows.
The priests make her kneel before their blessed Virgin and pray. She has prayed to others before and it is not so difficult to pray to new gods. It is more difficult to have lost her name. Even more difficult to have lost the jaguar shape.
But she does not remember much about those times either. It must have been years ago. She’s been the Spaniard’s mistress for an eternity. It has been like this forever, eating at his table, sleeping in his bed. Although it must not have been forever; she remembers there was a time when she could barely understand him and now his words are clearer although his meaning is the same.
Rated R for Violence, Including Gore
by Matt Bell
Read by Rish Outfield of The Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine
Originally published in Barrellhouse
The plumber always dies with the same surprised look on his face, his mouth hanging open as he flies upward through the air before being born again at the beginning of the world. He’s tiny and frightened without his mushrooms and his fireballs, desperately banging his head against blocks, looking for more. Sometimes, between reincarnations, the plumber thinks he senses God trying to decide whether to give him another chance or to just bag the whole thing. He’s scared then, but who wouldn’t be? He prays for continuation and then God says Continue and the music plays that means the plumber will live again. Back in the world, he realizes that the God he senses between deaths is there when he’s alive too, guiding his motions. His triumphs are God’s triumphs but so are his failures. It bothers him that God can fail but he doesn’t show it. He is a stoic little plumber, looking for mushrooms and jumping on turtles. He is not a philosopher, or at least not until after the Princess is safe and he has the time to think things through. Still, sometimes when he’s alive and running or, heaven forbid, swimming, he realizes that the God Who Continues is possibly not the only god there is. Surely, that god isn’t the one who put all the collapsing platforms and strange, angry wildlife everywhere. At first he thinks it’s the Turtle King, the one who captured the Princess and started him on this whole adventure, but then he thinks, Who made the Turtle King? Not God, or at least not his God. Does this prove the existence of the Devil? He doesn’t know.
Rated PG for plumbers, philosophy, and good ol’ fashioned shrooms
(Hey! Look at us! Fifty miniatures!)
Read by Sarah Tolbert
The dream jerks me awake and I stare at the rough plaster ceiling. My body is filmed with sweat, and the pattern of cracks above me looks just like Nevada.
The dream leaves me hollow. An empty place like the inside of a drum stretched tight, a hollow place echoing with short sharp cries of dread or despair.
The dream forces tears from me eyes, crawling slowly, thick like worms, drying into sticky crusts of salt.
I blink once, twice, and emerge from the shadow of the dream. The pit of of my stomach aches, as if punched, once, twice.
I blink three times and I’m out of it. Out.
Rated PG for Waking Dreams (Not the Idealistic Kind)
by Mike Allen.
Read by James Trimarco.
Originally appeared in Weird Tales.
Some of the asides in your article made me realize (Gods, can I be dense sometimes) that when you spoke of concerns about “arcane rites” in response to the invite to my Halloween party the next evening, that you possibly weren’t kidding and perhaps had some genuine anxieties. I really should stress that my wife and I had planned for the Halloween party to be occult-free — no spirits other than the liquid sort!
Rated PG for warlocks in your inbox.
Read by John Meagher
Extracted from “Tales From the City of Seams,” Originally Published in Polyphony 4
One day as I sat in the restaurant savoring my lunch, a man in an ivory suit came into the place. His head was as white and hairless as an eggshell, and when he spoke, every syllable came out twisted into an odd shape. I think he was Belgian. “Daughter of Lu Ch’eng-Huan, far removed,” he said, ”I have grown impatient with your truculence. I have dealt with you in good faith. I have offered you riches — gems and antiques, property and estates, significant shares in profitable concerns — but you have mistaken my generosity for desperation. If you will not part with the soup in a fair exchange, I shall have to take it by force.”
Michelle Sze was over at a corner table, taking care of some accounting matters. “Get lost,” she said.
Rated PG for some very old soup
Happy Chinese New Year!
Read by Ann Leckie
Originally published in Ideomancer
It is legend how my mother kept my grandmother’s eye sockets clean with the pure white feather of a cockatoo. She often sent me to the forests to pick marigolds to stack high around Grandmother’s skull. Grandmother loved the smell of the marigolds. She told me so every time I entered the house with an armful of fragrant weeds.
After my grandmother’s head had been sitting in the altar room for a month, my mother realized my grandmother was dying, not because of her missing body, but because she was bored. Mother brought Grandmother into the living room and positioned her right in front of the window. There Grandmother sat happily for a week until Dad caught her promising her skull to an epileptic candy vendor.
Rated R: For Skulls, Sweet and Otherwise, and Days of the Dead
By Eugie Foster.
Read by Melissa Bugaj.
Originally published in Cricket.
The maiden’s amber eyes glowed in the moonlight. A single tear glistened
and rained down her moon-white face.
“Don’t cry, lovely one,” Shakko barked, alarmed.
The maiden lifted the sleeve of her jasmine-yellow kimono and dabbed at her
eyes. “Why should I not cry?” she asked. “My champion says he will sleep
as Master Sun opens his house to the heavens, and when his windows close at
dusk, I will surely die.”
Rated PG: for outfoxing foxes.
by Tim Pratt
Read by M.K. Hobson
When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Clio, the muse of history, decided to unhitch the present from the past and make a few changes….Let the Age of Damnfool Things come, and sweep retroactively through the past, every idiot misconception made real.
Rated PG: for mischievous muses
by Cat Rambo
Read by Mur Lafferty
Originally Published in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight
In order to conserve color, the governments first banned newspaper inserts, the ones where dresses and dishwashers and plastic toys and figurines of gnomes with wary smiles tumbled across glossy surfaces. Readers faced columns of type interspersed with dour black and white line drawings, no slick sheets cascading on their laps as they unfolded the newsprint to gaze at the reports of latest developments in The Color Crisis. Others turned to the Internet, monochromatic monitors scrolled by blogs denouncing the Administration, the liberals, the conservatives, the capitalists, alien spiders, and a previously obscure cult known as the Advanced Altar of the Rainbow Serpent.
The change had been almost imperceptible at first. Only artists, fashion designers and gardeners noticed the dimming of shades, the shadows of reds, blues, purples that blossomed from less verdant stems. They brought the shift to the attention of white-coated scientists, who measured the changes in angstroms, then announced that laboratory results proved it true. Somewhere, somehow, color, once thought an inexhaustible natural resource, was running out, and doing so quickly.
Rated PG: For Bleeding Colors
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