“It is an axe, Mr. Selfry,” the man said. He produced a prybar — from where, Richard wasn’t sure — and, with a great squealing and popping of nails, pried the lid off the crate. Richard left the safety of the doorway and went out onto the porch just as the man set the lid aside. Peering into the crate, Richard saw only darkness, as if the box were full of ink, but then something glinted silver, and — as if his eyes were adjusting to a moonlit night, instead of midafternoon sun — he saw the great silver crescent of an axehead, nestled among styrofoam packing peanuts that were, inexplicably, black instead of white. It was a double-bladed axe, with a long three-sided pyramidal spike emerging from the top.

“I don’t understand,” Richard said. “This thing is a family heirloom? From Great Grandma Melody? It doesn’t even look old.”

Rated R: contains a weapon smarter than average, and more purposeful.

Besides, Tucson was too hot in summer.

It was so hot, way up into the hundred and tens, that the only refuge was in Betty’s pool. We stayed out there the whole hot afternoon, and when the sun went down it didn’t even get all that much cooler. Neither of us had a stitch of clothes on as we lay submerged, lying on twin yellow plastic floatables. It was good to be naked with Betty, I could look over at her and see all the things a body could survive. She had that old desert skin that bore a million wrinkles and just hung off her. It made me feel like maybe I could survive in this world too. Betty kept our cups of Jim Beam and Mountain Dew full all afternoon and into the night, cause as she said it, it was too hot not to drink. On about midnight, the hot air was just starting to feel bareable again, but neither of us were keen on getting out.

Rated R: for desert weather, both heat and storms.

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

Read by Elie Hirschman

In all the fairy stories, when the hero is magically gifted with an understanding of the speech of birds, it actually does him some good.  A robin brings him a message from his true love, or a bluebird tells him about buried treasure, or a starling warns him of a traitor among his companions.  It doesn’t really work that way, though — not in real life.  Birds mostly talk about seeds and worms and the breeze and nest-building and the state of their eggs.  I should know; I’ve been listening to them for seven years.

In all that time, they’ve only ever said one thing that interested me, and that one almost got me killed.

Rated PG: For Hungry Ravens, Corpses, and Curses (Not the Profane Kind)

Read by Brian Rollins

Originally published in SciFi.com (Yes, we know. We’re still pointing at it and calling it Fantasy)

Hitomi waited on the sidewalk, uncomfortably aware of the police dirigibles hovering overhead.  Their hulking mass was made even more ominous by the glare of their searchlights, fueled by kerosene, panning back and forth along the streets.  A constant hiss of steam emanated from their engines, softer now that they were idling, but all the more menacing for that.

It was a chill autumn morning, and Hitomi’s breath misted in the air, colored orange by the sun peeking over the Minneapolis cityscape to the east.  Likewise colored orange were the smoke and steam rising from the bookstore across the street — the bookstore where Hitomi worked.  The store had been broken into last night and set afire.  As far as anyone could tell, no money or merchandise had been stolen.  This was all in accordance with the modus operandi of the Burners.

Rated PG: Contains dirigibles, printing presses, and Edgar Allan Poe

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

Read by Jack Mangan

Originally published in Fantasy Magazine.

Ofelia was a superhero.  She told me so without reserve.  “It’s safe for me to tell you,” she said.  “I can sense you’re not a villain.  Besides, it would be unfair to keep it from you.  It won’t be easy, you know, being involved with a superhero girl.”

It did take some getting used to.  She received her mission briefings in birdsong, in radio static, encoded in every third word backwards from a breaking news bulletin on the televisions in a specific store window.  She saw battle plans drawn out for her in cloud patterns, coffee cup rings, the movement of players on a soccer field.  During these moments she would stand frozen in mid-motion, her head cocked to the side, listening intently.  Then she would drop—literally drop—whatever she was doing and dash away, calling apologies over her shoulder.

Rated PG: For Superheroes, Secret Identities, and Wham! Pow! BOOM!

Read by Phoebe Harris

Originally Published by Strange Horizons.

Irris was a changed man. When he went out fishing, he didn’t spend the day drunk or asleep in the boat and then come home with nothing, the way everyone expected. Instead he made a full day’s catch early, and then picked up an axe and went to cut wood. He sat down to dinner sober, played with the baby, spoke pleasantly to his wife and sister. In the evening, instead of drinking, he sat in front of the fire and knotted nets, or carved fishhooks. It’s because he almost died, the neighbors whispered. Everyone had seen the scar. Everyone wondered how long the change could last.

There were other things, little strangenesses that never made their way out of the house for the villagers to be aware of them. For instance, one afternoon Ytine brought him a dish of vetch, and he said, “My dear, it amuses me to call this gravel. So the next time I ask you for a bowl of gravel, you’ll know what I want.” Water was poison, working was sleeping. The list of changed names seemed to grow every day. Voud wasn’t sure why Ytine went along with it, except that the new Irris was kind and hard-working, and doted on the baby. And maybe, thought Voud, that was reason enough. The crane had said not to waste her grief on Irris, and she hadn’t cried when she’d heard the whispery-voiced god say he was dead.

But one evening Irris came home in an especially good mood. “Good fishing means good trading,” he said. He had needles, and fiber — dyed and spun — for Ytine, and a tiny, wheeled cart for the baby. “And Voud,” he said, “I hear you’re a hunter.” He handed her a bronze knife. It was small and its plain haft was dented, but it was a real metal knife and it was hers.

That was when she knew for certain that her brother was dead. Irris would never have thought to buy her something she wanted so much. Not without her telling him, and likely not even then. She sat there with the knife in her hand and cried.

Rated R: For Gods, Mortals, Frogs, and Other Potential Sacrifices

Read by Dave Thompson

Originally published in Ideomancer

My ex-wife tells me on the phone that she thinks she saw a kid in her yard last night. She’s got a lot of stuff in the shed that’s worth money, like her boyfriend’s tools and some nice bikes, and she’s always going on about how her neighbors are coming over to steal stuff.

“It couldn’t have been a kid,” I say. “Maybe that old guy from across the street? He’s pretty small.” I’m encouraging her, I know, but it’s possible it was that old guy. I once caught him peeping into the dining room window, and when I confronted him, he said he thought he smelled gas. That was when Steph and I were still together.

“I know how an old man moves,” Steph says. “I know how a kid moves. This was a kid.”

 Rated PG: For the Kids in the Yard

Read by Bob Eccles

Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

CORRECTION: The original file had an error midway through, which has been corrected now.

Rated PG: For Dark Deeds done in Dark Places

Read by Ben Phillips

Originally published in Abyss & Apex.

I rock in the bentwood chair on the porch and wait. I know about the
bodies in the arroyo, in the mesquite ash between the charred trunks
of the live oaks. The grass beneath the mesquite had grown long in
winter rains and was shriveled dry by the summer heat. Fire had
crisped it quickly, and the oaks were dense hard wood, old fuels,
burning long and hot and all-consuming.

Eventually they all come to me like homing pigeons, those unlucky ones
who die in the unforgiving desert, short water or caught out at night
with no fire and not enough of them to huddle together to keep warm,
not thinking how cold the badlands get in the middle of the night with
nothing to keep in the day’s heat. They come to me at dusk,
hollow-eyed and bewildered to my front yard, all of them. They stand,
wavering in the moonlight, waiting for me to let them go.

Rated R: Ghosts are Unhappy for a Reason

Read by Kane Lynch.

Originally published in Strange Horizons.

If you wanta learn you somethin’, go on down to a place where two roads cross. Get there Saturday ’round midnight, and wait there ’til Sunday morning—do that for nine Sundays, all in a row. The dark man, he’ll send his dog to watch on you while you wait. And on the ninth morning, the dark man will meet you. And he will learn you—anything you wanta learn. But you remember this: that dark man, he don’t work for free.

Rated R: Themes of abuse, and dark deals at the crossroads.

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No polos or coffee mugs yet. Maybe next time. Thanks very much for all your continued patience and support, from all of us at Escape Artists!

Read by Tina Connolly

Originally published in Fantasy Magazine.

Neither knew what the Weirdo did with his captives, but it was hard to think of a possibility that wasn’t horrible. Not when you saw that figure, with its thatched gray hair, lumpy shoulders and white hands as big as baseball gloves, carry some hapless creature into the house with the broken drainpipes and curtained windows. Even cooking and eating seemed too simple, too close to human.

“Sal,” Macey said, “we’ve got to find out.”

“You keep saying that.” Sal picked fuzzies off the bedspread, her mind drifting to the fair’s candy-bright commotion.

“But now I have a plan.”

Rated PG: Contains weirdos, children (the two are not mutually exclusive), and a very small door.

Read by Chris Reynaga

Every forty or fifty years the incubus and the succubus got together
to catch up. This time they met in a quiet little bar, and the incubus
said, “Yeah, it’s been hard these past few years. I did porn for a
while, but these days, with Viagra and everything, it doesn’t matter
what kind of a woodsman you are, because anybody can pop a pill and
perform superhuman feats of sexual prowess.”

The succubus nodded in sympathy, invisible serpents twining in her
hair. “I hear you. There’s easy money in internet porn, but it’s no
good for me, I miss the personal connection. But you can still do the
gigolo thing, right?”

Rated R: It’s an incubus and a succubus. There will be S-E-X! (Or, at least, talk of sex)

“I married your mother for her skull. It’s no secret.”

“Letis is indeed the most beautiful woman in Trepa and for seven leagues around. But that’s not the same thing. The ugliest man alive during your grandfather’s time turned out to have a skull of exquisite beauty, as your grandfather knew all along…

Rated R. for morbid themes. Happy Halloween!

“He’d been down here about six years when I knew him. Had a girl he was seeing name of Corine. She was pretty. Had this line of dark little moles, just like pinpricks, all along her jaw. Made me think of the sort of bangles they put on women’s veils out in Baghdad. She’d come by the shop sometimes, and we’d have to make him stop working until she went away for fear he’d get distracted and lose a finger.

“It was different for them. What with everything else that was going on back then, King’s getting shot was like Kennedy in Dallas and the planes in New York all wrapped up in one…

Rated R. for language and difficult situations.

Narrated by David Michel.

So there was Orange John near the war fountain in his oversized orange suit and Bozo hair, knotting himself up a real nice stegosaurus, when up came the young balloon man. He was a skinny boy in a black T-shirt, rainbow vest, and jeans painted like all the sample chips in a paint store. His limp balloons hung from his waistband like little tongues, and he stopped a dozen or so yards away from Orange John.

“Jack Many-Colors,” he said, tipping an imaginary hat.

“Orange John,” said Orange John, with a squint and a nod.

And so it began.

Rated PG. For Carnie Language and Balloon Violence

“I present to you the academy’s 150th class of brave, skilled, hard-working probationary firefighters!” Chief Kelly finally said.

Oh, shit.

Rated R. for fiery language.

Most dragons rarely think about accounting. But you’ve worked hard to acquire that hoard of gold and jewels–shouldn’t you be keeping track of what happens to it? Just sitting on it isn’t good enough any more. That’s why you need accounting. Here are some tips:

Rated PG. for creative book-keeping.

Excerpt not included this week. You’ll just have to listen!

Rated PG. for revisionist “history.”

Bonus: If you enjoyed this week’s Tanith Lee story, you might want to go check out Fantasy Magazine’s audio version of “Clockatrice” by Tanith Lee, read by perennial PodCastle favorite M. K. Hobson. Enjoy!

You and I were different. Making love on sprawling landings we learned that one way of life wasn’t better than another, and that we all shared the same ultimate misery, doomed to be born and die in this building. Who’d made this place? Had we built it ourselves generations ago when we still had legs to run from something fierce and predatory that circled our tower, waiting for travellers: the jumpers, the fliers, those with the twisted bed sheet ropes?

Rated R. for sex and dismemberment in enclosed places.

I turned around and found myself face to face with a minotaur.

“I think your dog would have done a better job,” Phil said. “And you are?”

Rated X. for S-E-X.

Avram had no more talent for wonder working than for farming. No matter how hard he prayed, he could not call even a sparrow down from a tree. His Sabbaths were spent at a small synagog in the town, and the rabbi there had no idea of the way to Paradise save the path of a good life. As for Avram’s attempt to animate a golem, the less said about it the better.

And that is how Avram came upon the dybbuk in the bottle.

Rated G. for child-safe dybbuk romping.

The Olverung is an ugly bird.  Its bulbous head juts from the spout of a scrawny neck, and warts dot the bridge of its fat beak.  When it struts upon the ground, its pot-bellied body waddles with the ludicrous gait of a town drunkard.  Its plumage has the black iridescence of a fly’s abdomen and is too coarse even for pillow stuffing.  Yet the fowl possesses one singular attribute that princes and popes have coveted for centuries, and it was for this sole virtue that Lord Atherton entreated me to steal the creature from the King.

Rated R for tugged heartstrings.

Please go to our forums for the story comment thread.

The suggestion was heretical, and treasonous to boot.  Two years before, the king had established by sacred decree that there was only one world, and that nothing lay beyond its bounds; anything seen there was a delusion, a final torment sent to test the faithful before their eventual salvation.  And for two years, his Councillors and subjects had respected his word.

Now they faced a choice.  Disobey the king — or lose him.  Commit treason, or let him die, and with him, the last remnant of the sacred royal line.

Rated PG. for actions taken at the end of the worlds.

One afternoon during his lunch hour, Emory wasn’t feeling particularly hungry. It was the monthly free-admission day at the art museum, so instead of getting a sandwich he went in to look at paintings. “This one,” he said to himself, “makes me think of flying, except that the blue is not right for the sky. It is more of a painting about sorrow, I think. Of flying through sorrow.”

He looked at her as she stood waiting, an earnest expression on her face. He nearly apologized, nearly told her that he knew nothing about art. But then he glanced at the second painting and the words were out of his mouth, clearly and distinctly this time. “All that whiteness makes me think of hospitals. The jagged line there, the bucket that is tipped over but isn’t spilling a drop — it must be the psychiatric ward of the hospital. The yellow corners, the dead flies make sure that I know not to take comfort in the whiteness. Fear of insanity. That’s what I see.”

Rated PG. for reflected nihilism.

We met near a pond, of course.

“I loved your ad,” I said after we’d finished our introductions. Sharon, meet Jerry. Frog, meet human. ”But I have to admit I wasn’t expecting an actual amphibian.

Rated PG. for narratives that play with the Grimm.

To comment please sign up on our forums and go to this thread.

A paper airplane drifted high in the sky above the field. I nearly crashed my bicycle, straining to follow its path as it circled above the treetops at the far edge. It held the wind beautifully. Pausing, it hovered over the field just as a sea bird holds its position above crashing waves.

It was folded in a distinct design–squat and wide, with a hinged belly. It was covered in writing.

Rated PG. for surrealism appearing through several fractured narratives.

PodCastle is proud to present these three excellent micro-fiction stories in conjunction with Fantasy Magazine. These stories won their recent contest for ten sentence fiction. You can read text versions of them, along with the other seven finalists, at Fantasy Magazine.

We hope PodCastle listeners will enjoy these stories and consider heading over to Fantasy Magazine for more excellent fiction!

“What’s that?” Ivory said.

She lay naked on the riverbank like a fallen swan. Her bare flesh white as snow, her hair midnight black. Her feet were thin and fragile as newly pedicured mourning doves, not a smudge or callus except for the mud that covered her.

Rated R. Contains non-vanilla adult sex.