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PodCastle 924: Reverent

PodCastle 924: Reverent is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:00 — 48.1MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG-13

REVERENT

 

by Leah Ning

 

It’s the smell of gravity that tells me Father’s been to my rooms: empty and metal-sweet, the way you’d think a black hole would smell before it crushed your nasal cavities. Out here in the spire’s lowest hallway, it’s faint, hanging in the dark humidity of my hour like dust in a years-dead room. But I know it’ll thicken as I walk, weighting my lungs, and I know what I’ll find laid on my pillow and who Father wants it used for. I’ve seen this before. I’ve done this before. I’ve been dreading doing this again.

Someone will do this to me one day. At least it won’t be Noon.

I breathe the humid heat of the hour that follows mine and go to my door. My soft shoes hush against the pale cream floor. The door’s brass hinges creak when I open it. I suppose I should get someone to spin them back to new, but I’ve come to like the noise. It’s what wakes me when Noon comes in, her hour done and woven into the next. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 923: The Sun Globe

PodCastle 923: The Sun Globe is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:56 — 55.3MB)

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Show Notes

Rated G

The Sun Globe

Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt

 

Grace Morley was singing “Silver Bells” under her breath — it was part of the winter pageant she was organizing, and she’d heard it a hundred million times in the past few weeks — when she saw the handmade sign reading POP-UP HOLIDAY MARKET, ONE DAY ONLY! on a brick wall, with a zig-zagged arrow pointing down an alley she’d never noticed before.

She was on the outskirts of downtown, where there were still more empty storefronts than full ones. People said the area used to be nicer, before lockdown had forced so many businesses to close. The city was constantly trying things like this, one-day festivals and events, in an effort to bring traffic back to the neighborhood. Two weeks before Thanksgiving seemed a little early for a holiday market, but she had nowhere else to be that Saturday afternoon, and it gave a serendipitous twist to her afternoon walk. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 922: A Long Tango Across A Canopy of Whispering Leaves

Previously published by GiGaNotosaurus

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:45 — 72.4MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG

A Long Tango Across A Canopy of Whispering Leaves

By Anita Harris Satkunananthan

 

The return of the last Festival King was not mere rumour.

Half a dozen heralds from Marip preceded his return, with a new summons from the Steward. Dusk-skinned youth dressed in flowers and skin-tight, fluorescent-blue breeches had read the proclamations from east to west. The Steward was returning the last Festival King. A new Festival King would be crowned at the duels. In the summons were also the names of four hopefuls, chosen from amongst the descendants of former Kings.

Melur’s name had been listed as one of the candidates. It was not a surprise to Melur who had been sleeping within the weave of the forests’ consciousness for twenty-five years since the disappearance of her lover. For those years, the Festival had been Kingless. It was a gap that was unprecedented for the Mykologosia. There had been Festivals for as long as there had been humans inhabiting the sentient mushroom dwellings, and there had always been Kings. But now, there was to be another duel. And if Melur was chosen, she would be the one duelling her lover, as they had both promised each other that night. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 921: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – The Surgeon’s Tale

Previously ran as episode 146 and first published by Subterranean Press. Read the text here!

Graphic Surgical Detail

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:40:30 — 138.0MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R

Read the text here!

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PodCastle 920: Auguries

Previously published in issue #3 of Gamut, on March 1, 2024

Content warnings for gore and traumatic birth

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:37 — 54.4MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R

Auguries

By Jennifer R. Donohue

 

She screamed the first time, so loud that the old man who lived in the next apartment arrived at her door with surprising speed, cardigan thrown hastily over his untucked white undershirt, light scent of an evening beer while watching baseball on his breath. The neighbor held her hands and said things to her in a language she didn’t know, even though they’d had accentless conversations before, in the daylight. When she wasn’t suddenly being torn apart, when there wasn’t a sudden gush of blood onto the rag rugs she’d gotten at a garage sale, when there wasn’t a dark bundle on the floor, a wild-eyed hare, full grown, linked to her by a disgusting, fleshy cord that the neighbor cut with a folding knife from his pocket, the blade rippled with honing over the years.

She screamed, too, when she looked into the hare’s eyes, even as she also, in a small quiet rational part of herself, thought that this was probably embarrassing, though she didn’t know what she meant exactly, and screamed once more for good measure. Maybe she meant embarrassing for her neighbor to see her like this, or embarrassing for this hare to be here, but also what she saw when she looked into its eyes harrowed her and looked like rattling keys and flashing red lights, and a cut-off siren, and smelled like antiseptic. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 919: FLASH FICTION EXTRAVAGANZA: Possibilities

PodCastle 919: FLASH FICTION EXTRAVAGANZA: Possibilities is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:24 — 50.0MB)

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Show Notes

The Only Map is Memory and CoverLetter_Version5 are rated PG. Valfierno is rated PG-13.

The Only Map is Memory

by B. Morris Allen

I use my memory for a map. It’s the only map I have, but it’s unreliable in the way all memory is. Objects that I remember as big must have been smaller, locations that were green and lush are dry and brittle, spaces that were broad and empty are cramped and crowded. Or maybe they’re not the right ones at all, and I’ve been fooling myself since I started. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I’ve spent a lifetime traveling, searching for one place or another, always on the wrong road, taking the wrong fork, going the wrong way. After my last trip to nowhere, I decided to use the only map I know is true.

Except it’s not. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 918: Waterways

PodCastle 918: Waterways is a PodCastle original.

Content warning for self-harm and coercive control

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:33 — 39.2MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG

Waterways

by Diana Dima

 

 

When his father died and left him the boat, he thought to himself, I can do it. I’m a boat-son, a boat-man, I’m no longer a child and no longer have to go home at sunset, when mother and sisters gather around the table and talk about the will and the debts. In the will his father had written to my son, who may yet feel at home on the water. So David spent days in the yard, scrubbing and polishing and waxing, and often fell asleep under the boat tarp in the cool May night.

When he left, he did look back at the hunched house and the village, faint as a smear of dirt on the green and the blue. He did feel a pang of guilt deep under the ribs. But mostly he was driven like a powerboat, like a steering wheel under his father’s hand. So he steered toward the northern shores where they used to go fishing for pike and drop anchor for the night in quiet coves. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 917: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – To Follow the Waves

Previously ran as episode 139 and originally published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:01 — 64.6MB)

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Show Notes

Rated R

We unfortunately do not have the rights to publish the full text of this story, but it is available to read in full over at Galli Books.

To Follow the Waves

by  Amal El-Mohtar

 

Hessa’s legs ached. She knew she ought to stand, stretch them, but only gritted her teeth and glared at the clear lump of quartz on the table before her. To rise now would be to concede defeat—but to lean back, lift her goggles and rub her eyes was, she reasoned, an adequate compromise.

Her braids weighed on her, and she scratched the back of her head, where they pulled tightest above her nape. To receive a commission from Sitt Warda Al-Attrash was a great honour, one that would secure her reputation as a fixed star among Dimashq’s dream-crafters. She could not afford to fail. Worse, the dream Sitt Warda desired was simple, as dreams went: to be a young woman again, bathing her limbs by moonlight in the Mediterranean with a young man who, judging by her half-spoken, half-murmured description, was not precisely her husband.

But Hessa had never been to the sea.

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PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush

PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:34 — 42.5MB)

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Show Notes

Rated G

Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush

by Ruth Joffre

 

 

Yesterday, I was a bird. A slender-billed curlew, to be exact. My girlfriend helped me ID the bird. Took photographs of my decurved bill, the flash of white under my tail, the small brown speckles on my cream-white breast.

“Some of these spots look like hearts,” I said this morning, once I was human again and able to compare her pictures to the one in an article I found: “The Slender-Billed Curlew Is Declared Extinct.”

It always happens like this: a species disappears once and for all, and I transform into a replica of it for one day. Thirteen hours, at least, maybe more if I wake up especially early. It takes about an hour each way for the metamorphosis to be complete — long enough, in theory, for me to prepare. To lock the doors, rush to the bathtub if I feel gills opening in my throat. I often track the process in the mirror as it unfolds. Watch scales harden over my flesh, feathers push through my pores. It never stops feeling like magic.

(Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 915: The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been

Previously published in Monster Lairs (Dark Matter INK, October 2023)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:12 — 36.0MB)

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Show Notes

Rated PG-13

The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been

by Leah Ning

 

You find the dying woman-thing in an alley, breathing her final wet, rasping breaths in a heap of white trash bags that seems more like a throne.

Everything tells you to run: twenty-four years of instinct, the government monster information pamphlets, the hard, practical voice at the back of your head that sounds a lot like your monster hunter girlfriend.

And then the woman-thing looks up. Her dark, scaled cheek drags on the distended belly of plastic that makes her pillow. Her chapped lips part and she says, in a voice like acid and smoke: “Eiko.”

That should make you run, too. Things that know your name and shouldn’t are firmly in “get the hell out and don’t look back” territory. But something in her voice hooks into the bottom of your soul and tugs.

You walk into the alley and she reaches for you. Her fingers are too long, dusky and scaled like her face. You shiver when they rasp over your cheek, your hair. Your heart pounds. You should run. You should run now. (Continue Reading…)