---

The Stars That Fall

by Samantha Murray

 

When Sara asks me if I want to go doom-spotting I say yes. Of course I say yes. The Edge Lookout is dark and rocky and romantic, and I usually say yes to anything Sara suggests. And I’ve been addicted to doom-hunting ever since I was nine and got my first telescope.

“Why do you need to see it? You know it’s up there,” Ibu says, as I lug my viewing gear out to the car. All of my aunt’s once-dark hair is grey now.

“It’s meant to be lucky, if you find it,” I tell her.

“Mmpffh, lucky,” she says in her dry voice. Ibu does not believe in luck, only unluck.

---

Everyone has a doom. They orbit the planet, some of them moving quickly, so that you can track their movement across the sky; some of them geostationary, always above you, hovering, even in bright sunshine. Even if you never see them.

---

“Don’t you drink,” Ibu says as I leave, “don’t you speed.” Don’t you bring your doom down upon you, is what she means, but she doesn’t say it.

“I won’t,” I promise her.

---

I break that promise, a little guiltily, when Sara opens champagne.

“Your telescope is great,” she says, sitting so that her arm brushes up against mine. “Mine is ancient, and it doesn’t track well. It’s hard to make out the names sometimes.”

It’s dark, but the sun hasn’t been long set. It’s one of the best times for spotting dooms. Moving stars everywhere trace paths of light in the sky.

“Phoon Si Hao,” Sara reads on a doom arcing from the south-west.

“Pooja Lavali,” I find. It’s a small doom, travelling quickly west-east, but my telescope is very good.

---

I’ve never found it, the doom that has my name on it. Despite countless nights searching. Maybe it has low albedo. Maybe I haven’t looked hard enough. It could be wobbling, its orbit degrading; it could be hurtling towards me right now, one specific streak of light burning through the dark.

---

“Have you ever seen a doom?” Sara asks me. “One that landed? Not on the news, I mean?”

“Just once,” I say. It’s only half a lie.

I tell her about the man I’d seen a year ago. He’d been standing in the taxi queue and I’d been at the end of the street. A flash of light in the corner of my eye had made me look. I’d seen it slam into him, obliterating him, but leaving everyone around him untouched and shocked. His name was Amza Yusuf. I know that because afterwards I’d looked at the rock, boulder-sized, just slightly smoking, and seen his name inscribed upon it, clear for anyone to see. For some reason the part I remembered the most was that just before it hit, he had turned his face upwards, just a little, to see his doom, falling from the sky.

---

Sara tells me about her Grandfather’s doom, and her aunt’s, although she hadn’t seen that one till afterwards. I think about the doom I can’t talk to anyone about, not even Sara.

Last summer my sister had her first child. A little girl, and she was five days old only, only that. Her doom had left a discrete circular hole in the roof of my sister’s house, smaller than my fist, and my hands are not big. The crib was marked and scorched with heat, but it was structurally intact.

My niece was completely gone.

It sat in the palm of my sister’s hand when she showed me. My niece’s tiny doom. It was shiny and smooth, not pocked and jagged like Amza Yusuf’s. And on it her perfect very brand new name in incredibly small letters.

---

Sara yawns and her head rests lightly against my shoulder. We watch the shower of doom, bright streaks against the sky, so many, so very many, falling to find the people they belong to. It shouldn’t be beautiful.

It is late when I find it. It is very far up, it must be, to still be reflecting any sun at all.

My name. And not just my name, but names upon names almost overlapping, hard to read.

“What do you see?” Sara asks me, feeling me tense, but I can’t answer her.

Names I don’t recognise, and names I do. My name. Ibu is there. My sister. The family next door. My cousins. Old school teachers. And Sara.

What I see is doom.

There, hanging in the sky, so large that through my scope I cannot see the edges of it.

It might stay up there, five years, ten perhaps, there is no way to tell. It feels like it has all the names in the world, but maybe it is just our country, maybe just our city.

It has always been there. This doesn’t change anything. And it does.

It’s meant to be lucky, I’d told Ibu. Lucky.

I turn to Sara. I cannot tell her what I see, not yet. I tell her something else instead. “I love you,” I say. And it is like the words have always been true and also like they have become true right at this moment.

And I feel like I, too, was waiting, waiting to fall.

I look only at her, and not up, where far, far above us waits the doom with all of our names on it.

 

---

 

On the Corner of Fulton and West

by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles

 

Howard has no patience, even as a ghost. He can’t even wait for the smoke to clear, or the ash, or whatever that stuff is that floats in the air for days afterward, before he starts telling Joanna’s story. Why her story? Because it’s the best one, the only one that will make people listen and remember. I watched her leap, I saw her fall. I couldn’t stop her. Nothing I could do. At first it was more of a practice haunting because there wasn’t anyone around to listen. For a long time there was nothing but jackhammers and dump trucks, then scaffolding and cranes. These days people come, people go, but no one stops. No one listens.

The story he won’t ever tell is his own story, the story of what happened after Joanna — he knew her name because he was the kind of man who learned the name of the girl who brought coffee on Tuesday and Thursday mornings — after Joanna stuck her head in his door, her beautiful, blameless head.

After he smiled and chose a pastry.

After the airplane, square in the middle of his million-dollar view. Too low. Too close.

After the explosion. Fire. Smoke.

And then Joanna, climbing over his desk. Joanna, stepping into space. Himself, kneeling in shattered glass.

---

He won’t talk about any of it.

---

No one listens as he tells Joanna’s story — shouts it, moans it — from the space he’s claimed, this square of cement on the corner of Fulton and West. He fought others like himself for the spot — there were so many others like himself when the towers came down — and then, when Joanna drifted past one night, he gallantly asked her to share it with him. She accepted. He thought she would help him tell her story the way it ought to be told. Help him get at the ugly truth of it. Tell it in a way that would make people stop and listen and never be the same again. When he tells it they wrinkle their noses, shudder, and walk right through him. He needs her help.

But when Joanna joins him the story changes. At first he’s enthralled by the sound of her voice — shining pebbles in a cool spring. He watches the faces of people walking past in the morning, in the evening, in the morning, in the evening, and he sees how moved they are. She’s singing one word over and over, falling falling falling falling, and people don’t quite smile but their faces soften as if they might smile, look up, and catch something beautiful floating down like cherry blossoms. As if they might see Joanna herself floating down on her song of spring, a faraway spring that will never come again. They love the story when Joanna tells it, her sighs and her moans; they don’t care if they can’t make out the words.

Their passing shivers are delicious.

---

But she’s wrong; that isn’t how it happened. He tells her so, his voice dead leaves in the wind. It was September, not spring. Everyone knows it was September, the second Tuesday. Everyone knows that! And it wasn’t pretty, Jesus it wasn’t. He needs to make her tell it the way it really was: nothing more, nothing less. He reaches out in the mist and the dark so he can put something like his hands over something like her mouth and stop the singing just long enough to make her listen to him and understand what she has to do. There. He surrounds what remains of her with what remains of him and squeezes until the singing trails off into a soft, wordless hush. She’s hurt but she understands. She must. Surely she does.

---

The next night he’s alone. People pass on the left, on the right, on the left, on the right, stepping around him though he is, of course, invisible, and he’s talking, talking, shouting but not a one stops to listen.

Where is Joanna? How can he make her come back? He needs to find out how she made people listen because he can’t make them listen at all. The truth is he didn’t see her fall. Didn’t see her skirt fill like a sail as she dove for oblivion. He learned about it later from others like himself (so many others!) and pictures in discarded newspapers. He was huddled on the floor beneath his desk on that final, terrible day, his face pressed into his own suit jacket as if that might somehow save him. Joanna passed over him like a cloud through the space where the window once had been. He didn’t try to stop her. He didn’t even look.

His corner smells of piss and stale chestnuts. Or is he imagining that because he remembers the smells of winter? And it must be winter — look at the lonely soul across the street hovering over a vent as he pulls a shroud of newspapers over his head.

A ghost like him, but living.

Joanna. Tell me how.

 

---

 

No Blood of My Heart, No Breath of My Lungs, But Love

by Stewart C. Baker

 

Being dead isn’t so bad. Not if there’s meaning to it. Not if there’s love.

I tell myself this constantly. What else can I do?

Only wait, succumbing to the pain that throbs where my heart once was. Only push against the peat which presses down on my body, crushing and hardening it, driving away whatever air might reach my breathless lungs.

---

On the surface they are preparing.

A girl, this time. Red of hair and fair of skin, dressed in clothing finer than I ever wore when alive.

She smiles as two servants braid her hair in a long, curling plait down the right side of her head, then shear the left side close to bald. As they place the crown of hazel branches atop her head, tears pool in the corners of her eyes and trickle down her face like thawing frost in spring.

I know what those tears mean, for I remember my own. She overflows with love for her people, for her gods, for what is coming.

---

My death is not all darkness and the warm, acid pressure of peat.

At dusk and dawn, when the gods ride the spaces between darkness and light, all manner of spirits may walk free.

So it is that I have watched my brothers and sisters age and die in firelight and mist. So it is that I have watched their children and children’s children follow them for a dozen generations. So it is that in death, my love for my people has only grown, until I feel that I shall surely fill with its joy and rise, buoyant, to the surface of the bog.

For more than a hundred years I have brought them good harvests, fat piglets, health in times of peace and wealth in times of conquest.

For more than a hundred years I have given them nothing but love.

Still they are replacing me.

---

In the smoke of the fire outside the priests’ great house, a crowd has gathered — all those who live in the settlement that has grown from my love, and others from farther afield. It is not without pride that I note the difference in appearance of my people: their more lustrous hair, their less hollow cheeks.

As the girl walks through them, the crowd reaches out to brush awed, respectful fingers down her braid, along the hem of the ochre-and-white robe she wears. Her eyes are like those of one already dead, her smile set in her face as though the peat has pressed it there.

---

What presses down on me is the weight of my love. The weight of my failure.

I do not know what it is I have done wrong, but it does not matter: I must show them I still love them, that I am here still, protecting them.

Beneath the boggy ground, I shift and struggle, struggle and shift, but the peat is unforgiving, unyielding. As I settle with an airless sigh, it pushes in closer, crushing my skull with a crack that would kill me if I still lived. Moisture seeps into the cavity of my brain, its cold fingers filling the space as if to account for whatever it is I am lacking.

It hurts to love so much. To love so deeply.

---

They sit the girl at a table piled with ritual foods: acorn bread, shank of newborn rabbit, wine distilled from dandelion and mulled for twice two moons.

As my people dance around her, it becomes full dark and I can see no more. I pass the hourless night in mourning my love.

---

My sight returns with the first fingers of dawn, the sky above the forest daubed in swaths of ochre, orange, blue.

The revelers have faded away to their beds, and the girl is at the edge of the bog. She takes measured steps onward, a noose around her neck, her hazel crown slightly askew.

Behind her walk three priests, sober and stern of face and dress, nearly blending into the dimness of the woods. The knives they carry are fresh-sharpened, and gleam subtly in the early light.

One last hopeless time, I summon all the love I can bear. I scream it to the priests, force it through the hole where my heart once lay, press it up against the peat that presses down.

For a long, endless instant, nothing happens.

And then the girl falters. The wind rustles her robe and she tilts her head, as if asking it a question. She stops, and the priests stumble nearly into her. One of them says something and she shakes her head, sudden and abrupt as a rabbit emerging from a dream.

Before they can stop her, she runs — her bare feet slapping the top of the bog in great leaps and bounds.

I feel each step against my wizened skin, hear each laugh that escapes her lips as though it is my own. She does not sink, although she should, and the priests are left behind, unsure of how to give chase or whether they should.

Somewhere a bird cries out, its high piercing trills echoing across the watery ground. And then the girl is gone across the bog, into the thin woods on its far side, and the day has broken fully, and I am back below the surface.

As the peat presses ever in and down, I feel my long-ago smile stretch thinner on my mummified face.

I do not let myself think on the girl’s expression as she fled through the trees. On where she might go out there in the big, wide world. On the way she laughed as her robe, pure still in its ochre and white, fluttered and caught in the new day’s sun as brilliant as the sky.

I think instead of love, only love. Only love.

 

---

Host Commentary

Good morning, good day, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to PodCastle, the flying castle of fantasy fiction. I’m your host, Matt Dovey, and I’m delighted to present for your enjoyment a veritable smorgasbord of fantastic flash fiction, a buffet of narrative, a cornucopia of character arcs: yes, this is a FLASH FICTION EXTRAVAGANZA episode around the theme of MORTALITY, with three stories to present for your palate. Shall we get into it?

Your first tale is THE STARS THAT FALL by SAMANTHA MURRAY, narrated for you by EMMA OSBORNE, previously published at Flash Fiction Online in May 2017, with a content note for infant death.

Samantha Murray lives in Western Australia in a household of unruly boys. Her story “Of Sight, of Mind, of Heart” won an Aurealis Award, and her fiction has been collected in The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 4. You can follow her on Twitter @samanthanmurray

Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Their writing has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Shock Totem: Tales of the Macabre and Twisted, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction, the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and GlitterShip. Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop (Team Arsenic forever!) and is a former first reader at Clarkesworld Magazine. Emma currently lives in Melbourne, drinking all of the coffee and eating all of the food, but has a giant crush on Seattle and turns up under the shadow of the mountain at every opportunity.
And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and it may catch you out of the blue…

---

…aaaaand welcome back. That was THE STARS THAT FALL by Samantha Murray, and if you enjoyed that, you can go back to episode 425 from 2016 for another of her flash stories, “Portrait of my Wife as a Boat”, or over to Escape Pod for episode 528, Divided by Zero.

Next up we have ON THE CORNER OF FULTON AND WEST by Lindsay Godfrey Eccles, narrated by the incredible Dave Robison. This one’s a PodCastle Original, and has a content note for suicide, death, and terrorism.

A Houston-raised lover of enchiladas, Lindsey Godfrey Eccles lives and works in Seattle, spending as much time as she can in the mountains and occasionally practicing law. Her fiction has appeared in Hobart and The Writing Disorder, and is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine and Orpheus + Eurydice Unbound from Air and Nothingness Press. You can find her at lindseygodfreyeccles.com and on twitter at @lgeccles.

Dave Robison is an avid Literary and Vocal Alchemist who pursues a wide range of creative explorations. A Brainstormer, Keeper of the Buttery Man-Voice, and Eternal Optimist, Dave’s creative ADHD ensures that he’ll have a half-dozen projects going at any given time. His dulcet tones have narrated dozens of stories for Escape Artists, and he’s currently shepherding several projects including Archivos, a story mapping and presentation tool, and a zombie-themed coffee company (complete with a weekly webcomic) called Corpse Coffee and Tea. He recently accepted the position of Production Concierge within EA, lending his years of production and vocal experience to the support organization.

And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and someone needs to listen…

---

…aaaaand welcome back. That was ON THE CORNER OF FULTON AND WEST by Lindsey Godfrey Eccles, and that was her first story in an Escape Artists market; welcome, Lindsey! If you enjoyed it and want more from Lindsey, we’d recommend checking her website at lindseygodfreyeccles.com, which will of course be linked in the show notes on our website.

Lastly, today, we have NO BLOOD OF MY HEART, NO BREATH OF MY LUNGS, BUT LOVE by Stewart C. Baker, narrated by our glorious co-editor Eleanor R. Wood. This story was previously published by Lamplight Magazine, September 2021, and has a content note for themes of human sacrifice.

Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian and author of speculative fiction and poetry, along with the occasional piece of interactive fiction. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Nature, Lightspeed, and Flash Fiction Online, among other places. Stewart was born in England, has spent time in South Carolina, Japan, and California (in that order), and now lives in Oregon with his family—although if anyone asks, he’ll usually say he’s from the Internet.

Eleanor R. Wood writes and eats liquorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, three marvellous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee. Her stories have appeared in dozens of venues, including Nature: Futures, Zooscape, Fireside, The Best of British Fantasy 2019, and Best of British Science Fiction 2020.
She blogs sporadically at creativepanoply.wordpress.com, and tweets @erwrites.

And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and someone must remember…

---

…aaaaand welcome back. That was NO BLOOD OF MY HEART, NO BREATH OF MY LUNGS, BUT LOVE by Stewart C. Baker, who has been here before as one half of BAKER & DOVEY with yours truly, and our rather ridiculous story in episode 467–deep breath– HOW I BECAME CORUSCATING QUEEN OF ALL THE REALMS, PIERCED THE OBSIDIAN NIGHT, DESTROYED A LEGENDARY SWORD, AND SAVED MY HEART’S TRUE LOVE. Stewart is somewhat of a master of the flash fiction form, though, so if you enjoyed this one, I’d strongly recommend checking his website infomancy.net for more.

And that was our extravaganza this week, with three different angles on mortality. I think what unites them, even more than that theme, is the hope that our lives and our deaths mean something: that we made an impact, and left the world a better place, even if just for one person, as in Stewart’s story of sacrifice; that our death provides a lesson that might save a life, as in Lindsey’s story of New York; or that we might know when death is coming so we can give our life meaning before it strikes, as in Samantha’s story of death falling like meteorites. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t have any religious belief, and so I don’t receive any existential meaning from a holy text: instead I’m a humanist, and so I believe meaning is what we make for ourselves, among ourselves; that meaning arises from the interactions between us all, as families, as communities, as societies, and how we do good in this life, and the ripples we leave behind. “A life well lived” does not, to me, mean a life of indulgence and personal happiness; it means a life lived for good reasons and good outcomes, one you can look back on with satisfaction on that final day. We’ll all be judged at the end of our life, when mortality claims us at last–but the secret is, we’ll all be our own judge. Live well, friends.