PodCastle 876: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: Nine-Fingered Maria

Show Notes

Rated PG


Nine-Fingered Maria

by Hilary Moon Murphy

…this girl appeared from behind a door and caught my ball.  She was probably my age: several inches taller than I am, with long straight black hair pulled back in a ponytail, plain white t-shirt, denim jacket and jeans with a hole worn in the knee.  She stared at me with intense dark eyes and said, “What are you doing here?”

“I was just getting my ball,” I said, stepping out of the way of two movers carrying a large red bureau with multi-colored wax stains all over it.

“No, you weren’t.”  She cocked her head to the side, and raised her eyebrow.  “You were spying.”

“I wasn’t!”

“That’s okay, I like spies.”  She gave me back my ball and showed me her hands.  “I have nine fingers.  I’m a witch.”


Host Commentary

Before we get into that, an announcement that excites me hugely: we are hosting a special submissions call for Disability Pride & Magic, to celebrate disabled authors, characters, and themes—and that’s a broad definition of disabled, including physical disabilities, neurodivergence, mental illness, sensory disabilities, chronic illness, and invisible and undiagnosed disabilities.

From the announcement that went up on our website earlier this month:

In fiction, disabled people — where we appear at all — tend to be left on the sidelines or treated as passive sources of inspiration (or worse: ridicule or disgust). In fantasy, we get our difficulties erased with superpowers or magical cures. We’re looking for stories that defy these trends. We want to see stories that show the dynamic nature of disability, that grapple with ableism (internal and external), and that, ultimately, see us as fully human — a depressingly low bar that is still failed all too often.

This submissions call is open now, right now!, all the way through to the end of March, and it’s being guest edited by Devin Martin, whose name you usually hear up front as one of our two audio producers, but they’ve been slushing here and steadfastly working to the dragon’s glory for, gods, as long as I have I think, years and years. They are a very excellent human, principled and clear-eyed, and there’s genuinely no-one I’d trust more to run this month of stories.

If you’ve listened to me through the past year or so of host spots you’ll know that disability pride is hugely important to me: since my late diagnoses of autism and ADHD two years ago, at the grand old age of 38, I’ve slowly come to realise that I’m disabled in many ways I never acknowledged and didn’t understand before; and in the 4 years of decline since my wife was diagnosed with MS I’ve seen so much of society’s ableism first-hand for the first time, from systemic issues like accessible paths to personal issues like people treating you as invisible rather than having to acknowledge their own discomfort at seeing a disabled person. I’ve spoken before about how much internalised ableism I still carry—go back and listen to my outro on episode 857, after Samir Sirk Morató’s Ecdysis—and that’s because I inherited it from the stories the world told me growing up, the ones where disfigurement was always a marker of villainy, where disability was a manifestation of poor morality or a punishment for it.

I’ve talked about the power of stories so many times, and I sincerely believe in it—as do you, I warrant, cos none of us would be here right now, doing what we’re doing, if we didn’t. This is a chance to use that power to right wrongs, to show people a little truth in a way that sticks, to make an audience understand the injustices and struggles and lies they’ve been told so that they empathise a little better with the real, disabled humans they’ll meet out in the world. For all the magic we have in our stories, there’s nothing more magical than that, I reckon.

If you want to submit, the full announcement with all the details is on our website at podcastle.org; in brief, stories between 2000 and 6000 words, originals or reprints, open till March 31. I can’t wait to read what you send us.


…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Nine-Fingered Maria” by Hilary Moon Murphy, and if you enjoyed that then there are two other stories by her in our archives, even earlier than this one: episode 14, The Grand Cheat, and episode 3, Run of the Fiery Horse.

I’ve given a version of this speech before, in a different context a long time ago, but I still stand by it, so: the idea that magic is the preserve of childhood is a longstanding idea. Peter Pan is the obvious example, and that’s 120 years old now, though there’s almost certainly something before it. But it works along another axis, too, which is this: the most important thing we teach our children is that magic exists. And I know it’s the most important thing, because it’s the thing we spend the most time and effort and money teaching them, because damn near every kids book and every kids show and every kids movie is about magic. Disney built an empire on it. Saturday morning cartoons have always been full of it, even now when you stream them any damn day of the week (because if I want to stick Hilda on in the background while I work through a week, you can’t stop me).

We use stories to teach kids how the world works: to pass down social norms and expectations and warnings, and lessons on being a good person and lessons on not wandering off into dark woods on your own where a wolf might get you. Which is to say, we use stories to get the really important stuff across to them, the stuff we need to stick. And so what do we put in nearly all of ’em? Magic!

Which is not to say that the actual important lesson here is that magic is real and goshdarnit you just gotta believe. No, I think it’s a subconscious drive to teach our kids not to just accept what they see before them but to dream of bigger, and dream of more, and not get trapped in banality the way we inevitably have as adults but this time to break the cycle and know there’s more out there than mortgages and annual performance reviews and remembering to put the bins out.

The good news, then, is that if you’re listening to me ramble on about this right now, at the end of PodCastle, the weekly fantasy fiction podcast, well… you won. You did it. You broke the cycle, and kept your magic, and never forgot how to dream. Sure, there’s still weeks where the world gets you down and tries to crush it out of you, I warrant—it manages it with me still—but you gotta protect it and fight for it. Which isn’t just a pitch for hey, come back next week, please subscribe! (Though, *ahem*, if you do want to: patreon.com/EAPodcasts) but a pitch for you to remember that hope and whimsy are not childish things to be left behind in shame, but childish things to be fought for tooth and nail, defended to the last, because they make you something bigger. They make you the realisation of generations of toil: that one day, our children will be free enough to dream forever. So go! Go dream, and dream big, and be happy.

About the Author

Hilary Moon Murphy

Hilary Moon Murphy writes and sells fantasy stories in Minneapolis and runs MinnSpec — Minneapolis Speculative Fiction Writers.

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About the Narrator

Chistopher Reynaga

Chris Reynaga is a multiple award-winning writer with stories appearing Cemetery Dance, The Drabblecast, and The Book of Cthulhu 2. You can enter his magical reality at CHRIS REYNAGA’S MAGICAL REALITY

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