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The Washerwoman and the Troll

by Julian Mortimer Smith

Bunchunkle was magnificently ugly. The trollmothers said there hadn’t been such an ugly child since Grimshik’s day, and Bunchunkle wore it with the pride and mirth befitting a troll. He could pull a face to make you void your bowels and howl with terror. He had a genius for mischief that rivaled even that of old Quillibim, the Arch Rascal of Moldy Stumps. There was much speculation about what would happen if a human ever laid eyes on Bunchunkle, but as far as anyone knew it had never happened, for Bunchunkle was as quick and sly as he was ugly.

When the faefolk decided it was time to drive the old washerwoman from the Blinking Woods, they did not come to Bunchunkle immediately. He was reclusive and cantankerous and did not like to be disturbed. Besides, they were loath to seek him out for fear of laying eyes on his revolting face. But nobody doubted that he would succeed if all else failed. They knew he was there as a last resort.

 

Read the full text in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #57

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Host Commentary

… aand welcome back!

I don’t really have a lot to say about this story. It’s pretty brutal, right? Even the author felt that. When we first ran the story back in 2015, he told us, “I set out to write an old-fashioned fairy tale, full of terrible, casual, gleeful cruelty. It’s the only story I’ve ever written that made me feel guilty about the way I treated a character.”

I’m glad he felt that way. Even though we know that story characters are just made up of words in a document, we are capable of understanding and empathizing with them, even those we make up ourselves, and it speaks well of our humanity if we can feel bad for what they go through, just like any flesh and blood person who has experienced misfortune.

The main reason I wanted to run this story was so that I — and you — could hear the voice of M. K. Hobson again. She was one of my favourite narrators back in the first several years of PodCastle’s existence, and I was lucky enough count her among my friends and even to meet her in person a few times, the first just a few weeks after PodCastle ran this story, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Spokane, Washington.

It seems like she really has gone into seclusion, though, and I miss her friendship and I miss her voice.

Before I get to the credits, here’s a quote apropos of this week’s story, and in fact the world in 2026, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.”