What is a Reborn?
A Reborn is an artist-enhanced baby doll that looks and feels lifelike. Artists create Reborns as one-of-a-kind collectibles, often from ordinary play dolls transformed into art suitable for hands-off display—or hands-on cuddling.
While reasonably durable, Reborns are not children’s toys. Rough play may damage them.
Rated R
I fell in love with a dragon boy when I was seventeen. The dragon train—five creatures long—camped near Grimpiper in the days before it crossed the Great Divide. Beyond the stones lay the Dead Red Heart. Our ’stead nestled in amongst the shadow dunes. Close enough to the Sand Road, not too close to its bandits and its warlords.
We’d been pushing our water wheels across miles of stone when the kite went up. Blue tail flags might mean many things but this time blue meant dragons. We dropped the wheels and ran up Puckers Ridge. Right to the top and there they were, five dragons chewing through wild melon fields below. Thick-set creatures, bellies low to the ground.
Rated PG-13
They must have executed me while I waited in the mangrove shadows. Here, amidst the cicada trill, amidst the basso rumble of distant ships in the Trincomalee harbor. The Seiko at my feet, my brother Vasanthan’s parting gift, lies broken. Its broken hands mark my passage into this juddering, flickering, solitary awareness. I am but one ghost, with not even Vasanthan for company, no matter how much I want him to be here. But how can that be? Sri Lanka must throng with ghosts, hundreds and thousands of them, monsters and innocent both.
And which am I?
Welcome to PodCastle’s first Eid issue!
Rated PG-13
Qumqam stood upside-down atop a cell phone tower, twirling at its pinnacle on his fingertip. When the humans had first started to besmirch the earth with the things, Qumqam had thought them hideous. But he’d come to love dancing on them the way he’d once loved dancing on ziggurats.
Well, he’d come to like it, anyway. Qumqam didn’t know if there was anything left in this lower world that he loved, but sometimes when he leapt among the towers and turbines of America he felt something like happiness again. For a moment or two, at least.