Archive for Podcasts

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 504: Words Never Lost

PodCastle 504: Words Never Lost is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:57 — 39.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Show Notes

Rated PG-13

Words Never Lost

by DaVaun Sanders

Imala spat on the schoolhouse’s brittle timbers as she passed, slipping behind the Tyre Orphan School’s woeful outbuildings and through the fence. A lashing awaited anyone caught here, but she had broken her promise to meet Vachaspah one too many times.

The soft crack of fledgling bone pulled her eyes up. An owl had perched atop a nearby saguaro, its dead barrel bleached white. Pitiful screeches and wet, tearing sounds floated from a wicked nest made entirely of long thorns. The owl’s wet beak dipped down again and again, skewering its floundering owlets. Bloodstained tufts of soft down littered the ground.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 503: Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters

Originally published in Postscripts

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:37 — 45.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Show Notes

Rated R; contains language, violence, and disturbing imagery circa Hurricane Katrina.

This episode is a reissue of PodCastle 154.

Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Under the Still Waters

by N.K. Jemisin

Tookie sat on the porch of his shotgun house, watching the rain fall sideways.  A lizard strolled by on the worn dirt-strip that passed for a sidewalk, easy as you please, as if there wasn’t an inch of water already collected around its paws.  It noticed him and stopped.

“Hey,” it said, inclining its head to him in a neighborly fashion.

“‘Sup,” Tookie replied, jerking his chin up in return.

“You gon’ stay put?” it asked.  “Storm comin’.”

“Yeah,” said Tookie.  “I got food from the grocery.”

“Ain’ gon’ need no food if you drown, man.”

Tookie shrugged.

The lizard sat down on the sidewalk, oblivious to the driving wind, and joined Tookie in watching the rain fall.  Tookie idly reflected that the lizard might be an alligator, in which case he should maybe go get his gun.  He decided against it, though, because the creature had wide batlike wings and he was fairly certain gators didn’t have those.  These wings were the color of rusty, jaundiced clouds, like those he’d seen approaching from the southeast just before the rain began.

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 502: Zilal and the Many-Folded Puzzle Ship — Live at Can-Con!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:58 — 28.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Zilal and the Many-Folded Puzzle Ship

By Charlotte Ashley

When Zilal Saleebaan Kamal was six years old, she built her first ship in a bottle. It was a fully-articulated craft of sandalwood and brass with eighteen oars that rowed in unison when the bottle was tipped to and fro. Her father presented it to the Suldaan on her behalf, and it sits in the winter palace still.

When she was nine, Zilal received her first commission from the Emir. The musical dhow she built as a gift for his young son played lullabies with the flow of the tides and could be heard singing low, fine raagas while at anchor, the drifting waters playing the ship’s reeds and pipes.

When she was eleven, Zilal redesigned the Suldaan’s xebec to carry a third mast and wider sails, making the Tidebreaker the strongest ship in the Ajuran fleet. She took formal apprenticeship with her father, the artificer Saleebaan, and moved into the Suldaan’s palace.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 501: The Christmas Abomination from Beyond the Back of the Stars

PodCastle 501: The Christmas Abomination from Beyond the Back of the Stars is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:51 — 35.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

The Christmas Abomination from Beyond the Back of the Stars

By Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt

“Mele Kalikimaka!” Uncle Ray shouted as Trish rushed down the steps from the little plane, sucking in great gasps of island air. The plane smelled like the trapped farts of three boys (maybe four; she wasn’t sure if the pilot had farted or not). The air here was humid and smelled of salt, which was better, but weird. Trish squinted around: palm trees, blue skies, the distant engulfing ocean. It was the opposite of a winter wonderland.

“That’s how you say ‘Merry Christmas’ in Hawaiian,” Ray added helpfully.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 500: Maiden, Mother, Crone

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:32 — 29.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Maiden, Mother, Crone

By Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky

The mule nipped at Marjan’s hand as she burdened it with her packs. She pushed its nose away, careful not to hurt it. She needed the mule to be well. Her life — and her unborn child’s — depended on it.

She led the mule outside the stable and carefully latched the door behind them. She didn’t want the other animals to suffer from the cold. Bad enough she was stealing the mule. She didn’t want Iresna and Gavek to lose anything else.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 499: Flash Fiction Extravaganza — Flash Fiction Contest IV

Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Three Cats at the End of the World

By Aimee Ogden

On the heath at the beginning and the end of the world, a witch once built a cottage where she could live with the past, the present, and the future. They are hers, and she is theirs, for as long as life and as deep as death. (Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle Miniature 101: National Geographic on Assignment: The Unicorn Enclosure

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:30 — 7.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

National Geographic on Assignment: The Unicorn Enclosure

by Sarah Monette

In the unicorn enclosure, all five unicorns are clustered along the fence, batting their long eyelashes beguilingly at a troop of girl scouts. The girls ooh and aah and argue about which one is prettiest, and the unicorns trail them patiently down the perimeter line.

These unicorns are captive-born (two from San Diego, one from Brookyn, one from Mexico City, and the stud all the way from Manchester in an attempt to maintain genetic diversity in North America’s captive breeding program); they’ve never hunted anything but sides of beef. But they’re too smart not to recognize their natural prey, even through plexiglas. The zoologists call the behavior I’m witnessing “playing,” in the same way a domestic cat “plays” with a mouse. Seen from the mouse’s standpoint, it’s not much of a game.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 498: Chasing Flowers

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:50 — 23.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Chasing Flowers

by L. Chan

Lian’s world is flat. Not just the landscape, which extends as far as the eye can see, horizon to horizon under the rolling twilight flux. Not just the houses, dotting the slate grey earth and the thunder cloud sky. Not just her folded servants, who used to pad around silently with their painted smiles and their unblinking eyes, unfurling from their hiding places to bring her the same dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a hundred years.

Lian ate regularly for fifty years before she realised that the food tasted of nothing but fire and ashes. Before she realised that she wasn’t hungry and had never been since her death. Not down here, where the sun peeks over the hills at the edge of the land and she still doesn’t know if it’s rising or setting because it’s been stuck there for the hundred years since she died.

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 497: Six Jobs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:33 — 40.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

Six Jobs

By Tim Pratt

 

1.   Exterminator’s Helper

I was eleven when a little man with watery eyes who blinked and sniffed all the time shuffled into my classroom, moving carefully, not brushing up against any desks or people. My teacher stood frozen with her hand pointed at a map of Africa, and the kids all around me were unnaturally still, too, stuck in whatever moment they’d been caught in when time stopped: note-passing, nose-picking, empty-space-gazing.

I held my breath at first, hoping this strange person in the gray suit looking at a scrap of paper in his hand wouldn’t realize I was still conscious, still capable of movement. I didn’t know what he was, or what was happening, but I’d read a lot of books and seen a lot of shows about fairies and monsters and magic, and being in the middle of a story like that was so scary I was afraid I’d wet myself.

He squinted around, peered in my direction, and bustled over. “You’re . . .” A glance at the paper. “Makayla?”

“Kayla,” I whispered.

A brisk nod. “Never saw the point of nicknames, but whatever makes you happy. I’m Sigmund. I need your help. Actually, all your friends and . . . so on . . . here at school need your help.” He rubbed at his nose and sniffled more. I wondered if he had a cold. “It’s not quite a save-the-world thing, but you can save this little part of your world. Won’t that be, um, fun?”

(Continue Reading…)

PodCastle logo

PodCastle 496: When You Find Such a Thing

PodCastle 496: When You Find Such a Thing is a PodCastle original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:52 — 20.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pandora | RSS

When You Find Such a Thing

By Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Yes, I know meeting my girlfriend’s parents wasn’t on my to-do list for the next few forevers, but it happens that Gbemi is the slyest babe I’ve dated, so I should’ve known, ba? One minute we’re off on a supposed spontaneous getaway weekend she planned for us; next thing, I’m sitting under the dining chandelier at her parents’ Lekki duplex, struggling to explain to her father what I do for a living.

(Continue Reading…)