Archive for Rated G

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PodCastle 527: Flash Fiction Extravaganza! In the Beginning…

Show Notes

Rated G, for godlike.

Note that the text for “Intelligent Design” is a story sample; the whole story is only available in audio format.”Intelligent Design” is a re-run of PodCastle Mini 24.

Latte-colored afterglow: the average color of the entire universe is a pale beige officially dubbed “Cosmic latte”. (See https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091101.html)

Raspberry: Sagittarius B, a massive cloud hanging out in the Milky Way, contains ethyl formate, one of the key chemicals giving raspberries their flavor.
(See https://io9.gizmodo.com/this-space-cloud-smells-like-rum-and-tastes-like-raspbe-1695890013)

Raisins in raisin bread: The raisin bread analogy is the standard mechanism for explaining Hubble expansion, aka the expansion of the whole universe. (See http://cmb.physics.wisc.edu/pub/tutorial/hubble.html)


Recipe: 1 Universe

by Effie Seiberg

Recipe: 1 Universe

Serves: everybody

1) Start with nothing. If you don’t have nothing, discard everything. Discard your house and your bed, your friends and your family and the dog who barks hello to you every time you pass it on your way to work. Discard your work. Discard your hopes and your dreams, your love of peanut butter, and the little crinkle you get at the side of your smile when you smell the seashore. Discard yourself.

(Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle Miniature 90: How to Survive in Room 105

Show Notes

Rated G


by T. Jane Berry

read by Jen R. Albert

This is a PodCastle Original!

Principal Freezarro announced that you’re substitute teaching in my kindergarten class for the next few weeks. I’m so excited! I’ve seen your work with the Vindicators, and just to let you know, I think it’s ridiculous that you were sentenced to six months of community service over the bridge incident. Who expects you to save the city from an army of wood chipper-earthworm hybrids and not take out a few historic landmarks? As we say in room 105, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” And please, please don’t let them get upset.

Click here to continue reading.

 

 

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PodCastle 413: This is Not a Wardrobe Door

Show Notes

Rated G

  • Dave Thompson as The Narrator
  • Jen R. Albert as Ellie/Ell
  • Rachael K. Jones as Zera
  • Alasdair Stuart as Misu
  • Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali as The Falcon Queen
  • Graeme Dunlop as The Forgotten Book
  • Marguerite Kenner as Lorraine

Originally published in Fireside Fiction Magazine. Support their Patreon campaign for more excellent stories!

Please stick around after the episode for an editorial announcement from Rachael K. Jones, or check out her blog post on her website!


This is Not a Wardrobe Door

by A. Merc Rustad

Zera packs lightly for her journey: rose-petal rope and dewdrop boots, a jacket spun from bee song and buttoned with industrial-strength cricket clicks. She secures her belt (spun from the cloud memories, of course) and picks up her satchel. It has food for her and oil for Misu.

Her best friend is missing and she must find out why.

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PodCastle 368: Dinkley’s Ice Cream

Show Notes

Rated G


Dinkley’s Ice Cream

by Effie Seiberg

Shanti squirmed with anticipation, trying to wriggle away from my hairbrush but caught by the knots in her curls. “A fair!” she said. “With monkeys and elephants and a magic man!”

“Yes, a fair!” I agreed, not wanting to confirm the rest – not wanting to set up any disappointment as I set down the brush on her bedside table. She beamed up at me with her sunshine smile and I looped a thin elastic around a pigtail. Four years old, and I’d never been able to take her before. Too expensive.

Fairs don’t come to the city. It’s too crowded, and where would they set up the tents? To even get to the fair it was a five dollar bus ride (two dollars for kids), plus a dollar eighty five for the shuttle if you didn’t walk. We walked.

 

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PodCastle 343: Elf Employment

Show Notes

Rated G


Elf Employment

by Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt

Alex was seven when he ran away to join Santa’s elves.

If anyone had asked why he wanted to leave home, he would have said “I hate it here!” (Actually, he would have said, “I’m not telling you!”, then raced into his room and slammed the door, which is one way to say “I hate it here!” in the language of seven-year-olds.)

Alex had his reasons. Even after he started second grade, his parents made him go to bed at 7:30, even though all his friends stayed up until eight, and Fletcher didn’t go to bed until 9:00 p.m., an unmatched hour in his little boy crew. For Halloween, Alex wasn’t allowed to be Darth Vader, because his parents didn’t like him “idolizing villains,” and they made him be a Jedi knight instead. Alex made the best of it by telling everyone he was young Anakin Skywalker (a detail he kept from his parents so they wouldn’t change his costume into something stupid, like old Obi-Wan). He wasn’t allowed play dates with the two kids he liked the most, just because they got in trouble for chasing some kindergarteners and putting dirt in their hair. What was the big deal? Alex had gotten dirt rubbed in his hair when he was new, too!

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PodCastle Miniature 80: Days of Rain

Show Notes

Rated G


Days of Rain

by Rachael K. Jones

When the wind smelled savory and the clouds looked like burnished
gold, Mom would round up all the pots, pans, buckets, and basins in
the house and send us outside to tuck them beneath the rain gutters
ahead of the chicken soup rain. The summer draft only fell once a
year, and you had to know how to read the signs, but with Mom on the
watch, we never missed a storm.

If we were extra quick about it, Mom would open the special freezer
where she kept the remains of the winter draught and scoop out a
cupful of peppermint snow for each of us: one for me, and one for
Marie. We’d sit side by side in the heavy summer’s heat while the
clouds piled up and up, layer upon layer of gold with pulsing light in
their dark hearts. Marie liked to lick at the mound of snow in her mug
as if it were ice cream, while I preferred to let the heat melt it to
a shimmering slush before I sipped, sending a peppermint-sweet
coolness running through my whole body, the essence of winter to
banish summer’s weight.

We’d barely sleep from anticipation, the rumbles above echoed in our
tummies. In the middle of the night, Marie shook me awake to watch
faerie fire skip between the thunderheads. Then the downpour
started–first just a drop or two tapping the glass, and then quicker,
faster, a rising tempo, a thundering heartbeat, a deluge of chicken
soup, the essence of summer raining from the sky.

At dawn, if school was out, Mom would let us play in the soup as it
poured down in warm sheets. Marie and I would put on red galoshes and
raincoats and charge out the door, with a shouted promise to be back
by dinner.

For hours we’d splash in fragrant puddles swirling with noodles like
earthworms. Or we would throw back our hoods and stand with our mouths
wide open, taking summer into every fiber of our being. It made you
feel warm through and through, like a heavy blanket, or a sister’s
hug.

Once, an old beater of a blue truck rumbled by too quickly and kicked
up a wave of soup from a pothole, soaking Marie’s leggings above her
galoshes. Her eyes filled up, and I thought she might cry, so I
stripped off my own raincoat and let the storm soak me until she
laughed and didn’t mind anymore.

We decided to go home a little early to change into dry clothes. When
we rounded the corner into our cul-de-sac, we were surprised to find
Mom in the street barefoot and coatless, stomping in a puddle, her
skirt hitched to her knees, shrieking like a child. For the first
time, it occurred to me she might have been a little girl once, too.

“Mom, you look silly!” said Marie, giggling. “What are you doing?” Mom
dropped her arms, looking a bit sheepish as she shooed us inside for
some lemonade and a shower. “Every year goes by faster,” she said.
“Sometimes you have to make it stand still.” And that was all the
explanation we got. I watched Mom closely the rest of that day, but I
couldn’t detect anything else strange about her. I thought she
lingered at the window, but I could be misremembering that.

Once Dad got home, we’d circle the house together collecting the
buckets and bowls of summer draught, which Mom and Dad would pour into
red jugs. These got packed in the freezer to be reopened at the right
time.

Mom said you shouldn’t open a draught too soon, or in the wrong
season. “That ruins the magic,” she warned. “The potency grows with
time.” So we’d wait until the snow fell, and the sun shrank, and the
darkness grew. There would come a day when I’d come down with a cold,
or Marie caught the flu, and only then would Mom fish out the first
red jug from the freezer and set it on the kitchen counter. It thawed
almost instantly from its own radiance. I swear there was no better
cure for a cough or a runny nose, and no better tonic against the
gloom. All winter, we’d sip mugs of rain and feel warm again.

Now many seasons stand between me and those days of rain.  I have
become the one who thaws the soup rather than the one who collects it,
first for my daughters and nieces, and later, for their children.
Marie and I buried our mother, and eventually, I buried Marie.

Life is a rain of many small joys punctuated by sudden, rending
losses. But joy adds up with time. It has always been about the joy.

And so when the wind smells savory, I take off my shoes and step
barefoot into a puddle and turn my face upward just like my mother did
and wait for the summer draught. When you are as old as I am, you’ll
feel drunk when you taste it, all the memories of bygone years
sweeping down in a torrent so bracing you will shriek like the child
you once were when you dance in the rain of chicken soup, your mother
and sister and all you’ve lost returned to you in living memory. And
when you feel old and hungry and dry inside, like cracked earth, that
is when you will see clouds of burnished gold, and know the time is
near.

When I miss my sister the most, that’s when I know the rain is coming.

 

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PodCastle Episode 287: Tiktok and the Nome King

Show Notes

Rated G


Tiktok and the Nome King

by L. Frank Baum

The Nome King was unpleasantly angry. He had carelessly bitten his tongue at breakfast and it still hurt; so he roared and raved and stamped around in his underground palace in a way that rendered him very disagreeable.

It so happened that on this unfortunate day Tiktok, the Clockwork Man, visited the Nome King to ask a favor. Tiktok lived in the Land of Oz, and although he was an active and important person, he was made entirely of metal. Machinery within him, something like the works of a clock, made him move; other machinery made him talk; still other machinery made him think.

Although so cleverly constructed, the Clockwork Man was far from perfect. Three separate keys wound up his motion machinery, his speech works, and his thoughts. One or more of these contrivances was likely to run down at a critical moment, leaving poor Tiktok helpless. Also some of his parts were wearing out, through much use, and just now his thought machinery needed repair. The skillful little Wizard of Oz had tinkered with Tiktok’s thoughts without being able to get them properly regulated, so he had advised the Clockwork Man to go to the Nome King and secure a new set of springs, which would render his thoughts more elastic and responsive.

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PodCastle 260: Fine Flying Things

Show Notes

Rated G


Fine Flying Things

by Adele Gardner

Frankie watched, open-mouthed, as the cats soared up into the sky.

All he could think of was Dali’s photograph, that crazy one where the
cat flew across a stream of water while Dali perched on a chair. He
ran outside.

In that little space of time, yet more cats had lifted off from earth.
They floated like furry balloons, orange and gray and tiger-striped.
Some looked scared, their claws extended to full panic, like a kitten
caught in a tree; but there was nothing to grasp in the sky. The
clouds didn’t seem to slow them down.

Others looked mildly interested, their whiskers drooping in curious
contentment. Still others seemed entranced with possibilities,
stretching their claws to snag unwary birds as they soared by.

Frankie gaped at the spectacle of cats dotting the sky like a flock of
migrating birds. As the felines swarmed through the air, he glimpsed a
familiar gray leg. By instinct, he reached up to grab the striped
appendage, just as he might have done to spare the china. The skinny
leg jerked taut, and he found himself looking up into the startled
blue eyes of his Maurice.

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PodCastle 243: Tiger in the BSE

Show Notes

Rated G


Tiger in the BSE

by E. Lily Yu

There was once a tiger in Mumbai, a Kshatriya and a ruthless trader of stocks, who lived in a glossy high-rise the color of the sea. His suits of slick poplin and seersucker were confected by two tailors in Milan; his bath was cut from marble as rich as soap, and always drawn warm and fragrant for him at the end of each day; and his suppers, which threw the meat markets into an uproar, were prepared under the hands of some of the finest cooks from Mangalore and Chengdu. He had, in short, the kind of life that any well-bred tiger could hope to have. But he lacked one thing, and it made him pace between the red walls of his living room and bite the pads of his paws.

He went to the house of an old friend, where he and his trading tips were always welcome, and said, “Brother, I have no mother or father to help me in this matter, and no family except my friends. For the sake of the tricks we played in school, for the beatings I took for you, will you help me find a bride?”

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PodCastle 212: Squonk and the Lake Monster

Show Notes

Rated G


Squonk and the Lake Monster

by P.M. Butler

Sometimes, you don’t realize how bad a bad idea _really_ is until your best friend is suddenly plummeting head over ringtail to his certain death.

Squonk and Slowfingers had been playing catch–well, _trying_ to play catch. You see, Squonk was a dragon, and his best friend Slowfingers was a raccoon. They were both apprentices to a wizard named Wendel. They liked hanging around each other, but there wasn’t a lot they could _do_ together. Unlike most of Squonk’s other friends, Slowfingers didn’t have wings; and unlike Slowfingers’ other friends, Squonk had to be very careful to not step on him.

But according to Wendel, being a wizard didn’t mean you ran away and hid from problems; it meant grabbing your problems and showing those problems who’s boss. So Squonk had come up with the idea of playing a nice game of catch.

It worked like this: Slowfingers would pick an acorn, and throw it as hard as he could–from the top of a tall tree, since his throws needed the head start. Squonk would try to watch the teeny tiny acorn as it bounced off leaves and branches and stick out his paw where he thought it would land. After inspecting his paw carefully to confirm he’d missed, Squonk would set another acorn in his paw and use a talon on his other paw to flick it at Slowfingers. If he was lucky, he’d get it somewhere near the tree Slowfingers was in, and Slowfingers could watch it go by.

This was every bit as frustrating and not-fun as it sounds.