Archive for Rated PG-13

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PodCastle Miniature 93: Husk and Sheaf (Aurealis Month)


by Suzanne J. Willis

read by Graeme Dunlop

Hosted by Aidan Doyle

First published in SQ Mag.

Spring had stretched the daylight hours and dried the damp-weather rot in my hands by the time the old woman, Emmeline, began visiting the orange grove. By then, I knew enough to see she wasn’t well. I had been placed in the grove to scare away the mynahs pecking incessantly at the fruit. At first, I couldn’t remember being made, or recall the hands that sewed my body and my clothes. Who was it that stuffed me full so I plumped out like a real man?

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Rated PG-13.

Suzanne J. WillisSuzanne J. Willis is a Melbourne, Australia-based writer, a graduate of Clarion South and an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies by PS Publishing, Prime Books, Fablecroft Publishing and Fox Spirit Press, and in Fantasy Scroll Magazine, SQ Mag, Mythic Delirium, Capricious SF and the British Fantasy Society Journal. Suzanne’s tales are inspired by fairytales, ghost stories and all things strange, and she can be found online at suzannejwillis.webs.com.

 

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PodCastle 442: Almost Days (Aurealis Month)


by D.K. Mok

read by Graeme Dunlop

First published in Insert Title Here.

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.

Hosted by Margo Lanagan.

What is time?

It’s a question I never asked myself while I was still alive, and now, I suppose time is something that happens to other people. Gainful employment, on the other hand, only happened to me after I’d died.

My colleagues call this place the Wings—we’re the before and the after, enfolding the stage of the world. Here, in my lonely turret on the hill, the sun is always noon overhead. Go seaward, towards the misty waters of Unan, and the sun hovers in eternal dawn. Go worldward, towards the Golden Vale, the realm of Transformation, and the sun dips into the cusp of night. Travelling across the Wings can give the illusion of time passing. Long ago, I found it comforting. Now, it makes me vertiginous.

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Rated PG-13.

D. K. Mok is a fantasy and science fiction author whose novels include Squid’s Grief, Hunt for Valamon and The Other Tree. D. K. has been shortlisted for three Aurealis Awards, a Ditmar, and a Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award. D. K. graduated from UNSW with a degree in Psychology, pursuing her interests in both social justice and scientist humour. D. K. lives in Sydney, Australia, and her favourite fossil deposit is the Burgess Shale. Connect on Twitter @dk_mok or find out more at www.dkmok.com.

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PodCastle 440: The Jellyfish Collector (Aurealis Month)

Show Notes

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.


The Jellyfish Collector

by Michelle E. Goldsmith

“Where do you think they keep their brains?” Eva asks. “They have to have one somewhere, don’t they?”

She stands motionless beside her younger sister, Fiona, the two of them staring past their own reflections and into the tank beyond. On the other side of the glass drift dozens of moon jellyfish, gently pulsating in the water as though dancing to imperceptible music.

(Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle Miniature 92: Chatter the Teeth

Show Notes

Rated PG-13.


Chatter the Teeth

by Kurt Hunt

Mordecai plucked a beetle from the magnolia, crushed it, and sucked the juices from its head. This rejuvenating trick was one of many secrets known to the imperial gardener, but even he did not know everything the gardens hid—that the ivy conspired, the worms gossiped, or that, far beneath the ground, the magnolia’s roots knotted around a skull.

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PodCastle Miniature 91: Love Letters on the Nightmare Sea

Show Notes

Rated PG-13


Love Letters on the Nightmare Sea

By Rachael K. Jones

I thought the tendriled horrors were angels when we woke at sea that disastrous night and saw them falling on the waters. Now, Suneeti, on this abandoned island, they are radiant in the setting sun, their translucence licked gold by dusk.

The first one crashed onto the deck of our little boat. Its body was round, jellyfish-translucent, with six wing-like fins, and fine waving tendrils like underwater kelp. An alien, ethereal beauty–of course you reached out and brushed a tendril with your fingers. You were always the curious one. I caught you before you collapsed on the deck, fast asleep. The horrors swarmed the hull, their soft feet sticking like little kisses climbing up a neck, but I took you below and locked the hatch. Tendrils groped through the cracks, but they couldn’t reach us through the door. (Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 437: The Cruelest Team Will Win


The Cruelest Team Will Win

by Mike Allen

A spider with a leg span wider than my outstretched hand squeezed out from the space behind the light switch, and spread its wings.

I froze, my finger still on the toggle. Behind me the dust-draped ceiling fan hummed to life, the light bulb beneath it flicking on to paint the monster with my shadow.

The marks on its body formed a single staring eye above a screaming mouth. Two more false eyes glared red across its dragonfly wings. Another hideous little soul turned demonic, yearning to grow into something far worse.

I showed it my own spirit form.

It made good on its threat and lifted into the air, but its terrifying modification only made my task easier and my beak closed around it. The poison leaking from its crushed body spread warmth as it slid down my gullet.

(Continue Reading…)

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PodCastle 436: Flash Fiction Extravaganza! Elements


“Gaps of Joy, and a Knot for Love” by S. B. Divya.

Read by Nadia Niaz.

Prakash’s wife lay on a mattress as old as their marriage and as sunken as her cheeks. Devi’s hair was gray like the threadbare curtains, her body swollen and sweaty with betrayal, consuming itself in an immunological civil war. The doctor had shrugged in apology and prescribed pain medicine. “Nothing else we can do,” he’d said and left.

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“Green Girl” by Erica Ruppert.

Read by Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali.

Sharp spring came, and with it mud. Cold early rains turned the still-frosty soil to a rich black paste, something that clung to your boots and spoiled the rugs. Clea didn’t care that it did. After the deprivations of winter, a little mud was good for the soul. But she was surprised to find it all over the sheets.

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“Dragon Fancy” by Leigh Wallace.

Read by Kim Rogers.

There are dragons everywhere!

I’ve never been to a dragon fanciers show before. I get my badge and table assignment and push my contestant, in her covered baby carriage, down the center aisle. I try to see everything at once. Did you know pygmy squiggles, with their curly fringe, come in hot pink? Me neither! And I’ve never seen
a wyrmicorn before. There’s one with a glowing horn! I love dragons. I love every kind of dragon.

I’m such a loser. I know. But for once I’m the same kind of loser as everybody else here.

Everyone’s so excited to see each other and catch up on each other’s dragon news. I wish I knew some of them. I’m too shy to go right up to their dragons and check out their hoards.

My little copper mutt, Dirigible, is very garden variety (AKA cheap), but I’ll bet you anything that nobody’s got a hoard quite like hers. I was thrilled when she didn’t turn out to be a common sparkle hoarder like so many other dragons. You can’t show them. Sparkles just get everywhere and it makes sense that the convention centers won’t allow it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong; Dirge’s hoard is a total pain. But at least she’s not disqualified. And maybe she even has a shot at the Unique Hoard award. Well, we’ll see during judging.

As I make my way toward the center of the big convention room there’s a bit of a kerfuffle near a dragon on a tiny hoard of opals. My my, actual gemstones. What a lush. A lady is upset that her table assignment is next to theirs because her dragon hoards seashells, which look enough like opals to risk the dragons getting competitive and violent. Everyone within earshot is nodding. I nod, too, to nobody in particular. It’s a legitimate concern; there’s no safer place for valuables than in a dragon hoard, but if a dragon decides another one is a rival, one of them will die. Hey, if you want a sweet, easygoing pet, get a dog. Or a chupacabra.

A show volunteer hurries over to shuffle the table assignments around. A low hiss emits from my baby carriage. Ok ok. Someone’s getting restless. I hurry on toward my aisle. We’re up against a wall and the table next to us is still empty so Dirge will have some time to settle in. I don’t want her to get uptight around the other dragons; they don’t tend to like each other and they have absolutely no chill.

I quickly pull the water dish, food bowl and litter box from my bag. Next to me, the baby carriage jiggles a bit and a white claw sticks out through the cover. I hear a high-pitched growl from inside. Someone is ready to be let out.

Now comes the tricky part.

I gently unstick the claw and pull back the cover. Four
pairs of shiny yellow eyes peer back at me, vertical pupils contracting and adjusting to the overhead lights. I reach in slowly and unthreateningly, then spread my hands carefully under the cushion laid out in the bed of the carriage. If you want to move a dragon, you have to move its hoard. And if you want to
move a dragon hoard, well, do it carefully. In as smooth a motion as possible, I swoop the cushion, with Dirge and her hoard still on top of it, onto the table. Then I freeze and wait.

For a moment, all is stillness. Dirge’s muscles are all tightly wired under her coppery scales, her eyelids pulled as far back as they’ll go. She lets out a pent-up breath, and just when I think everything’s going to be fine, a cat zips from between her front legs toward the table’s edge. With whiplike speed Dirge clamps a forepaw down on a puffed up orange tail and huffs indignantly.

“Well, don’t look at me,” I say to her. “You’re the one who picked cats, of all things.”

Dirge eyes me sideways and drags the orange tabby, who I call Shitstain, back to plop him on top of the other two. She stretches her forelegs around them all and doesn’t look at me. Dragons are not interested in uninformed opinions; they are the experts in hoards and if she wants cats, she gets cats. Dirge
stretches out and curves her neck in a perfect, regal S. Well, she seems to be settled in. That’s all that matters.

I reach over to give her snout a scratch and she tilts it just out of reach. The cats squirm around each other and Dirge gives them a rough poke with her nose. She and I don’t much care whether they’re comfortable, as long as they’re properly hoarded. I honestly don’t get the appeal of cats but whatever.

The one good thing about the cats is that I think we have a shot at winning the hoard award. You rarely see dragons with hoarded pets. There was one with goldfish that got big on YouTube until the overstocked aquarium poisoned all the fish, but that’s the closest I’ve ever heard of.

Dirge and the cats are settled in, or as settled as Shitstain ever gets. Dirge has her hoard and her bit of territory and I can be confident that she’ll stay put. The judges have started their rounds but they’re still in the first aisle. I decide it’s safe for me to have a quick stroll and check out the merchandise tables.

In ten minutes I’m back, in a full dragon onesie (with wings!), a glowing plastic necklace shaped like flames, and with a cartoon dragon painted on my cheek. Yes, I’m a loser, but today I’m a happy loser.

Dirge is scraping her talons into the surface of the table in a circle around two of the cats. Shitstain is now squashed under Dirge’s hind leg and seems to be temporarily tamed. Also, someone is now setting up her dragon at the next table. We nod to each other, friendly but not too friendly. I don’t interrupt
her since the judges are turning down our aisle and she’s not ready. I busy myself fluffing Dirge’s cushion, but Shitstain lunges out and sinks a claw into my finger.

“Ow, you little shitstain!”

My neighbor chuckles. “Fucking cats, right?”

“I so know.”

“Cool hoard, though.”

I shiver a little inside. I knew they were a cool hoard! I knew it!

She’s got her dragon and hoard laid out now. “Whoa,” I breathe. It’s an honest-to-goodness firebreather. Its fringe wavers and glows at the tips, ever so slightly. As if it sees me staring, it lets a lazy curl of smoke wisp out of its left nostril, its smug eyes half closed. I can’t say I blame it. It’s magnificent. Then I notice that it’s perched atop a little tower of books.

“Whoooa,” I say to the other woman. I can’t think of anything more specific to say. I’m just standing and pointing at her dragon. I force my hand down. God, I’m a loser.

She just nods. I mean, she knows how awesome her dragon is. No sense having fake modesty. But she’s not a dick about it. I like that. Dragon people are the coolest people.

I go on. “But, like, I’m sure you always get asked this, so sorry, but a firebreather who hoards books? As in paper?”

She shrugs. “I know. But she’s careful. So far.” The dragon, as if to demonstrate her lack of concern, dismounts from the tower, opens the top book and props it up against the others before settling down to read.

I nod. Ok, then.

I can’t think of anything to say that doesn’t sound stupid and anyway, the judges are here to check out the firebreather. They are duly impressed and the firebreather is the picture of nonchalance.

Just as the judges move on to Dirge, Shitstain makes a break for it. Of course. He makes it right to the edge of the table before a taloned forepaw claps down on his neck.

It’s not Dirge’s forepaw. It’s the firebreather’s.

The two dragons are utterly motionless, their eyes piercing into one another’s. The cats are still and wary. Even Shitstain hasn’t struggled to get free.

That’s when I notice the book the firebreather was reading. It’s a cat book. A fucking cat book.

“Uh…” I say.

“Yeah…” the other woman says.

The firebreather’s slim tongue slides out from between its front teeth, a lick of flame flickering off the forked tip. One of these dragons is going to die. No, let’s be real. Dirge is going to die. Because of Shitstain.

“Fucking. Cats.” I hiss.

It takes me awhile to realize that Dirge is moving, almost too slowly to see. Her yellow eyes are still locked on the other dragon, but she’s extending her own foreleg toward Shitstain. Oh just let him go! He’s useless! I can get another damn cat! A better cat! An upgrade! But that’s not how this works; he’s
hers, shitstain or no. She will fight for him. She will fight a firebreather, and she will lose.

Dirge’s paw hovers over the cat’s orange hindquarters but she doesn’t touch him yet. Her talons pass over where the firebreather’s paw clutches Shitstain by the neck. She slowly but firmly lays her paw on the cat book. The firebreather’s eyes flick from the book to Shitstain to Dirge’s intent gaze.

The other two cats, now bored, start kicking each other in the face. Because cats are idiots.

The firebreather now pulls Shitstain toward her a little bit, maybe just an inch. Dirge curls her claws around the book. Then, as if it was choreographed, the book and the cat slide past each other, over the small gap between the two tables.

The two dragons turn their backs on each other, for all the world as if neither could care less about the other. They tend to their hoards – Dirge’s now consisting of two cats and one cat book, and the firebreather’s of a small library with one cat for good measure. Dirge starts flipping through the pages, and Shitstain leaps to the top of the book pile while the firebreather watches with a doting glint in its eye.

Excited cheers and chatter erupt all around us. I had no idea the whole room was watching. I had no idea the judges had been right there. I had no idea I’d been crushing the firebreather’s owner’s hand in mine. She doesn’t let go. There are phones pointed at us; this will be on YouTube in ten minutes. Before I get home, Wikipedia will be updated with the announcement of the first evidence of dragon barter.

Oh, and Dirge tied with the firebreather for best hoard. I guess cats are good for something. I think I can live with being this kind of loser.


“The Seventh Year” by Alexandra Balasa.

Read by Graeme Dunlop.

I long to be free, I long to live large,

I make my coin raiding boat and barge,

Take what I want, do as I please,

I fear no Keeper of the Seas!

 So say the men who foolishly rove

Into the depths of Casiphea’s Cove

 – From ‘Seafarer’s Blight,’ a pirate’s song of unknown origin

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Rated PG-13, for some language.

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PodCastle 434: The Ghost Years

Show Notes

Rated PG-13.


The Ghost Years

by Nghi Vo

The year I turned ten, the war almost ended. The Chinese army fell back beyond the northern border of Cao Bằng, leaving behind thousands of widows, wide swathes of burned ground, and their great war bells in their haste.

These bells were of the ancient kind, tongueless but elegant and struck with enormous logs swung from their own frames. They filled the battlefield with sonorous thunder, and the crews that manned them were said to be fanatical, as devoted to their bells as they never were to their commanders. They were left sinking in the black mud along the border, and the Resplendent Phoenix Army brought back news of their silence. We don’t know what happened to their crews.

There was talk of melting them down, perhaps into a war memorial, but the bells, two hundred or more scattered along Vietnam’s long northern border, were still in disputed territory.

Besides, the war was not over yet. We all knew that. The bells stayed, silent and dreaming in the mire.


My name is Cho Doan, and I am the only daughter of Nguyen Mai and Cho Tuan. My father was an apothecary who came to Thăng Long with nothing more than a little bit of money and a pet lizard that he carried in his sleeve.

He stopped to rest in the shade of an apitong tree just outside of the city, where there was a gang of pretty girls clustered in the shade and reading each other poetry. There was one girl in a pale orange aoi dai that fluttered daintily around her knees. She laughed when she saw the lizard poking its green head out of my father’s sleeve, and he liked her laugh so much, he took her all the way to Thăng Long to be his wife.

I was born with a full head of black hair that fluffed up like a chick’s when it was dry. It was all black, black as tar, black as good earth, but then when I was six months old, a patch of it at my right temple fell out. Well, no matter, I still had plenty left, and my grandmother would play with me, kissing the bald spot and massaging it with her fingertips so it would grow back as black and strong as the rest, but it didn’t. It grew back white tinged with cream, like the lotus flowers that massed on the river after the typhoons.

“She was born in the year of the pig, and I ate pork the night before it happened,” my grandmother declared, and she became a vegetarian on the spot. My parents tried to tell her that her meal had nothing to do with my hair, but it was no use. She never ate another bit of meat after that day, and though my hair never turned black, I liked it well enough, and my friends thought it was pretty.

There’s another story about how my mother’s youngest sister disappeared. There was a man involved, and money taken from her family’s shop. Maybe she was living in Saigon, far away from the war and rich as only a smuggler’s bride can be, or maybe she was dead, killed for the promise of love and that money stolen from her sleeping parents. No one told me that story, and I had to piece it together over fifteen years of overheard whispers and sorrowful pauses.

My family exists in the stories we tell each other about each other, and in that, we are very much like our country. The Vietnamese were born from the marriage of a dragon from the sea and a goddess from the mountain. They lived together long enough to have one hundred children, but upon realizing that he craved the water, and she her mountains, they split their family in half and went their separate ways.

There are no stories about my brother.

He was not born, he did not go to temple with our family, but he did die, and when he did, he took the heart of my family out as neatly as a butcher removes a pig’s heart and throws it on the grill.


The year I turned thirteen, my parents enrolled me in the local high school. The war was going not well, but steadily, and we practiced our calligraphy by writing to soldiers at the front.

I ran home one day in the rain season, my white trousers rolled up to my knees and the long skirts of my aoi dai plucked up so that they would not become soaked in the puddles. I set my yellow umbrella in the front hall to dry, and I was putting down the school books just when I heard an anguished cry.

I was a daughter of a country at war, and I knew what it was, but I had never expected to hear it in my own home. I ran to the kitchen where my parents were on the ground. My mother knelt on the checkered black and white tile, clutching a letter in her hand, and my father rocked back and forth on his heels, a humming grunt of pain strained between his clenched teeth. The sound was terrible, and I froze in the doorway.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

She gestured me to the floor next to her and she showed me the letter.

My eyes flew to the name signed at the bottom. It was one that everyone in Vietnam knew, that of General Phuc, the commander of the Red Phoenix Army in the north. I read the letter, growing more and more confused.

General Phuc was grieved to have to tell us of the loss of Cho Vinh, son of Nguyen Mai and Cho Tuan. Cho Vinh had become separated from his platoon while on maneuvers, and captured by the Chinese. He was executed at dawn two days later, and his body dropped in a pit. His bones could not be returned home. The General was very sorry.

I stared at the paper, and I stared at my parents. I could feel their grief as if it were my own, because I was theirs. I was their daughter, their flesh, and I had known them every day of my life. I knew their faces and their hearts just as I knew their grief now, and I knew one other thing.

“But I don’t have a brother!” I said, my voice louder than it had ever been. I had never raised my voice to my parents before, but I wasn’t shouting at them. I was shouting at the letter, I was shouting at the strange conspiracy that we had fallen into, a world where I had a brother who had been executed by the Chinese.

My father’s hand crashed into my face. I was lucky it wasn’t his fist. He stood over me, hands clenched, and eyes rimmed with tears.

The words were on my lips, I have no brother, and then he would have hit me again and harder, but then my grandmother, his mother, was there.

“She’s in shock, she’s crazy,” she said, kneeling down to put her arms around me. “See, that white in her hair, it makes her sensitive, it makes it so hard for her, she does not know what she is saying.”

For a moment, neither my father nor I were satisfied with that. I needed to go on shouting, and he needed to hit me for it, but then it was like the fight went out of us. He went back to my mother, still rocking and keening on the ground as if she would never stop, and my grandmother helped me up and mashed some rau răm leaves in a bowl. She had me apply the leaves to my face to reduce the redness and to prevent a bruise from forming, and she shook her head the entire time.

“Such a bad thing, a bad thing,” she kept saying. We loved her, and of course we honored her, but she was so old then, and her mind soft around the edges.

“Do I have a brother?” I whispered, and for a moment, she only kept up her tuneless hum.

“Your parents say you do,” she said. “So you must.”


That was how I got my brother.

It maddened me. There was no space for a brother in my life, none at all. We lived in a small house, the apothecary shop below, and our home above. My parents slept in a room alone, a luxury, and my grandmother and I slept in the tiny room at the back of the house. There was nowhere for my brother to sleep.

There were no pictures of him, no boys’ clothes bundled up in the attic and ready to send to the next relative who had a son of his size. There were little pencil marks on the doorway where my father measured my growth with every year on my birthday, and there are no other marks beside mine there.

I saw these things, and I saw that they were unimportant to my mother and father. They contacted the priest at the temple to have the prayers said, and we scrubbed the house from top to bottom, dumping pail after pail of dirty water into the street. Over the course of seven days, our relatives came to visit and pay their respects, and I began to realize something.

They paid their respects to my family, they mourned with my parents, and they brought food, oh they brought so much food, but there was something eerily familiar about it all.

It was a time of war. Funerary rituals happened often, and I had attended plenty of them myself with my parents. How many times had I mourned a male cousin I didn’t know? How many times had I said prayers for the safe delivery of a solider who had been executed, who had died with all hands on his submariner in the East Sea, who was shot trying to run telephone wire across disputed territory?

After someone dies, there are stories told. When my father’s father died, I was only a little child, but we traveled all the way to Thanh Hóa in cars drawn by the steam engines. I remember that the engine itself was sculpted to look like dragons, fierce cat heads and long crocodilian bodies. I thought that they ate up the distance between Thăng Long and Thanh Hóa so that we got there before the day was out.

My father and his siblings told stories about his father for three days straight over enormous plates of burnished duck and roasted pork. I ate the crunchy pork skin that my mother peeled off of her meat for me, and I ate up the stories as well. I learned that he was a privateer for the Vietnamese navy when he was a young man, and how he stripped Chinese ships of everything from their cargo to their bolts. He met my grandmother when he bumped into her, causing her to spill all of her shopping on the ground. She made him pick them up, she made them carry them home for her, and as he liked to put it, she made him marry her. It was a happy marriage, and they had six children living still to tell stories about them. His teeth were stained from the betel nuts he loved to chew, and when his wife, my grandmother died, he was drunk for six months straight.

I never met my grandfather, but I knew him, and when I have children of my own, they’ll know him too.

We mourned my brother, and my aunts, my uncles and my cousins came to mourn him, too. My father did not speak a word to me until the service was over, and for weeks, he viewed me with a kind of narrow-eyed suspicion.

“I’m sorry I was… I was rude and thoughtless,” I finally said to him. “I don’t mean to be, I’m sorry.”

To my surprise, he grabbed me by my shoulders and drew me in for an awkward embrace. We didn’t touch often, and it shocked me how bony he was, how hard his sternum was through his shirt.

“Yes, yes, he is dead,” he said, and though he was not crying, his shoulders heaved once, twice, before he let me go.

He is dead, my mind whispered. Not I miss him, or we loved him. Only he is dead.


I lived in the shadow of my brother’s death; we all did. We mourned him the way that any family would mourn their only son. My parents still worked in the apothecary, but their shoulders were bent, and they held their mouths in hard lines. Because I loved them, I had a brother. I mourned with them, and I could feel the tug of the conspiracy at my ankles, trying to lure me closer so that I would fall in. I could feel its pull like the sonorous ringing of an enormous bell, and more than once, when my mother wept or my father stared off into the distance, I looked north.


The year I turned eighteen, they closed the schools and sent the children home to study with their parents. They sent the teachers to the front, and there were many going-away parties that summer. I was part of the last class to graduate from my high school.

I was already a skilled typist, and I enlisted in the women’s corps, what many people then called the Elephant Army after the legendary Trung sisters. My mother reminded me of what had happened to my brother, but my father nodded solemnly and said that I had his permission to go. I packed the single bag that was allowed, and my mother made sure that a lucky talisman was stitched into the bag’s lining so that I would always find my way home.

The women’s dorm at Thăng Long was cramped, with eight women sleeping two to a bunk in each room, but it was the first time I’d met so many girls from so many different places. There were sturdy Ma girls, Hmong girls who kept themselves, and a single Lu girl who watched us all as if we breathed a lesser air than she did.

I shared my bed with Linh, a young widow from Saigon. She was as lively and light-hearted as the plays always painted southern girls as being, and she was always trying to teach us songs and dances from the south, keeping us up so late and so loud that the hall mother had to come and quiet us down.

“You’re good girls who work hard during the day,” the hall mother said in confusion. “Why won’t you just lie down and go to sleep?”

The dead haunt us, we could have said, the ones we remember and the ones we don’t.

I was not the only girl with a phantom dead brother or cousin. Through the long hot nights, we would swap stories, building an intricate web of relations, joys and tragedies. I knew to watch out for shifted eyes, the half-shrug, the almost absent-minded grief.

He died in of malaria in the swamps with all his regiment.

He was executed at the rout in Cao Bằng.

He died.

He died.

I could hear the difference now, and I learned to listen for it in dark or in the light.


Our small group of typists and switchboard operators moved with the front lines. The year I was twenty-two, we were as far north as any of us had ever been, and it felt as if the Chinese were watching us from just beyond the next rise in the mountains. We knew that we were somewhere close to Lạng Sơn, but beyond that, we could have been anywhere on the frontier.

You might think that fear of the fighting and our distance away from home would have kept us in the barracks, meek as little babbler chicks in their nests. The truth was that the danger made us wild. We were good girls, we never shirked at our work or appeared drunk in the morning, but after the day was done, the night was ours.

Up late in our barracks, we would push the beds against the walls, dancing and playing cards by the light of the pair of lanterns that rationing allowed us. Tuyet, the Lu girl, finally unbent enough to play her flute for us, and Tam and Suong danced together arm in arm, kissing whenever there was a pause in the music.

Linh and I sat back from the others, sharing a slender cigarette that she had gotten from who knows where.

“Do you want to go out?” she asked, as casually as if we were on the street in Saigon. I had heard that it was easy to pretend that there was no war in Saigon if you were heartless enough.

“Sure,” I said carelessly. “Where do you want to go? The shadow puppet theater is supposed to be good here, or maybe you want to get some noodles?”

She laughed, her dark eyes dancing, and she scooted a little closer to me.

“Better than that. Come on.”

She ducked out the back as if she was just walking to the latrines, and after a stunned moment, I followed her. We dodged a few of the guards on patrol easily enough, and soon we were walking one of the narrow mountain roads, clear and easy in the moonlight.

“No, seriously, where are we going? We’re going to die out here, Linh.”

She didn’t even turn around.

“Come on,” she said. “This is wonderful.”

It was both safer and more dangerous than you might have thought, being out there that late at night. The front was miles away, but there was always talk of saboteurs and spies. We were as likely to be shot by our own soldiers as any wakeful Chinese sniper.

Linh walked along, and after a moment, I trotted along beside her.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going yet?”

“When we get there, I won’t need to tell you,” she said brightly.

I cursed a little under my breath, but I kept following her. If it wasn’t for our dull blue uniforms and the mountain night, we could have been on our way to a party in my own home town.

We came to a little valley that I wasn’t aware even existed, and just as we came to its mouth, a cloud scudded away from the moon to light the entire space up with silver. I stared.

At the center of the valley, amidst a nest of rotting timber and rolled on its side, was one of the Chinese war bells that I had seen in my school book pictures. It sat as imperturbable and eternal as the mountains themselves. As we walked towards it, I felt something echo inside me, as if it had been struck and everything except my ears could hear it.

“Linh…”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid,” she said playfully. “Come here. I bet you’ll feel it too.”

I could have asked her what she meant, but she went and sat in the shadow of the bell, disappearing almost entirely into the darkness there. I hesitated for a moment, but I had come along and I wouldn’t be left behind now.

I crawled next to her, sitting on the stony ground by the bell. I was almost disappointed. When I touched it, there was simply brass under my fingers. It was ancient and beautiful, it belonged to the enemy that we had been fighting since before I was born, but it was just a bell.

“Linh…”

“My husband wasn’t going to join up,” she said softly. “He was a university student, and his parents had already bought his dispensation. They weren’t rich, but they did it all the same. He was going to go study in Korea, but then at the last moment, he walked away and spoke to the recruitment office. They had him in a flying fortress less than three days later.”

As she spoke, I could see her husband in my head. She had a single snapshot of him, shy and skinny standing next to a budding tree, her smiling and brilliant under his arm. Now I could see him moving and breathing, living and signing up for the war all in spite of his poor parents’ wishes.

“He was so gentle, and so kind. He wrote me back whenever he could. He sent me such funny drawings of the other soldiers, of the ships’ cats and the mountains from the fortress.”

I pressed my face against the cool metal of the bell, because it seemed to me that I could see her husband more clearly that way.

“He sounds wonderful,” I murmured. “I wish I could have met him.”

She tilted her head back against the bronze, a slight smile on her face. Southern girls smiled even when they were sad.

“I can feel him the most clearly here,” she said. “Sometimes, if I think about him hard enough, it’s like I can almost touch him.”

Something about her words rang in my head, not like a bell, but like an alarm. I sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder, and I reached back to trace my calloused fingertips across the corrugated surface of the bell. It was so old, and it had rung for so many battles. The Chinese used it to instill fear in their enemies, but bells were always used to send message of one sort or another.

“Do you remember your brother?” Linh asked presently, and for a moment, it all wanted to come out. I had no brother, I never had, but strangely, now I could feel his presence more than I had ever felt it before.

I rested my cheek against the bronze surface of the bell, and I let my eyes drift closed. I reached inside, and I lied, but soon enough, it became something different.

“I do,” I said. “When I was very young, my mother sent Vinh and I to the market to buy water spinach for dinner. It was the rainy season, and the stream that runs close to our home was flooded. It lapped against the grass on the bank, and there was a little white kitten playing there. I stopped to watch, and when it slipped in, I screamed. Vinh didn’t hesitate for a moment, he leaped in after it, and he was carried nearly a quarter of a mile down the stream. He got out, soaked to the skin, but the kitten was inside his shirt, shivering and crying, but alive. My father caned him for being so reckless, but we kept the kitten. She’s quite an old cat now.”

With my ear pressed to the cool bronze, I thought I could hear a shivering tremolo, something musical but not music, and abruptly, I pulled away, wiping my hands needlessly on my trousers.

“Let’s go back,” I said roughly, but when Linh looked disappointed, I smiled a little.

“I want to come back,” I said. “I’ll come back with you soon okay?”


A week later, I went home to visit, and as I stepped inside the door, my white cat, little and bony in her old age, came to twine around my ankles. She chirped at me inquisitively, and smiling, I went to ask my mother if she remembered the time my brother had won the city-wide painting competition.


I went back to the bell. I went back over and over again, and I told Linh stories about my brother, about how brave he was. I tried to remember all of those cousins, so deeply, earnestly and falsely mourned. I spoke of what they were like as little boys. I spoke of the good they did and how proud we were of them.

I found others, too. I had been watching for them without knowing it for years. I found the ones who looked away when we mentioned brothers, cousins and fathers, the ones who hitched one shoulder, and mumbled something hurried. We went to the bell, and we talked down the moon.

When we left that posting, the girls who came after us were taken up there as well, in ones and twos. We found other bells. The front moved back and forth, we lost some, we gained others.

We never stopped telling stories.


The year I turned twenty-eight, the war ended. Today, some forty years after that, there is a Chinese school down the road from where I live. My parents are long dead, and so are many of my friends from the war. Linh married again and emigrated to Korea. I teach at the local university, and when they come to my house for dinner or when I go to theirs, my stories are full of my friends, our brothers and our cousins.

I do not know if our stories changed anything. I do not know what role the bells were meant to play, whether they were cunningly deployed weapons or simply monstrous devices that have their own strange aims.

What I do know is this:

Last week, Anh, a shy girl who was born long after armistice, came up to me with an old photograph, softened from two generations of handling and care.

“I told my father about your brother,” she said in her diffident way. “He said that his cousin was in the same regiment, and that this was a picture of him. Is your brother is this picture, Professor Doan?”

I took the picture reverently in my hands, because the past, phantom and faded, is fragile. I scanned the four rows of serious young men with their hair cut short, all alike in their dark uniforms. Some of the young men squinted, some smiled, and in the back row, faded even more than the rest, was a face I recognized.

His ears stuck away from his head like a monkey’s, like mine and my father’s. He looked straight at the camera, and there was no smile on his face. He was a serious boy who had grown up into a serious man, but I could still remember his hands clinging tight to a white kitten, both of them shivering from the frigid water of the stream.

“There he is,” I said at last.

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PodCastle 433: Telling Stories

Show Notes

Rated PG-13


Telling Stories

by Sandra M. Odell

Sam knew there would be trouble the night the saguaro came to call. “Evening,” she said, and stepped aside for her unexpected guest.

The cactus scrunched down as far as it could and skittered through the door on its roots, bringing with it the breath of rocks, sage brush, and the cold Sonoran desert night. It stopped in the middle of the cabin’s sparsely furnished main room and straightened until its spines brushed the roof. “I hope I didn’t come at a bad time.”

“Not at all. I don’t get many saguaros stopping by.” She didn’t have many anybodies stopping by anymore, but saying so would have been rude. She settled into the rocker by a bookcase crammed with dog-earred issues of Popular Mechanics and National Geograhic. “What can I do for you?”

The cactus tried to straighten to its full height, but the roof got in the way. “I wish to marry a gila monster.”

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PodCastle 431: La Héron

Show Notes

Rated PG-13.


La Héron

by Charlotte Ashley

In the grayest hour of the evening of April 16th, 1699, when the sun had just vanished behind the great château that embraced the city of Caen but before her lantern-bearers had taken up the hooks of their trade, a gargantuan woman stooped to fit through the door of the Trois Tours Inn. Her inconvenience did not end at the door. Her steeple-crown hat, two centuries out of fashion, bumped the inn’s rafters and fell askew, causing her to swear and slouch as she made her way toward the crowd clustered at the foot of the stairs. Like the other travelers there, she was road-worn and unkempt, blonde hair so filthy that it looked green in the moonlight, spilling like seaweed out of her pointed cap. But so great was the force of her presence that the lesser persons ahead of her moved aside at her approach, clearing the path to the front of the queue where a registrar sat at a table, poised over a long ledger. His pen shook as it hovered over the lists.

“Name?”

“La Héron.”

“Weapon?”

“Rapier.”

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