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
Pharah Dupree always wore her hair up tight.
“You ever hear of Muscle Shoals, Manny?” she said one afternoon. We sat on the back porch steps of Rock Bottom Studios, her with a cigarette, me with a longneck Bud, thinking about how good it’d feel if she smiled my way. “Some of the best music in the world came out of Muscle Shoals, all the big names. Aretha, Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Wilson Pickett, Bob Dylan, Percy Sledge.”
The sun beat the sweat out of me and cut dusty shadows through the trees around the edge of the gravel parking lot. “Yeah. They say the Tennessee River’s what makes the Muscle Shoals sound.”
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?
Rated PG-13
“If these danggone crickets don’t stop following me,” Naomi grumbled as the insect bounded out of the path of her wedge heel. Another of the bugs scuttled across the top of her foot, its spiny legs pricking her exposed skin. Under the streetlight, moths danced in the circle of brightness on the otherwise dim road. Heat ebbed from the asphalt, making her wish she’d worn flip-flops.
For months, the insects had followed her around. At her parents’ house, one had even jumped out of her pocketbook onto the hardwood floor. While her mother screamed and leapt onto a chair, her father had chuckled, scooped up the invader, and placed it outside.
During the month of September, PodCastle will be looking for submissions to celebrate ARTEMIS RISING, a special month-long event across the Escape Artists podcasts featuring stories by women and nonbinary authors in genre fiction.
Stepping in as guest editor for our fourth annual ARTEMIS RISING event is PodCastle assistant editor Setsu Uzume!
Summary
Who Can Submit
Anyone who identifies as a woman, to whatever degree that they do. Nonbinary authors are also welcome and encouraged to submit stories.
As always, we at PodCastle strongly encourage submissions from people of backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented or excluded from traditional fantasy fiction, including, but not limited to, people of color, LGBTQIA authors, persons with disabilities, members of religious minorities, and people from outside the United States. Our goal is to publish fantasy that reflects the diversity of the human race, so we strongly encourage submissions from these or any other underrepresented groups.
What to Submit
Send in your best original fantasy fiction between 2000 – 6000 words.
You can send PodCastle one submission for ARTEMIS RISING. If we have another story under consideration already in the general submissions queue, we’d be happy to consider an additional story for ARTEMIS RISING.
While we’ll be accepting a limited number of stories for ARTEMIS RISING, all stories will be considered for regular PodCastle too.
How to Submit
Start writing now, and keep an eye out for a special ARTEMIS RISING Submittable portal. Submissions will be open for the month of September.
ARTEMIS RISING Q&A
Thanks, and we look forward to reading your stories!
Jen R Albert, Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, and Setsu Uzume, PodCastle Senior Editors
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.
Rated PG-13.
“—which suggests possible applications, if the cobbler is much younger. Don’t you think, Miss Professor?”
The Dauphin sat twelve rows back—teenage heir apparent to the throne, playing at Academy student—smug smile, a ring of vacant seats around him, his speech casually slurred, ostentatiously humble with plain quill and standard-issue student gown (expensively pressed).
I intended my gaze to crucify him. Softness to students is a graybeard luxury; a young woman can only be hard. All the more so, I was sure, in this particular case. I nursed silence to the edge of discomfort, coiling the spring. “It is a thought experiment that depends on immaterial souls transferred by miracle,” I said. “There can be no practical applications.” I paused again, as if gathering my thoughts. “Or do you perhaps mistake yourself for God?”
Rated PG-13.
She arrived at his apartment ten minutes late and discovered that she was already there.
The woman was a champion worrier, but this was something she had not thought to worry about. She had considered: is this a date, is this not a date, am I ready, is he a psycho/rapist/murderer who is going to drug/rape/murder me, what if I am a bad kisser, and even what if dinner makes me gassy and he leans in to kiss me and I let one rip and the whole evening comes down around our ears.
2016
Russell walked past the Check-’n-Go and the cell phone shops on either side of it. It was cold, and the bare branches of the leafless trees reached up to snatch plastic bags from the sky.
He paused at a bit of graffiti low down on the brick of the abandoned corner building. Someone had written, “CA$H MONEY”. Most folks tuned that stuff out, and even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t see any significance in this particular tag. But Russell did; he recognized it for what it was. It was a pretty good one too: even folks who knew what to look for might have missed this one.