Rated R
“When you’re dead,” Samantha says, “you don’t have to brush your teeth…”
“When you’re dead,” Claire says, “you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re never afraid.”
Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being dead than Samantha.
Anna and Dave squeeze in one last PodCastle Spotlight, because dammit, Flex, by Ferrett Steinmetz is worth it! Also: There’s a free eBook giveaway, and Dave reads an excerpt!
Rated PG.
Editors’ Note: This is the last story Dave will be hosting at PodCastle as your editor. And he has a present for you — he wrote a story for you all which you can listen to on his new site!
Special thanks to Peter Wood for all the hard work in putting this episode together, and to LaShawn Wanak, for being a wonderful part of our staff.
From: Stef Jones-Tanaka <bilingualbiologist@supermail.com>
To: <superbabymoms@superdupergroups.com>
Subject: Intros
Hey Super Moms! Here’s the email group I mentioned to a couple of you at preschool today. Teacher Stacie said there are four of us families in the system right now at Little Darlings Preschool and shared your emails with me–hope that’s ok! I think we can learn from each other!
Please go ahead and introduce yourself and your kids, and feel free to share a problem you’re having right now. Chances are you’re not alone.
As for me, I have twin four-year-olds Isabel Ko and Beatrix Ai. Isabel has super strength and Beatrix has X-ray vision. Isabel is going through a hitting phase. Our front door has been obliterated twice. Beatrix knows all about sex from looking through the neighbors’ walls (apparently the neighbors have way more fun than we do.) I’m tempted to put both girls in a cement dome covered in foil until they’re twenty.
Hope to hear from you all!
hugs, Stef
Live each day like the planet might explode tomorrow. Who knows, right?
Rated R. Contains Unethical Clothing Options.
He stood in front of the machine that made clothes and fretted. He already had a fur suit, a carpet suit, and a brick suit. Everyone had a water suit; it was practically cliche.
Last week he’d had a Pop-Tart suit for a lark. That had been popular, but he couldn’t go back to that well so soon. Anyway, it smacked too much of the bacon suit fad from last year. He’d had to shower for an hour to get un-sticky afterward.
He’d even done a suit suit, which had helped keep his reputation for the sartorial avant-garde.
Harriet, their aging basset hound, shuffled into the bedroom and plopped down beside him. He looked at Harriet and pursed his lips.
The Brindletom woke after Erdi had already finished her eggs and was on her second cup of coffee. He swung down from his nest in the rafters and slid along the ropes to the table. Erdi pushed the plate of bacon toward him.
“I had a dream last night,” he piped, plucking a bacon strip up with his clever forepaws and gnawing on it.
“Do tell,” Erdi said, somewhat blearily. She was considering a third cup of coffee.
“I dreamed that I was a man accursed, trapped in a hideous mannikin body, and bound to a cruel sorceress who had promised to help me, to return me to my place and my true form, but upon whose pleasure I must wait and serve in the interim. I dreamed that my servitude would have no end, for I was sworn to her unto death and she would live forever.”
Rated PG
“What’s wrong?”
“I just … wasn’t expecting that. Usually it goes ‘Join me and together we can rule the world’, then you heroes say ‘Never!’, and we fight. Nobody’s ever just said ‘Okay’ like that.”
“So what now?”
“Don’t know. I had a great battle planned for us, through the ice caves, over the lava lake, into the mud plains, it would have been spectacular. Now, I guess … do you want to see the inner lair?”
“Yeah, sounds good.”
They met in a birdcage, in those last precious days before they became birds themselves. They were too panicked to ask each other’s names. The boy beat his palms against the wire bars as impotently as he had beat them against the giant’s fist; the woman brushed her fingers first against her sternum, then along the cage floor, even through the boy’s kinky hair, to prove that she was not mad or dreaming.
“Don’t touch me,” he said, making the order into a question.
The woman drew away. “Are you hurt?” Her hands still moved restlessly, diffident as butterflies. They were in a ramshackle attic full of cages whose inhabitants were sparrows as big as she was.
“I didn’t know,” said the boy. He slumped against the bars of the cage. The woman watched the wire press indentations into his shirt. “I didn’t know there were giants in Ohio.”
“Oh.” The woman squatted next to him, careful to keep their shoulders from brushing. “I didn’t know there were either, until today.” She paused. “What’s your name? Where did the giant take you from?”
“Avery.” The boy’s eyes were as brown as tree bark. “I was in the backyard, working. Who are you?”
“Jack.”
Avery blinked. “Jack is a boy’s name.”
Her expression did not change. “But if we’ve been kidnapped by giants,” she murmured, “the only way we’ll ever escape is if one of us is named Jack.”
The seas are full of wives, and our nets strain to hold them. The Greyling is the largest of the fleet, and our catch the greatest. The wives are the source of our great wealth.
When the wives are pulled up in the steely silver nets, they are poured in a shimmering stream onto the deck. Vikos and Broun work the crane, and they sit up high in the control booths, rocking and swaying with the motion of the ship. I couldn’t do that job. I’m a knife man; I cut the skins away and put them in the holding tanks, wives in one and skins in the other. It’s very important that the skins be kept separate. It’s a simple rhythm, once the catch is coming in. The wives are disoriented, confused, sometimes dead. It’s a long haul up from the deeps, and some of them drown or smother on the way in. I throw the dead ones overboard, skin and all. The skins are no good once they’re dead.
The ones that stay alive, I slit open. One stroke along the belly. Two strokes at the forelimbs, two strokes at the rear. There’s a trick to shucking the skin then, and more than once I’ve seen a new knife-man get it wrong in the unfamiliar wet and the noise of a ship at sea. There’s squalling and crying, then, and the whole mess has to go to feed the sharks. I try to slit their throats first, to be merciful. You can tell right away who’s not fit to be a knife-man by the way they handle a ruined skin.
Rated PG
by Matthew Johnson
apilar: to let a fire burn out
gelas: to treat something with care
pikanau: to cut oneself with a fishhook
It is a well-known fact that there are no people more gifted at language than those of the Salutean Isles. Saluteans live in small villages on a thousand densely populated islands; isolated but never alone, their languages change constantly, and new ones are born all the time. A Salutean’s family has a language unintelligible to their neighbours, his old friends a jargon impenetrable to anyone outside their circle. Two Saluteans sharing shelter from the rain will, by the time it lets up, have developed a new dialect with its own vocabulary and grammar, with tenses such as “when the ground is dry enough to walk on” and before I was entirely wet.”
It was in just such circumstances that Sendiri Ang had met his wife, Kesepi, and in such circumstances that he lost her. An afternoon spent in a palm-tree shadow is enough time for two people to fall in love, a few moments enough to die when at sea. Eighteen monsoons had passed in between, enough time for the two of them to develop a language of such depth and complexity that no third person could ever learn it, so utterly their own that it was itself an island, without ties to any of its neighbours.
Rated R. What do you call a group of crows, again?
It is a simple matter to track a deer, to bring it down with a single shot to the neck. I follow it by the red droplets in the snow, then drag the carcass back to the clearing of the crow gifts. Each bit of offal in its turn: black heart, worm-like entrails, pink spongy lungs. I save the liver for myself, and a haunch. The rest I cut apart, leave in a starburst – and by now I am surrounded by crows, a circle of beady-eyed children in cloaks of iridescent black feathers. As I back away, the crows descend, cawing loud enough to wake the dead.
The crows give me gifts in turn. At first they pelted me with rocks that shone ruby and emerald when broken open. I am richer than any king I could name, here in my empty forest, far from any human city. I began it by sharing my kills, inadvertently at first; I give blood and flesh, and they give me what humans want.
Rated R. Contains, well, Destruction (and Creation)
At one time the waters were divided and contained, and dry land was raised up out of the sea, mountains and valleys, hills and plains, and the people lived there. They lived this way for a long time, standing on the bones of the world, until it chanced that they angered the lord of wind and storm. The lord of storms caused it to rain, and it rained for days, for weeks, for months, until there was no dry spot on the face of the world. The low places were deep lakes, the high places awash. In the highest place every step was ankle-deep in water. The clothes the people wore, the beds they slept in, were soaked and dripping. The very food they ate was soaked and dissolved by the rain. And day by day it rained, and the water grew still deeper.
“We will drown!” the people cried. “Alas for us, and for our children! It would be better if we had been fish!” And many of these people, who cried so, were turned into fish, and swam away into the sea. And after this no one gave birth to anything but fish.
There was a woman who gave birth, and the child was a fish. The woman would not put the child into the sea, because it was hers and sickly, but instead kept it beside her. “I will go to the lord of storms,” the woman said, “and beg for the god’s forgiveness, and the life of my child.” And so she did, swaddling the child and keeping it wet with her tears. She traveled far, where even the waters could not reach, until she was too weary and grieved to go further, and some way past that she came to the palace of the lord of the winds.