* Author : L. S. Johnson
* Narrators : Nicola Chapman, Matt Dovey and Peter Seaton-Clark
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by G Is for Ghosts, Poise and Pen Publishing



Content warning for era-specific homophobia


Rated PG-13
The O’Brien and Palmer Show – PART ONE OF TWO
by L. S. Johnson
 
INTERVIEWER: My guest tonight is comedian Timothy Palmer, who recently returned to the stage for a nationwide tour. Please welcome Timothy Palmer. [applause]
 
PALMER: Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s great to be here, John.
 
INTERVIEWER: Before we get started, I must tell you that we polled tonight’s audience before you arrived. Over the years you’ve done some remarkable cameos in films and television, and we asked the audience what was the line they most wanted to hear you say. The winning line was from ‘The Ladies of St. Agnes.’ [laughter and applause]
 
PALMER: My God, I’m funny and I haven’t even said anything. [laughter] It’s every comedian’s dream. [He starts to stand up] Well, I’m off, you can put my fee in the mail. [laughter]
 
INTERVIEWER, handing PALMER a slip of paper: This is the line in question. [to audience] Ladies and gentlemen. Timothy Palmer, from his memorable cameo in ‘The Ladies of St. Agnes.’
 
PALMER, looking directly at the camera: They never taught us this in Sunday school! [laughter and applause]


 
The advertisement had read:
 
WANTED
Medium for private séance. Familiarity with occult history and practice required. Serious inquiries only.
 
Anne hadn’t needed the job; she certainly hadn’t wanted the job. Private séances usually started creepy and ended worse. There were plenty of small circles a person could join, that would come to your house if necessary. Private was the last resort for those who were too emotional or demanding, or it was a lure put out by men with very particular fetishes. The last time Anne had done a private séance she had been trapped for hours in a stuffy, pitch-dark living room while the client verbally abused his dead wife. Anne had desperately wanted to sever the link, but she had been terrified the man would turn his rage on her. When she had finally been released she felt physically and emotionally beaten. It had taken her weeks to recover.
Yet the advertisement would not let her be. When she knocked the newspaper off the table it fell open to that page; when she went to run her errands the grocer was reading that selfsame page, the butcher wrapped her Sunday meat in the page, and she found herself staring at the ad as she ate a cone of chips for lunch. When she finally boarded the bus for home and found a newspaper in her favorite upper-level seat, neatly folded to show the exact quadrant with the ad in it, she threw up her hands and admitted defeat.
The man’s voice on the phone was pleasant at least, and oddly familiar; the address he gave was a posh neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood that would probably call the police if a woman screamed, if for no other reason than to restore its tranquility. And the fee he suggested was more than generous, so perhaps for once the spirits were doing Anne...

* Author : Mimi Mondal 
* Narrator : Elizabeth Green
* Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Originally published as PodCastle 349



Content warnings for violence and disturbing imagery


Rated R
This Sullied Earth, Our Home
by Mimi Mondal

A few hours after the Majestic Oriental Circus rolls into Deoband, Johuree steps into our tent and whispers, “This is the place where I took you in. It was here.”Outside, it looks just like one of the many small towns we wind our way through, halting for a week or two to put up a show. It has been raining for days. The university dome in the distance glistens with dark moss against the ponderous sky. The fairground is all mud, sludge and clumps of grass, sucking in our tent posts like a fumbling, ungainly monster. A group of local men, hired to dry up enough ground to put up the main circus tent, have been working since the morning. So why does this miserable earth feel like a familiar taste, again?We wonder if Johuree would like a cup of tea. He agrees. There is no milk, but he sips the dark brown brew in silence.We watch.“There is a cottage at the far end of the town. Little more than ruins now, I presume. Would you like to visit?”Johuree never goes anywhere. We don”t recall him ever stepping out into the daylight. We don”t recall much anything. Though we travel far and wide with the circus, we have never left the camp site and gone “sightseeing”, as some others in the troupe are in the habit of doing.
Nor has he.


“He was my friend. My brother. We had fought together through our darkest hour.”
Johuree never reminisces, the least of all about family. We are not sure if there is anything to reminisce. He shifts his bulk upon the faded patchwork rug that is the only seat for guests in our tent. He places the empty cup and plate delicately on the floor.
We sit on wooden chairs set against the mirror and the dressing table. We nod.
“Well, then. We leave after lunch and return by sundown. I will send Bansiram out to find a pair of hooded raincoats for you . ”
After he leaves, we fiddle around our tent, grappling with the thought.
Eventually, Elia speaks, “Our . . . father.”
“Should we put on our makeup?” says Sascha.
“He didn’ t say. ”
“He didn ‘ t say not to.”
That is a fact. We never leave the tent without our makeup. But then, we never leave to go anywhere but up on the stage.
“What if we dress up as one of each?” Elia suggests. “You take the light one, I take the dark.”
This sounds reasonable. Sounds like the way we think people in the non-circus world might dress.
Our efforts meet Johuree’ s approval. We are less sure that his silver ringmaster jacket is the appropriate attire for a visit to the dead. But we do not know what is, so we hold our judgement.

“Going out, babu saab?”
Wading through the mud towards us is one of the men working on the ground. Soaked, mud-splattered kurta pajama lingers against translucent skin that stretches tight over his bones. The man sucks vigorously at a sodden beedi.
“Just taking the children out for a walk. Bit of sightseeing.”
“Some weather for sightseeing.”
“Not likely to improve any time soon, is it?” Johuree displays his teeth.
The man stares at us. We recede under the hoods of our oversized raincoats.
Then he smiles.

* Author : Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko
* Narrator : Yaroslav Barsukov
* Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies


Rated PG-13
The Cuckoo of Vrežna Mountain
by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko
 
I realised I was in love with Ivor the day he went up the mountain to speak with the goddess.
We were at that age when the affectionate ease of childhood tips over into something different, when every touch could be the casual brush of friendship or something more and I would never know in advance which was which. There were many times, in those days, when Ivor would take my hands in his, larger and warmer and smooth with the orange-blossom oil he rubbed into them; and I would jerk away with some hasty apology and adjust my trousers while he was not looking. To this day, I find the smell of oranges arousing at the most inopportune times, of which, in a town known for its citrus trees, there are uncomfortably many.
Which is to say that it was not entirely unexpected, this matter of my being in love with him, except insofar as I had never considered the option until it was upon me; and if we had been boys further up the coast, away from the Oracle and her mountain, perhaps this would have been a cause for celebration: the sort of slow exploration of love and youth that ends, mutually, in a friendship deeper than it was before.
But Ivor was a scion of the city Vrežna, and his mother Silva was a devout woman. Her ways were the old ways, and that was why I awoke early one morning to climb a mountain with Ivor and wait out the dew, wait out the dawn, wait out the moment he emerged from the goddess’s temple a betrothed man.
The temple stood facing the sea, the bulk of the mountain shielding it from the town below. It was a simple structure, columned and open to the elements with a tall pointed roof. Inside, the floor was given over to a shallow pool of water that was a hand deep at most. There was no altar. The Oracle did not accept gifts.
Ivor splashed through the water like a man born to the task. Silva and I remained outside, but the demarcation was immaterial. The Oracle’s temple was curiously small. It was easy to see everything that went on inside. Vrežna’s people claim that only those born within sight of her mountain could see the Oracle’s physical form. I do not know if this is true. I do know that until that day, until I looked at the thing slumped at Ivor’s feet, I had never seen anything in the temple.
It was a woman, slumped against the shallow steps rimming the pool. Her skin was the same light brown as Ivor’s but mottled with pale splotches, like someone had spilled ink that sapped colour rather than granted it. Her open eyes were an even grey. She looked as though dead, I thought, until her lips opened around an indrawn breath.
“How strange,” Silva said to me, and it took me a moment to realise that she was not looking inside the temple, not speaking of the woman lying there, “to stand with one of the Godless on the Oracle’s mountain. Or perhaps three dead gods is not enough for you? Would you strike down our Vrežna, given the chance?”
She said it as if she had not herself stamped the permission form that allowed a non-Vrežni access to the mountain.
“Two dead gods,” I murmured. “The third survives.”’
“Even worse! Yours are not the only people to suffer the death o...

* Author : Cynthia Zhang
* Narrator : Curtis C. Chen
* Host : Shingai Njeri Kagunda
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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PodCastle 886: Houyi the Archer Fights the Sun is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13
Houyi the Archer Fights the Sun
by Cynthia Zhang
 
“I,” Houyi the Archer says one bright August afternoon when the thermometers hit 103 and the teenagers crack eggs on the sidewalk to see if they’ll fry, “am going to fight the sun.”
“Husband,” says Chang’E, three thousand years into immortality and long past reacting to these types of statements, “please do not fight the sun. We only have the one left, and most people would not appreciate having it gone.”
“Some might, though.” Above them, the ceiling fan whirls, valiantly trying to assuage the heat. The maintenance company, when Houyi called, gave the next available date for fixing the air conditioning as Monday, which — while not too far away — is crucially not today. “The tanuki pack in Arlington Heights or all those hipster vamp kids in Logan Square, I’m sure they’d come down to personally thank me. Besides, I didn’t say I was going to kill the sun. Just rough it up a little, teach it a few lessons about respect.”
“A truly terrifying prospect. Gods and men tremble at your approach, naught but the bravest of heroes can dare but stand when you draw near.” On her Sudoku puzzle, Chang’E pencils in a seven, frowns, and then erases it. “Humans have lived thousands of years without air conditioning, Houyi. We can survive a few days.”
“Aiyah, but that was thousands of years ago, before we had electricity and coal and acid in our rain. This sun’s been getting far too bold, I say. In the old days, I would already have a fast mount and a full quiver to chase the whelp down.”
“If you are mulling over old battles,” Chang’E says, “perhaps it would be better if you had something else to occupy your mind.” Placing her Sudoku book on the coffee table, she stands up. “I have a task for you, my husband.”
The effects of these words are instant. “A task, is it? Well! Let’s have it. What is it you need, my best beloved? The first fallen feather from a newborn phoenix, a sprig of new buds from the world tree, the last dried slices from this millennia’s crop of divine peaches on Kunlun Mountain?”
“Something like that.” Chang’E takes her purse off the wall hook, smooths down an errant wrinkle in her dress. “We are in need of groceries once more, my beloved. I would appreciate your help in seeing this task to completion.”
“In this weather? Do you care so little for your husband that you would have him roasted to ashes?”
“I care enough for my husband that I would not have him starve, yes. Besides, we’ll be spending most of the time indoors, and the stores have air conditioning.”
“The trials we must brave in this cruel world,” Houyi says, sighing as he reaches for his cane. “To think that after all our years of service, this is how the world repays its heroes of lore: with broken air conditioning and technicians unavailable until Monday.”
“Don’t forget to put on sunscreen,” Chang’E says, checking her sunhat in the hallway mirror. “You may have bested his brothers before, but the sun is still a formidable foe.”

Houyi, dutifully trundling their shopping cart across narrow sidewalks and cracked asphalt, is sweating by the time they reach Tai Hwa Market. On instinct,

* Author : Si Wang
* Narrator : Shingai Njeri Kagunda
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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PodCastle 885: Prisoners is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG
Prisoners
by Si Wang
 
The fortress was as large as a city and empty as a dried-up well. During the days, I followed a tattered map annotated by many hands and took many wrong turns through cramped hallways, treacherous stairways, and rusty gates. At night, I couldn’t sleep. Resting on the cold, stone floor, I clutched a delicate metal ringlet weighed down by heavy keys, worried I might lose it.
After five days, the claustrophobic ceiling finally opened up into a courtyard. The air was cold and fresh. The full moon illuminated a cloudy sky. At the center of the courtyard, a rusty cage hung a few feet off the ground — just enough distance so that the man’s feet couldn’t touch the stone floor. The man was as gaunt as the cage. They were one and the same with the way he sat: motionless, his thin arms wrapped around the bars, his thin legs protruding from the bottom.
He slept with a shallow breath, now and then shuddering and whimpering. His eyes fluttered open, and he groaned.
“Who’s there?” he said weakly in an accent I had not heard in a long time. Although his hair was jet black and his face free of wrinkles, the frailty of his words made him appear a hundred years old. He straightened up and said more firmly, “What do you want?” The illusion broke, and he looked like a much younger man. He looked familiar, like a childhood friend.
I tried to control the excitement in my voice and hide the reason I was there. “When I heard about you, I had to come see for myself.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the Queen.”
His face was impassive. “Is that so? Come closer — I can’t see very well.”
I stepped forward, a breath away from his reach.
His eyes studied me. My red silk gown flowed as smoothly as ocean waves, the jewels in my hair gleamed in the moonlight, and the perfume on my feet smelled of petrichor. The chaos priest had painted the penumbral edge of judgment on my forehead. The heavy set of keys hung on my belt.
“Are you going to free me?” he said and laughed bitterly.
“That was my intention, but first, I have some questions for you.”
“You would have brought guards if you intended to free me. I’ve had this conversation countless times with countless people. I don’t know the answer to what you’re looking for. You’re wasting your time.”
“You’ll find it hard to believe how much time I’ve already spent trying to find you.”
“Your forebears wanted the same thing. Whatever means they used, it always ended the same way: they died, and I am still here, locked up in this cage.”
“They were not my forebears.”
The man’s eyebrow arched. “A revolution then? That must be quite a story.”
“Allow me three questions. That is all I ask.”
He looked tired. He shifted his legs and grimaced. “And you’ll free me afterward?”
“That depends on your answers.”
The man sneered and nodded. “Of course.”
“Why were you put into this cage?” I asked.
“I stole a piece of bread,” he said, “Next question.”
“I was told you didn’t need food to survive.”
“The bread wasn’t for me.”
The man’s eyes were like dark pools of water where the depths were deeper than the ocean, and I couldn’t see below the surface.
“Please, tell me more.

* Author : J.J. Roth
* Narrators : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Jen R. Albert, Dagny Paul, Graeme Dunlop, Summer Fletcher, Matt Dovey, Alasdair Stuart, Marguerite Kenner, Eleanor R. Wood and Steven Capps
* Host : Emmalia Harrington
* Audio Producers : Eric Valdes and Pria Wood
*
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PodCastle 884: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: All of the Cuddles With None of the Pain is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG
All of the Cuddles With None of the Pain
By J. J. Roth

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.

How do the dolls become “reborn”?
An artist re-paints each doll with more lifelike skin-toned paints, mixed to achieve the actual skin tones of real babies across the racial spectrum. Delicate veins and blue wash undertones give the newborn baby a more realistic appearance. Hair is sewn strand by strand into plastic bald or molded hair-grooved heads through a process called micro-rooting. Glass beads weight the baby’s body, head, and limbs for the authentic feel of holding a living infant.
Electronic devices can be added that mimic a heartbeat and respiration. Other devices can make the baby warm to the touch, or make it emit infant sounds. Magnets can be inserted in the mouth and glued onto on an actual baby pacifier (Nuk, Avent, Gerber, etc.). When the magnetized pacifier sticks to the magnet in the mouth, the baby appears to be sucking on a binkie, just like a real baby.
*WARNING*: Strong magnets! Can be harmful to pacemaker wearers and others with medical implants.
 
Why are Reborns so expensive?
BabyMakerTM uses only real glass eyes imported from Germany, the best mohair available, aquamarine glass beads from the Czech Republic for weighting, and rare earth magnets for each baby. Art, packing, and shipping supplies also contribute to the cost.
Each baby takes a minimum of three weeks to create, and goes home with its own layette, which includes a three-piece outfit, sleeper, hat, diapers, and receiving blanket, as well as birth and adoption certificates.
Where can I buy a Reborn? What sort of person buys a Reborn? How lifelike are they?
Most Reborns are sold through online nurseries, such as BabyMakerTM, or at art conventions and fairs.
Almost all purchasers of Reborns are women, though we do have customers of other sexes and genders. Some customers collect Reborns as they would regular dolls. Often, older, single women treat Reborns as substitutes for the children they cannot have. Some customers who have lost a child, or have become empty-nesters,

* Author : Brigitte Winter
* Narrator : Julia Rios
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention



Content warnings for violence and coercive control


Rated R
Redo
by Brigitte Winter
 
3.
In our third timeline, I met you on New Year’s Eve.
I had slept off a migraine half that day, so I wanted nothing more than to spend the evening by the fireplace cuddling with Jamie and our ancient basset hound. But New Year’s Day would be my fifth wedding anniversary with Jamie — our “wood” anniversary — and he had gotten tickets to a burlesque show because he thought he was hilarious. Predictably, he insisted that it would be wasteful to skip the show because the tickets were fifty dollars each. Plus, booze was included. Plus, he could watch women dance out of their clothes, which was significantly more interesting than watching me sit around all night in the oversized sweater and leggings I’d been wearing since Christmas.
“Plus, Mary,” he said, “maybe you’ll surprise yourself and have fun for once.”
And so I pulled a black slip dress over my leggings and twisted my unwashed hair into a bun, and Jamie and I squeezed into the dingy black box theater just as the first dancer finished her set. Jamie muttered something about me making him late again before disappearing to the bar. He didn’t ask me if I wanted anything, which was fine because I didn’t. My temples pounded along with the bass blaring from the too-close speaker. Everyone in the audience was standing, and the guy directly in front of me was well over six feet tall and completely blocking the stage. The back of his jacket was a maroon velvet that looked so soft and dark that I longed to press my face against it until the bass stopped pumping and my brain stopped throbbing.
And then the bass stopped pumping.
I pushed up onto my toes to peer around the velvet jacket as slow piano and the first rich notes of Des’ree’s “Kissing You” wrapped around me and pulled me forward until I found myself standing in front of the tall man.
By the time you glided onto the stage, I had somehow edged my way to the front of the crowd. They introduced you as Ale Mary. Your sequined teddy glinted like a disco ball with every slow, luxurious spin, and your arms were clad in long feathery wings, which you used to cover and uncover your body in delicious, teasing motions. You were the most glamorous woman I had ever seen.
And each time you spun toward the audience, you looked directly into my eyes.
By the time the song ended, Jamie had made his way to the front of the house and draped his heavy arm around my neck. I barely felt it.
“I have to pee!” I yelled over the music, untangling myself from him. He nodded, eyes glued to the stage. The next dancer was already down to pasties and a thong, flossing a purple boa between her legs.
I didn’t want to fight the crowd to the back of the house, so I slipped through a door to the left of the stage. I realized my mistake as soon as the door clicked shut behind me and an icy wind whipped down the alley outside the theater with enough force to make my eyes water.
“Shit.” I grabbed the door handle and yanked. Nothing. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”
I spun around and growled, eager to kick the nearest dumpster or brick wall or some other big hard alley thing,

* Author : Luke Wildman
* Narrator : Hollis Monroe
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 37


Rated PG
How to Steal the Plot Armor
by Luke Wildman
PART TWO of TWO
 
Something was obviously wrong from the moment we entered the great hall. Too many folk milled about, too many by far. Logs crackled in the firepit. The tables groaned under a weight of food and drink too profuse for the number of retainers who abided here while the Lord of Omlath was absent, and something was wrong with their eyes . . . a sort of dull light. They moved in a jerky, mechanical way, as if someone had wound them up and set them to clanking from task to task. Disconcerting, to say the least.
The explanation soon became apparent. In a flower-carved throne at the head of the hall, the Lord of Shadows presided.
The Master of Darkness swung his gaze to us when we entered, and his obsidian eyes seemed to pierce all hopes and disguises. “Ah,” he said, “entertainers. Come! Play a song for your great lord.”
Sir Barm stiffened beside me. I followed his gaze and beheld a willowy slip of a teenage girl lounging on the steps at the Shadow Lord’s feet. She wore a fetching red gown, a gold circlet over brown curls, and she possessed the same delicate pasty features as her dad, though they looked better on her. From how Sir Barm was gaping, I knew at once that his love for her was no fickle impulse. There was a story behind it, though I hadn’t listened when he told it to me. This could spell trouble.
“Lords and landed gentry!” Bacchus said, bowing. “Behold — we trifling troubadours shall traipse through twittering tunes, endeavoring to entertain for the honor of your encores!” And with that, he began to play.
I’d hired the man for a reason. Neither Sir Barm nor myself had the faintest idea what to do with the musical paraphernalia strapped to us, so we banged our drums and blew our pipes at random . . . and somehow, Bacchus made a song of it. He wound our cacophony into a greater melody, sweeping discordant notes along as if they were intentional. The song reared to the vaulted roof, reverberated among the ceiling beams, sank low and mournful into the souls of our listeners. In this song, wrought partially of my own ineptitude, I recalled every grief of my life, relived each failed and faithless moment, remembered all my bitter choices, until I longed to weep. And still it continued.
Bacchus was rearing the song toward a triumphant crescendo when jeers interrupted him. His accordion squawked in protest, and the music fell apart. All heads turned toward the source of the desecration.
“You call that music?” the Shadow Lord’s daughter asked. “There weren’t even lyrics! When I hear music, I want poetry. I want to hear about ancient deeds of valor. In short . . . I want recitations.”
A cruel smile played on her rosebud lips as she rose and sauntered toward us.
“Play a good song, a song with words,” she said. “Make them play one, Daddy . . . or chop off their heads!”
The Shadow Lord looked bemused. He raised his eyebrows at us. “Well, boys? You heard my daughter.”
I clenched my jaw.
Bacchus was shooting me worried glances, but he should’ve been more concerned about Sir Barm. The knight was trembling from head to heels, his accordion emitting tiny squeaks as he took shuddering breaths,

* Author : Luke Wildman
* Narrator : Hollis Monroe
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Artist : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 37


Rated PG
How to Steal the Plot Armor – PART ONE
by Luke Wildman
 
The day before it started, I had to chase off three more heroes with a stick. I swear, winter is the worst season for them. You get a few enterprising farm boys during the spring and summer, and fall’s the time for disinherited princes looking to reclaim kingdoms that their uncles stole from their murdered fathers, but winter is when the big ones arrive. There’s nothing worse than sitting down in front of the hearth, a tome on your knee and a tankard of ale at your elbow, all cozy while the blizzard howls outside — and hearing a knock at the door.
You’ll have no peace till you open it. When you do, you’re greeted by the sight of a hulking, smelly barbarian, snow clinging to his fur cloak, sword bigger than your leg strapped over his back, with a story of an omen-prompted journey into the mountains to seek one who will tutor him in magic, or guide him to hidden paths, or interpret runes on an ancient map, and might you be that one? And, of course, you are. Try to deny it and he’ll point out that the prophecy specified the man he sought would be holding a tome and a tankard, and would be venerable of years, knobby of knees, bearded of chin, and dark-skinned as the night. Really, they might leave out the knobby knees part, just once. Do they think I have no feelings?
Over my lifetimes, I’ve developed quite the repertoire of tricks for sending heroes away. They never catch on that a person living in a shabby cottage at the highest pass of the most remote mountain in the farthest corner of the world might not want to be bothered, the insensitive jackanapes. So I always had to use other strategies.
The beginner’s mistake is thinking rigor alone will deter your average hero, but it only encourages most of them. Their eyes light up when you swear to only take them on as a ‘prentice if they descend into the Tomb of the Necromancer and steal the ruby eye from the idol of Ang’Vel’Nazsh. If they survive this perilous deed, then you really can’t put them off.
No; the secret is to give them dishonorable, icky chores, like cleaning your chamber pot or mucking out your pigsty. That usually works.
Unfortunately, there’s a breed of hero that revels in humiliation, and might, I shudder to add, even be a bit turned on by it. Such a one was the young gallant who galloped into my life that winter day.

It was one of those bright, cold mornings when life in the mountains feels almost a treat, the pines resplendent with icicles and the snow an unbroken field of dazzling white. He arrived while I was hobbling on my staff from the barn to the cottage, having just fed the old nag. I focused on my footing, and so didn’t immediately notice the rider dismounting outside my door.
“Hail, honored wizard!” the man called, startling me half out of my wits. “Lo, I have ridden many weeks and endured many perils to seek you.”
I sighed as I looked him over. He had the usual shaggy golden hair and storm-blue eyes, the usual disregard for animals (his poor horse was half dead), and the usual lack of sense when it came to dressing for the weather, clad as he was in silver armor that glittered with frost, and a thin cape of purple silk.

* Author : Samantha Mills
* Narrator : Sandra Espinoza
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by Translunar Travelers Lounge and as PodCastle #639.


Rated PG-13
Kiki Hernández Beats the Devil
By Samantha Mills
Kiki Hernández, rock legend of the Southwest, had seven devils on her tail.
They scurried through the roadside scrub, not even trying to sneak. She could hear their scrabble-claws and clacker-tails, their dripping maws and teeth. If they were trying to round her up for a crossroad deal-making, they were going about it all wrong.
That’s what happened when devils got hungry. They made mistakes.
Kiki hummed as she walked, watching eddies of dust form tornadoes on the road ahead. It was a swagger of a walk, born of a perfect record: Kiki 72, Devils 0. She would have been bored, if she hadn’t been so eager for an encore.
“Come on out!” she hollered.
They tumbled forth in a gray-green tangle of many-jointed limbs, an acrid smell preceding them: sulphur and grave dirt and candy apples stuffed with razorblades. Their voices tangled like a nest of snakes: Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? Are you vengeful? Are you sad?
For a moment she felt it—the thirst like three weeks eating salted pork, the grief that could only end in retaliation—and then Kiki popped open her molded-plastic carrying case and pulled out her guitar: Mona Lisa.
Mona Lisa was fierce. She was raw. She was a fine-tuned devil-killing music monster.
They never stood a chance.
Kiki laughed, high and wild, as her fingers danced through “Voodoo Child”—acoustic, sadly, but that was the state of the world these days. In Kiki’s head she was rocking steel strings and a hundred watts. She was playing to a crowd of twenty thousand and crushing it.
The first trio of devils hit a solid wall of sound and crumpled, bloody and squealing, to the earth. The others skittered away, and she chased after them, shouting, “Come back, you cowards!”
She needn’t have worried. They raced for the crossroad, so desperate they didn’t even notice what was waiting for them there.
Kiki’s hellhound.
He was short and squat, with the jowls of a Neapolitan Mastiff and the blue-black coat of a Friesian horse. He had curling horns for ears and deep pits of flame for eyes, and he swallowed those devils in two bites apiece.
“Ozzy!” Kiki scolded. “What did I say about wandering off?”
He slumped hard against her leg, whining, and she pulled out a spare bone pick to loosen the gristle from his fangs. He let out a particularly un-hellish yip when she accidentally jabbed his gum.
“Well next time don’t chomp them around the ribs!” she said. “Honestly, Ozzy…”
He tilted his head for scratches, and Kiki complied. She was still flush with the high of performing, the heart-fluttering, head-buzzing, loose-muscle happiness that only came from a good tune. It didn’t matter if there was no audience. She had Ozzy.
And then a voice like rotting garbage slithered down the breeze: “Isn’t that just too sweet to stomach?”
Kiki spun, guitar drawn against her belly. An enormous toad-like devil was sitting on top of an overturned city bus, wide and squat and green, with a short, sharp horn protruding from the center of its forehead. A nasty wall of cacti stood between them, holding the beast out of guitar range.
That bit of foresight was alarming.

* Author : E. M. Linden
* Narrator : Louise Hewitt
* Host : Alasdair Stuart
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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PodCastle 879: The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead is a PodCastle original.


Content warnings for grief, infant death, and a reference to suicide


Rated PG-13
The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead
E.M. Linden
 
The living have been leaving Tawlish for centuries; this evacuation is only the latest and last. There are good reasons for it: the freshwater spring gone brackish; the water, always encroaching; the colicky, relentless wind. No schools for the children. No doctor. We should have seen it coming, but sometimes we forget what the living need.
We cannot cross salt, so we watch from shore. Our loved ones and descendants wade into the sea. The men strain to hold the boats steady against the waves. Everyone’s weighed down by possessions, a village crammed into sacks and lifeboats. Spoons, spindles, fish-hooks, balls of yarn. A clothes-peg doll in a twist of old apron. Seabirds’ eggs wrapped in blankets: habits ingrained by generations of scarcity. They’ve even dug up their potatoes.
Katie Zell’s mother is already on the boat. The songbook is tucked inside her jacket.
Thirty-seven people. Only some of them look back.
They leave cold firepits and fulmar bones, middens, empty crofts with the thatch already collapsing. Sheep they’ve blessed and turned loose to fend for themselves.
And us. The dead of Tawlish.

Katie Zell’s father has been dead longer than she’s been alive. Before he drowned, he’d hoped to sing her lullabies: the ones he sang to her older brothers, the ones his grandparents sang to him. Now, in farewell, he rests his hand briefly on her curls. Most of the living are oblivious to the dead, but the Zells are a noticing kind of family.
Katie raises her hand to his; perhaps she mistakes the cold brush of it for sea-spray. It’s enough. He smiles. That’s all there is time for: Katie’s uncle lifts her from the shore, over the churn of the sea, and seats her next to her cousin on the boat.
Old Maureen Stornaway is furious, sees evacuation as defeat. She clenches a knuckle of island rock in her pocket. Tiny luminosities watch her from shore: the ghosts of three of her children. She strains her eyes and peers back through the sea-mist. Maybe something shines there. After decades of loss, of wishing them still with her, this is the first and last time that she almost makes them out.
The rector, smug, takes nothing. He doesn’t need to. He has a house on the mainland, and — as far as he’s concerned — he’s saved thirty-seven souls.

A Tawlish tradition: the living and dead send each other gifts. The living give tobacco and carved pipes, posies of sea-vetch, griddle-cake. Packets of seeds for Lizzie Knell. Wooden rattles and teething rings. Handkerchiefs embroidered with our names. They slip our gifts into the flames so that they’ll cross over to our side. Burnt offerings. The wind chases the sparks out of the sky. The gifts arrive smelling of smoke.
Our gifts are less generous. All we can send are dreams.
Tonight, all together, we dream safe passage for the living. Grudgingly, because they’re abandoning us; jealously, because we want them here: their songs and laughter reminding us who we are, their bones buried beside ours in the thin Tawlish soil. We dream them returning.

* Author : Somto Ihezue
* Narrator : Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by Tor – Africa Risen anthology
 


Content warnings for violent murder and the death of an animal


Rated R
The Carving Of War
By Somto Ihezue
 
Odili was a child when Nkeala, her grandmother, died. All she remembered of her were her braids, a tangle of clouds that reached for the floor. She remembered her eyes, how they swallowed her face. To look into them was to be lost in a vastness. It was to find eyes — owl eyes, bold eyes, brown eyes — staring back at you. Most of all, she remembered her kindness, an unending sea.
Nkeala had been dìbìā — keeper, to Idemili; the roaring python, they who drowned oceans, mother of mothers. At the birth of time, Idemili, like beads dancing on a fragile waist, had wound herself around the clans of Obosi. Out of her mouth, the Eke River poured, its brooks and streamlets giving sustenance to the corn in the farmlands, the antelopes of the wild and the Irokos that split the sky. Odili’s family was bound in perpetuity to Idemili. With her grandmother’s passing, the fanged staff fell to her mother, Adaugo. In the past, a few keepers had met their fate with defiance. Odili’s great-great grandfather, Agbadike, had refused the staff when it passed to him. Setting the shrine of Idemili ablaze, he invoked the ritual of blood in a bid to sever the bond that tethered his life to the deity. Three days after, a breadfruit fell from a tree and split his skull in half.
Like moth to fire, Adaugo embraced the mantle of keeper. Before her twelfth birthday, she could already perform the passage rites of ancestors. Beneath the glow of a horned moon, she’d slay a ram, its body thrashing beneath her knee. Immersed in its blood, she’d wade into the Eke, bridging the fold between the living and the dead. Ancestors past would come walking through her, blessing and cursing the ones they left behind. When she was heavy with Odili, Adaugo ventured into Idemili’s mouth and emerged unscathed, spirit water coursing through her veins. One of the dwindling few, Adaugo knew the words to the eternal utterances and the anchors that held them. The clans of Obosi had revered Nkeala; Adaugo, they feared. She was power unbridled, her dedication to Idemili undying. Like her mother and keepers before her, Adaugo stayed unwed.
“We are the rage of Idemili, unburdened by the constraints of love and companionship,” she’d remind Odili, “We are fire and water, we are rain and lightning, our bodies are nothing but vessels.”
Still, keepers were mandated to bear offspring and preserve their line. Without a present father, a mother who in all entirety was of another realm, Odili roamed the village unchecked, her python familiar slithering beside her. More than a companion, it had become a parent, regurgitating rabbits and bush rats for her to roast and eat.
When the first missionaries came to their village, Odili was drawn in by their flaky bread and the trinkets that hung from their neck, how they shimmered in the light. At the rooster’s crow, she’d run into the village, into the shack that doubled as a chapel, to watch the priests bless communion, to watch Edward. Edward was a mass server and Edward was beautiful. With her eyes, she’d follow him and when he caught her stare,

* Author : Louis Inglis Hall
* Narrator : Pippa Alice Stephens
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by The Colored Lens
 


Content warning for the death of a child


Rated PG-13
The Hand that Feeds
by Louis Inglis Hall
 
Last Christmas a mermaid died in the school swimming pool. It was only a small pool, built up at the sides with wooden panels, more like a tank for training children in. That meant it froze over very easily, but a mermaid couldn’t know that. It stood in a courtyard in the shadow of the school, and the sun reached it only at rare intervals.
Behind it lurked a stone and sulking outhouse, pebbledash walls lashed together with a corrugated plastic roof. In its damp darkness the children undressed, and tripped, and snapped tight, powdered rubber caps over their skulls. Under its benches something black grew wetly out towards them. It was the hut that Freya hated most of all.
Miss Wallace had caught Archie Dorrick from Upper Third belting down the corridor but she hadn’t told him off, not properly, just asked him why he needed to be rushing so quick. He said there was a mermaid dead in the pool, that it must have happened in the holidays, and Miss Wallace was so interested that she didn’t ask Archie why he had been down there on his own, which was definitely cigarettes.
Miss Wallace was young and pretty and was allowed to wear any jumper she liked, unlike Freya, who was a pupil and had to wear a plain grey one like everybody else. Miss Wallace also had colourful bracelets on her arms and hair that rose up above her head and fanned out like branches. When she moved they swayed about her; the bracelets and the hair both. In the older years they had a teacher for English and a teacher for history and a teacher for comparative mythography, but Freya was only nine so Miss Wallace was her everything teacher, and she needed no other.
Freya’s last teacher had been Mr Heagerty, who had folded himself into a corner of the classroom, spiderlike, and spoke to them only in riddles. His interest in the outside world was oblique at best, and he’d never once worn a bracelet or even a colourful tie. For Miss Wallace, the outside world was the whole point, it was something to push both your hands into and wiggle about. That was why Class 7C were allowed to follow her, symmetrical grey cygnets, through the hall and out the fire escape and down the iron stairway that led to the pool with the mermaid in it.
The ice was frozen over most of it, a thin sheet, breakable. One arm punctured the surface, a long, grey-brown javelin that reached up and out and seized around the metal rung of the ladder in a tight fist. Frost followed up it and caught on the trail of fine hairs that sloped along its back. Freya couldn’t see down below the ice; Miss Wallace had them at a distance, she had first dibs on exploration. Freya jostled her way to the front of the group. She knew she had to be as close as was allowed.
Miss Wallace stared down at the mermaid, and her hair quivered, and her breath came out in clouds. Below her the arm was stiff, and quiet, and altogether too close to her throat. In the end it was Juno Clarke who asked the question that held them all close with a ferocious anxiety. Juno asked if Miss Wallace was sure it was really dead, and Miss Wallace said yes,

* Author : Hilary Moon Murphy
* Narrator : Chistopher Reynaga
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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PodCastle 876: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: Nine-Fingered Maria is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG
Nine-Fingered Maria
by Hilary Moon Murphy
…this girl appeared from behind a door and caught my ball.  She was probably my age: several inches taller than I am, with long straight black hair pulled back in a ponytail, plain white t-shirt, denim jacket and jeans with a hole worn in the knee.  She stared at me with intense dark eyes and said, “What are you doing here?”
“I was just getting my ball,” I said, stepping out of the way of two movers carrying a large red bureau with multi-colored wax stains all over it.
“No, you weren’t.”  She cocked her head to the side, and raised her eyebrow.  “You were spying.”
“I wasn’t!”
“That’s okay, I like spies.”  She gave me back my ball and showed me her hands.  “I have nine fingers.  I’m a witch.”

* Author : Osahon Ize-Iyamu
* Narrator : Takudzwa Sharon Kirimi
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by Lightspeed Magazine


Content warnings for grief and the death of a spouse


Rated PG-13
Last Ritual of the Smoke Eaters
By Osahon Ize-Iyamu
 
I didn’t want to eat Joshua, but he turned into dust, and the way things go in Carucchi village is that if someone turns into ashes you inhale them till there’s nothing but smoke in your lungs and redness in your eyes. Sometimes we have to eat people to make us less lonely. I didn’t want to do it, but Joshua named me as his eater, so my entire village forced me down on the floor and told me it was necessary. Great-aunty Chinny held my hands and made me inhale his smoke till his entire presence was roiling through my body like the last movements of a dragon.
When Joshua had finally settled in my body, he felt like a weight in my throat.
 

Joshua and I used to play by the riverside all day and night. This was before his death and before he left and before the inhalation. This was before him telling me he loved me (he always loved me). The riverside was considered to be one of the safest places in our village, the place were youth could go to avoid the dreaded dragon’s breath and the insecurity of the nation and the fear of living life in worry. The river was thought to be some anti-dragon zone, and it was believed that if we stayed there long enough, we would prevent our own deaths. We could hold space for our futures, laugh and sing and love once again, and we could hold on another day longer.
Joshua was always an adventurer. He would wade through the water like he was fighting the biggest smokebeast dragon, splashing through the river like he was slicing through its depths like a sword. He couldn’t swim properly, but when he waded all the way to the deeper parts of the river he would drag me in, as if I were his life craft. We would laugh and he would tease me for being silly and I would chase him around the water, screaming at him for getting me wet. As if no one ever went to the riverside without knowing they’d be soaked. As if wetness wasn’t everyone’s private rebellion against the heat of the dragon.
On the river shore, after we had finished playing and we were waiting for our clothes to finish drying on rocks nearby, Joshua told me he was going to join the soldiers leaving for war. He didn’t even let me speak with the way he blurted it out — he was so adamant about it, because he knew I always interrupted him. I was going to tell him that he didn’t have to go because his family were always fighters, that he didn’t have to be a hero by being a warrior, that sometimes being a hero means staying home, but you could tell he’d been thinking about it forever and he’d made up his mind. Come a fortnight from that day, the Carucchi soldiers would be raging war against the ferocious dragon territory of the East, and no one would be able to stop them.
I could see the pride in his eyes when he told me. I didn’t want him to leave, but everybody has their own personal ways of fighting, of dealing with a life under despair, and I didn’t want to stop his. I sat with him in silence, waiting for our clothes to dry on the rocks. I held his hands the whole time, my own private prayer that he would return after his departure,

* Author : P.C. Verrone
* Narrator : Eric Valdes
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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PodCastle 874: The Husband is a PodCastle original.


Content warnings for sex, violence, and references to the death of a spouse


Rated R
The Husband
By P.C. Verrone
 
He has never taken a man for a wife before. This becomes clear as he introduces me to his other wives. The youngest wife bristles and the wife with the long, dark hair avoids meeting my eye. The tallest wife just looks from him to me and nods. Her face betrays no hint of hospitality. They are aware that he and I have exchanged vows, exchanged fluids. However they may feel, nothing can be done about it now. He has chosen me.
He wants a feast to celebrate. We order delivery. When the driver arrives, the youngest wife invites him into the house. She is beautiful and coy, and the driver is stupid. As soon as he steps inside, our husband sinks his teeth into the man’s neck.
At the sight of blood, my eyes fill with red. I leap at the body in our husband’s arms, but a sharp jab in my rib sends me tumbling to the floor. The youngest wife tucks her elbow back against her side as she devours our victim’s clavicle. I reach for a wrist, a thigh, but the wife with long, dark hair kicks me away. The tallest wife glowers at me, lapping at the driver’s neck, inches from our husband’s lips. I can only suck the capillaries from the man’s toes. If our husband notices, he does nothing.
As the sunrise approaches, all five of us descend into the cellar. Four pine boxes glimmer in the scant moonlight. The other wives climb into their own, but he invites me to sleep in his. My fingers dig into the silty soil of his homeland spread across the bottom. In the tight space, he undresses me with ease as I nip at the last vestiges of the delivery boy’s blood on his lips. The sex only partly quenches the starvation in my belly. Afterwards, he snores gently against my back. My nerves are so giddy, I can hardly sleep.

It was meant to be a routine inspection. Some young couple had purchased the old Anderson widow’s place, so I was sent to assess the property. It had lain empty for sixty years, but lately any listing with four walls and a roof was getting snatched up. The agency notified me that they hadn’t located the key for the cellar, so they’d be sending somebody to get me in.
The only access to the house was a mile-long unpaved road off the highway, which eventually led to the state park. As I turned onto the dirt road, the roar of traffic hushed beneath rustling leaves and chittering birds. Under the heavy tree cover, I could hardly tell that the sun was setting. Just when I worried that I had somehow taken a wrong turn, the trees opened up to unveil a small workman’s cottage.
Taking in the sturdy wood walls and pre-war pragmatism of its design, I was struck by a pang of envy. This house had some history to it, nothing like my prefab “dream home” cluttered with trendy appliances. From the outside, the house seemed shockingly well kept. The new homeowners would be pleased to hear that.
When I met him inside, I assumed he was the locksmith the agency had sent, though his formal suit made it seem like he was showing the house rather than unlocking a basement. Dark, slick hair, pale skin, and those eyes. When I shook his hand, something skittered around my ribcage. I don’t remember a thing about the assessment.

* Author : Cécile Cristofari
* Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by Interzone
 


Content warning for dementia


Rated PG
The Third Time I Saw a Fox
by Cécile Cristofari
 
“You know what I think, the world is going bonkers,”’ the circus man says.
I nod, draw a gulp of burning coffee from my thermos flask. A decent night watch needs to start with a little bitterness on the tongue, the first drink just a little too hot before the next cups fade to lukewarm. It’s the only excitement I’m afforded, after all. No one ever breaks into natural history museums.
“Who needs the world when we have this?” I say, encompassing the anatomy exhibits with a wave of the hand. “And the two of us, of course.”
The circus man nods, sagely. Even though I’m not looking at him, I can hear it from the creaking of his vertebrae, grinding against the copper wire that holds them together.

My shift always starts after the cleaning crews have left, and I always take my first walk alone around the quiet halls, as the ghost of another crowded day fades into the night. Some say I’m too old to be working night shifts, but I say I’m too old to stand by as hordes of school children squeal over dinosaur bones. Fake dinosaur bones at that, though children don’t realise they’re standing in front of casts.
It’s easier to tell real skeletons apart when night falls.
“Hello there,” the minke whale yawns. It stretches its big head left and right and sighs, a whisper of wind through polished jaws that snap uselessly, as if attempting to trap shoals of ghost fish in imaginary baleen. It must feel lonely here, hanging above the ground, floating in a make-believe sea. I pat its bony knuckle and walk on.
In the zoology gallery, discreet sounds emerge upon my entrance. Sawdust rustles from inside stuffed bodies, glass eyes whirr in their sockets. Their old bones move even more awkwardly than mine, but they acknowledge me nonetheless. They don’t make new stuffed specimens for natural history museums anymore. Resin models may look glossy and sprightly forever, but the night shows just how dead they are, in their perfection of plastic. All my friends here, posing on their mahogany stands, tired but still proud under their bald patches and protruding wires, are from another time. Just like me. The thought makes me grin, sometimes.
In their glass cabinets, ancient enough that the glass bends in places, the birds stretch the tips of their wings. Some of them groan the way I do when I wake up with stiff limbs on a cold morning. An albatross sways on the thread that holds it up, gliding in the same spot, day after day. I wave, nod, ask about their health. They tell me the same things every night, but I can tell they’re still pleased that I asked. They need distractions, just like all of us, and they have no one else to talk to.
Farther on, the leopard stretches its paw, lazily hanging from a fake branch, and rests it on my shoulder as I walk by.
“Nice evening, isn’t it?” I say, petting its front leg.
“A little damp for me,” it replies. “I feel bloated.”
Of course. All that sawdust stuffing won’t do well in damp weather. I turn down the humidifiers at once. The leopard nods its thanks.
I don’t know how long this nightly ritual has been going on.

* Authors : Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw
* Narrator : Ian Stuart
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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PodCastle 872: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – The Ghost of Christmas Possible is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG
The Ghost of Christmas Possible
by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw
I was asleep: to begin with.
The hour was just before midnight on Christmas Eve when a ferocious knocking woke me from my slumber. My first muddled thought, or rather hope, was that some specter or spirit stirred beneath the cramped rafters of my newly rented accommodations. Such a prospect aroused in me no little excitement — for though I am well versed with the actions and habits of apparitions, ghosts, and hauntings of all sorts, I have always had to seek out such extraordinary creatures in situ, as it were, and their attentions had never been initially directed toward me. I thought immediately of the incident of the Knocking Well, when I helped lay to rest the unquiet spirit of a lost child in Somerset, and so I leapt to my feet and pulled on my dressing gown to begin my investigation. I followed the sound of knocking, now ever more ferocious, through the corridor and down the narrow stairs.
Alas, it soon became clear the knocking was of an entirely ordinary sort, attributable to some visitor pounding upon my front door — though the lateness of the hour did suggest some manner of emergency or alarm. When I opened the door, a wild-eyed creature, with a ghostly white aura about his head and loose robes that flapped wildly in the wintry winds, forced his way inside, and I reconsidered my assumption that he was a mortal man. I had certainly never encountered an apparition polite enough to knock — however vigorously — before entering, and when he spoke, I was crushed by the mundane quality of his voice, which possessed none of the eerie harmonics I associated with those few spectral beings who deigned to speak.
“Mr. Hodgson, I presume? I have immediate need of your services, man!”
He was a frightened old man, and I was acquainted with such; I had met the terrified, the dread-filled, and the desperate over and over during my researches into the occult.

* Authors : Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt
* Narrator : Alasdair Stuart
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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PodCastle 871: Homes for the Holidays is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG-13
This episode is dedicated in loving memory of Orion Adey (October 4, 1989 — September 28, 2023)
Homes for the Holidays
by Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt
 
I stood on the slumlord’s doorstep and took a deep breath — one of the last I would take in this body, which had served me well despite being treated badly. It’s not the body I was born with — I don’t think I started with a body at all. I don’t know what I am, or where I come from, just that I need a human body to host my own consciousness.
My current body wasn’t totally worn out yet, but sometimes I switched for strategic reasons, like now. Even if I want to settle in, I’m forced to take a new host every twenty years or so. Maybe that sounds like a lot compared to a human lifespan, but since I’m immortal (so far), twenty years is a fraction of a fraction, and it feels like I’ve barely settled into a new skin before I have to go looking for a new one. Even when I pick a young, healthy body, something about hosting me puts unusual strain on the brain, and they usually pop an aneurysm, even if I take good care of them.
I hadn’t taken such good care of this latest body. But I was trying to do better.
You can only hover on someone’s doorstep in a suburb for so long before you attract trouble, so I knocked on the door. Someone shouted something garbled and hostile from inside, and then an old man awash with gray stubble and wearing a misbuttoned cardigan opened the door and glared at me. He didn’t even ask if he could help me.
“Marvis Sims?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?” His voice was raspy and his breath was heavy.
I briefly felt guilty for making him come to the door. Then I reminded myself who he was, and why I was here, and straightened my spine. I could have jumped right into him . . . but I needed to be sure this was Sims, and not his elderly father or something.
“I’m —” I began, and then a woman in her thirties approached, her expression more curious than hostile. She was wearing a headband with reindeer antlers on them, the antlers festooned with little blinking lights. It wasn’t Christmas yet, but it was coming.
Ho, ho, ho.
“I need to find Marvis Sims,” I told her.
“You found him,” she said, nodding towards the man. “What can we help you with?”
The old man turned to scowl at her, and opened his mouth to say something that wouldn’t have been in keeping with the holiday spirit, so I jumped into him, and let my old body crumple dead on the steps.
I know. That’s not in keeping with the holiday spirit, either. But here’s why I did it:

Listen, I’ve been around a long time, and I used to be fairly callous about my whole deal. Yes, when I take a body, the original inhabitant seems to vanish, or get overwritten, or whatever. And it’s no picnic for their loved ones, either, since those people are meaningless to me. I usually cut all ties with them via faked head injuries, amnesia, religious conversions, midlife crises, or just straight-up ghosting (though I do keep the bank accounts). I realize that living as I do seems reprehensible. But what am I supposed to do? Gazelles don’t much like lions, but lions have to eat.

* Author : S.B. Divya
* Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Uncanny
 


Content warnings for fire, violence (including domestic violence), references to rape, and parental deaths.


Rated PG-13
Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold
by S.B. Divya
I was hidden in a tree near the mill when the Duke of Bavaria arrived in Talgove. I had never seen the man before, but the coat of arms matched the hangings I’d seen in Salzburg. The sizeable retinue stopped by the water wheel.
Blasius emerged from the building, staggering and red-faced from drink. “My lord,” the miller said, his face wrinkled in confusion, “the steward’s house and the inn are —”
“I’m here for Trudy of-the-mill,” the duke interrupted. “Your daughter, I presume?”
Balsius’s befuddlement deepened. “Yes, but —”
“I hear that she can spin flax into gold, that she has a special instrument from a witch who used to live in these parts. I wish to witness this skill for myself.” The duke grinned.
The miller executed a deep, sloppy bow. “My lord, indeed she is a talented spinner and weaver. Beautiful, too.”
“Then let us see this lovely and gifted creature.”
Still bent at the waist, Blasius went inside. I held myself as still as wood and waited. What was he up to? Trudy had never learned how to make gold thread from my mother, and she certainly couldn’t magically transform flax. I could. Had someone discovered my gift and mixed up their stories?
A sharp cry sounded from inside the building. Blasius emerged, holding Trudy’s wrist in one hand and one of my mother’s spindles in another.
“See here!” He thrust Trudy forward and gestured at her head. “She made the golden thread for this embroidery. This ring, and the chain about her neck, too. Those used to be silver. She learned from a witch who used to live near our village. Take her! She will do well in your household.”
My stomach twisted with rage and disgust. Trudy’s wimple came from one of my mother’s fabrics. She wore my mother’s wedding band and necklace. How had they obtained the jewelry except from my mother’s body? How dare Blasius abuse my mother’s memory like that? And why would he lie about it? He’s desperate to see her married well. With Ilsebill secured to Konrad, there was no good match in the village for Trudy. Her looks — the golden hair, the womanly curves — had always attracted attention from men.
A flush covered Trudy’s round cheeks. She kept her gaze fixed on the ground, and her hands trembled. I sat in my tree, frozen with indecision and fear. I could think of nothing in my power that would help her without revealing my secret.
“Quite attractive,” the duke murmured. Then, louder, “I will take her to Salzburg with me. I wish to have some gold thread made for my wardrobe. If she succeeds in her witchcraft, I will take this young lady to Regensburg and keep her safely with my treasury.”
The men in the duke’s retinue snickered. Trudy’s flush crept down and across her neck.
“Yes, good,” Blasius said. He bobbed his head and swayed.
“And if she fails, she will be burned.”
At that, Blasius fell to his knees, his face pale. “But, my lord —”
“I am your duke, and you will not deny me again or else you will hang for the crime of consorting with witches.”
Trudy put a hand on her father’s shoulder. To my surprise,