* Author : Amal El-Mohtar
* Narrator : Marguerite Croft
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes


Previously ran as episode 139 and originally published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories.


Rated R
We unfortunately do not have the rights to publish the full text of this story, but it is available to read in full over at Galli Books.
To Follow the Waves
by  Amal El-Mohtar
 
Hessa’s legs ached. She knew she ought to stand, stretch them, but only gritted her teeth and glared at the clear lump of quartz on the table before her. To rise now would be to concede defeat—but to lean back, lift her goggles and rub her eyes was, she reasoned, an adequate compromise.
Her braids weighed on her, and she scratched the back of her head, where they pulled tightest above her nape. To receive a commission from Sitt Warda Al-Attrash was a great honour, one that would secure her reputation as a fixed star among Dimashq’s dream-crafters. She could not afford to fail. Worse, the dream Sitt Warda desired was simple, as dreams went: to be a young woman again, bathing her limbs by moonlight in the Mediterranean with a young man who, judging by her half-spoken, half-murmured description, was not precisely her husband.
But Hessa had never been to the sea.

* Author : Ruth Joffre
* Narrator : Julia Rios
* Host : Matt Dovey
*
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PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is a PodCastle original.


Rated G
Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush
by Ruth Joffre
 
 
Yesterday, I was a bird. A slender-billed curlew, to be exact. My girlfriend helped me ID the bird. Took photographs of my decurved bill, the flash of white under my tail, the small brown speckles on my cream-white breast.
“Some of these spots look like hearts,” I said this morning, once I was human again and able to compare her pictures to the one in an article I found: “The Slender-Billed Curlew Is Declared Extinct.”
It always happens like this: a species disappears once and for all, and I transform into a replica of it for one day. Thirteen hours, at least, maybe more if I wake up especially early. It takes about an hour each way for the metamorphosis to be complete — long enough, in theory, for me to prepare. To lock the doors, rush to the bathtub if I feel gills opening in my throat. I often track the process in the mirror as it unfolds. Watch scales harden over my flesh, feathers push through my pores. It never stops feeling like magic.


 
My parents were frightened, of course. The first time it happened, I was just a baby. Not yet three weeks old, and already my skin was turning gold. My mother thought it was jaundice. One of her parenting books mentioned it. Something about a buildup of bilirubin. A newborn’s liver couldn’t process it fast enough. She called the doctor’s office to ask what she should do, did I need to visit the emergency room, was it something in her breast milk, but the nurses said it was fine; this just happens sometimes.
“Babies are weird. That’s what they said.”
By the time she returned to the crib, my first transformation was complete. I was the golden toad, Incilius periglenes. “I came back in, and it was just sitting there, in a puddle of your clothes.” My diaper was clean, thankfully, or else my toad self would have hopped away and left my mother to assume I’d been kidnapped. Was this a curse, she wondered. Or a particularly weird case of post-partum depression? When my father got home, he confirmed she wasn’t hallucinating. There was indeed a fiery orange toad in my room. Practical man that he was, he assumed she just misplaced me, put me down somewhere, then forgot.
He kept asking, “Where did you go today? Think. Did you go to the store?”
And then the toad grew a human foot.
 

 
My girlfriend asked me once what it felt like. If I remembered myself while I was a Guam flying fox, hanging upside down from the pipe of the showerhead. The simple answer is no. My brain is different. My memories of her and of us are gone, and all that remains is a vague, primal sense of comfort. I didn’t bite her as a bat. I didn’t peck her as a bird. When she offered a palmful of feed, I landed on it happily and picked through all the seed to find the dried berries, just like I do when she pours me a bowl of granola. Was I myself then? She didn’t think so. For her, it was as if I had been possessed by the vengeful ghost of a Bachman’s warbler seeking retribution for the loss of its loved ones; but for me it was as if I had been gifted new eyes, new senses. When I flapped my wings, I detected the Earth’s magnetic fields and knew I could follow them all the way to Florida and across the strait to Cuba. That isn’t suffering. That’s wonder.
 

* Author : Leah Ning
* Narrator : Amanda Ching
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published in Monster Lairs (Dark Matter INK, October 2023)


Rated PG-13
The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been
by Leah Ning
 
You find the dying woman-thing in an alley, breathing her final wet, rasping breaths in a heap of white trash bags that seems more like a throne.
Everything tells you to run: twenty-four years of instinct, the government monster information pamphlets, the hard, practical voice at the back of your head that sounds a lot like your monster hunter girlfriend.
And then the woman-thing looks up. Her dark, scaled cheek drags on the distended belly of plastic that makes her pillow. Her chapped lips part and she says, in a voice like acid and smoke: “Eiko.”
That should make you run, too. Things that know your name and shouldn’t are firmly in “get the hell out and don’t look back” territory. But something in her voice hooks into the bottom of your soul and tugs.
You walk into the alley and she reaches for you. Her fingers are too long, dusky and scaled like her face. You shiver when they rasp over your cheek, your hair. Your heart pounds. You should run. You should run now.
That tug in your soul, a deep ache like kinship, won’t let you.
Something passes from her rough palm into you: a jolt, warm and slimy and slipped between your skin and the muscle beneath. Your body goes soft, like puking and collapsing and passing out all at once, only you can’t do any of those, something won’t let you, and you have to shiver and listen to the last of the woman-thing’s clotted, choking breaths as she dies half-buried in trash.
You are left with a sour breeze, a hollow where that ache hooked into your soul, and the sudden, desperate certainty that you need Mia right fucking now.

She opens her apartment door for you in loose sweatpants and that white ribbed tank top you like. You don’t want to tell her — you know what it’ll do to her, and you’re so scared — but what else are you going to do? You don’t know what you’re doing. Mia hunts things like you saw in the alley for a living. If anyone can fix this, it’s her.
So you sit her down on her scruffy couch. There’s a catch in her breath when you say it, so small you wouldn’t have noticed if you weren’t looking for it.
But you are not a thing to kill. You are a thing that can be saved. When you reach for her hand, she leans into you, presses a kiss to your hairline.
“We can still save it,” she says. “It’s all right, girl, I got you. You stay with me until I get this fixed.”
There’s a hard burst of relief in your chest. “But I have to work —”
“Call out sick.” She squeezes your hands. “You can’t go in like this. We’ll get it fixed up and then you go back in and it won’t matter. Two days, okay? Tops.”
Or you won’t get it fixed up, and then you won’t go back in, and it still won’t matter. You try to shiver and can’t. The feeling sits in an unsteady pocket at your core.

Mia sits at her desk, one knee up, blond curls edged in blue laptop glow and books laid out across each other. You try not to pace and you pace anyway and you apologize at least once an hour.
“You do what you need,” Mia says, and slips an absent arm around your waist.
Your fingers ache to do something, so you peel away from her.

* Author : Eden Royce
* Narrator : Laurice White
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes


PodCastle 914: The Magnolia Returns is a PodCastle original.


Rated PG
The Magnolia Returns
By Eden Royce
 
The Magnolia blooms out of nowhere at any time of year it chooses, bringing its dilapidated wooden slats and rickety front steps to a neighborhood that somehow believes it has always been there. The butcher shop itself is well-worn, looking like it has seen better days: peeling seafoam green paint on salt-blasted boards, the once-vivid red front door now a faded smear like lipstick after an ardent lover’s attention.
Once it arrives, the locals begin to talk about visiting. They have always talked of the things they miss in life, and more often than not, it’s the food, the ingredients. Depending on when and where the Magnolia appears, either the supermarkets don’t stock the items the locals crave — the chicken feet, the pig tails, jowl, and ear — or these once-reviled parts of the animal have become so popular with the wealthy, it’s impossible for the poor to attain them.
Make no mistake, the Magnolia knows it’s the poor that have made these ingredients desirable and popular. It’s the poor who have had to do so much with so little: food, care, recognition. Understandable that the poor wish to have acclaim and thus shared their techniques and recipes with those of means, who only stole and warped and erased, shoving any chance for others to prosper into airless crawlspaces, to be forgotten by all but each other.
But the Magnolia believes in chances.
Even so, it does not deliver. You must go and ask for what you want or need. Then it gives what you request, sometimes a little more. Rarely does it give less.

Fish heads: Old man Johnson made his way to the Magnolia with difficulty. He could deal with the pain of getting out of bed, standing too long, sitting too long, laying down too long. It was losing his entire sight that he preferred not to contend with. He had no real family left, only the married ladies in the neighborhood who checked in on him once their kids went to school, offering to hang his laundry with theirs or bring him some hot food from the pots simmering on their stoves.
Most times, he accepted with a dip of his head and a “Thankya, ma’am”, even though he remembered them married ladies when they was babies around the courtyards, with skinned and ashy knees and hair unraveling from carefully oiled and twisted ponytails. They was grown now and he was old. Still, he gave them what he had: some money from his Army pension check and his words of wisdom when they requested them.
One evening, a neighbor lady asked if she could get him anything from The Magnolia, and he wondered why he hadn’t gone there before. He hadn’t thought of the place in years, since he was a little boy and his father took him when the daily catch hadn’t been enough to feed the family. They didn’t have money, but there always seemed to be enough for plenny meals once they went within those rickety walls.
Johnson shook his peppery head and told her he would go himself, but in the morning when he had his good strength. And go he did, when the sun came up, Johnson was dressing in his not-quite-Sunday suit and hat, leaning on his cane, hoofing it down the asphalt. It was slow going but he would get there in plenny time. He’d see to that. The early morning hours were easy on his eyes, before the sun started glaring, and after the hazy, dim confusion of nighttime. Halfway there,

* Author : Adriana Kantcheva
* Narrator : Kat Kourbeti
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Trollbreath Magazine



CW for drowning



Rated PG
Vedritsa of the River
by Adriana Kantcheva
 
The Kamchia river had grown turgid after a storm. I surfaced from my habitual pool and bent over the young girl as she lay washed on the bank, her limbs cold and pale as the settling twilight. A small tin boat lay near her half-opened hand — the reason she took a tumble into my river.
I paused.
Yes, though weak, a current flowed beneath the child’s skin; her heart still worked. I placed a palm on her chest.
The river water in the girl’s lungs had no choice but to obey me. I willed it out, and it obliged in a single great spurt. As if she had waited for just that, the girl’s eyes flew open, her hand clamping around my wrist with desperate strength. Her grip tightened while she coughed and choked to take that first breath. She finally managed, yet still she held onto me, her eyes — ah, those eyes the color of storm clouds — taking in my long, green hair, my crown of living dragonflies, my gown of moss and lilies. We stared at each other for an eternity.
“Vedritsa!” The call came from the direction of the village, startling us both. A search party for the girl no doubt, already nearing.
“Let go, my darling,” I said and tugged.
But she only held on tighter. “I know what you are,” she croaked, hoarse from the heaving.
Of course she knew. Hard not to.
“You saved me. Why would a rusalka save me?”
Which showed how popular my kind was and, probably, still is. Dangerous, supernatural beings we’re said to be. The myths are not wholly mistaken.
“Vedritsa!” The call came again, now closer.
“You must let go,” I said, the river behind me rising with my panic.
Startled by the surging water, the girl released me, and I dove under the surface, the dragonflies on my brow dispersing just in time, my long, green hair now resembling algae. But even from down there, I sensed her tears flowing. After all, the girl — Vedritsa — had been raised drinking my water filtered through sandstone and pebbles.
I let my head break the surface. “When you turn sixty, but not before, come to this place, and you’ll meet me again.”
By then, she should be safe from me. My kind has no interest in children — we can’t draw power from them — but I could already intuit she’d grow beautiful to others and intoxicating to me: the alluring currents within her veins, the beating of her heart as it pumped her life’s blood — they whispered to me, reminding me of a dangerous instinct I could barely ever resist.
I kicked away from the bank, ready to dive under.
“Wait!” Vedritsa called. “I must give you something. It’s bad luck to be indebted to a rusalka.” Her young face, still pale from the ordeal, grew matter-of-fact. She proffered her boat to me.
I’d heard of this notion before, which is, frankly speaking, superstition. But her deep concern made me stop. I couldn’t leave without satisfying her — and taking a toy away from a child would do exactly the opposite.
“Your name,” I said. “Give it to me for my own.” I’d never had one before. My kind doesn’t need a name to know who we are. My river is my defining essence.
Sticks snapped in the undergrowth just beyond the bank.

* Author : Eugie Foster
* Narrator : Tina Connolly
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously ran as episode 28 and first published by Cricket Magazine


Rated G

The Tanuki-Kettle
by Eugie Foster

When Hisa was a baby, her mother called in a soothsayer to cast her daughter’s horoscope. The old woman pulled out her astrology charts and consulted them while incense turned the air blue with perfumed smoke. That day, the fortuneteller had a headache and was in a black mood. Though Hisa’s mother brought her a cup of hot, green tea and fanned her sweating brow, the old woman continued to scowl.
“This child will be too bold for her own good,” the fortuneteller grumbled.
“Is there nothing I can do?” asked Hisa’s distraught mother. “I could hire tutors to teach her the folly of brashness.”
“That is not sufficient.”  The soothsayer’s eyes lit upon the brimming teapot. “She must grow up to be a lowly tea girl.”
Hisa’s mother wanted, above all, for her daughter to have a joyful and serene life, as befitting a devout follower of Buddha. Did not the teachings of Buddha extol the virtues of poverty and humility? Hisa’s mother bowed her head to fate. If the cosmos wished her daughter to be a tea girl, so be it. She bundled Hisa in the poorest swaddling she could find, purchased a teahouse in a humble village, and took up residence there. She raised her daughter to be thoughtful and kind, and above all to understand that every moment presents an opportunity to act, and that these choices determine one’s happiness.
When Hisa’s mother caught the lung cough and passed on to her next life, Hisa took charge of the teahouse. When a new landowner moved into the village and raised everyone’s taxes, she accepted it with philosophic grace. She did, however, wish the new landowner, Lord Seiichi, would be more considerate. He brought his hunting parties thundering through the narrow streets of the village at all hours, day and night, whooping fit to awaken the ancestral spirits. The rumble of hoofs knocked shelves awry on the walls, and pots and pans free from their hooks.
One dawn, when Hisa was preparing for her busy day, Lord Seiichi took his hunters racing past in the street outside the teahouse. Their commotion startled Hisa so much that she dropped the copper kettle she was scouring. A great gash appeared in the lid as the kettle bumped and rolled over the hard, stone floor.
“Oh, pickled plums!”  Hisa exclaimed. As everyone knew, an imperfect teakettle brewed imperfect tea. She examined the rent in the metal. It was quite wide.
Hisa glowered. Enough was enough. She would petition Lord Seiichi to cease the thoughtless ruckus and to compensate her for her loss.
As she opened the door, Hisa was surprised to see an iron kettle sitting ...

* Author : Beth Goder
* Narrator : Tatiana Grey
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes


Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction



Rated PG
Mycelium
by Beth Goder
 
I only travel to the golden head when the dragonflies are in season. It’s Piack and me this year, rafting up the river past the lilies and arched trees. While I steer us through the river’s gentle snarls, he sings about lost keys to pass the time — he’s always had a thing about lost keys and the doors they’ll never open, the places we’ll never find.
“Are you going to eat what the head gives you?” asks Piack. He’s one year older than I am — nineteen. With the sun behind him, his form swims in light.
The dragonflies buzz around us, brush their wings against our faces.
Piack’s scent is like apples after harvest, and the soft smell of bark, and some deeper, stranger thing. The first time I saw him, he was running through flax fields for the joy of it. I dropped my basket to join him, feet smashing through fallen stems. We were two wild children, stomping across logs, burrowing into fleecy snow, cracking open walnuts like badgers and scuffling through the shells. That feels like so long ago, now.
He brushes dragonflies from my cheek, and as he cups his hand, it looks as if he’s catching the setting sun.

The golden head sits on the bank of the river, far from Alaga and the other river towns. It towers over the arched trees, a sun coming up over the mountains. The face has two spaces where the eyes should be, like doors leading to a world that looks like the one you left, but isn’t. Once, the head had a crown, but now the top is a jagged ruin. The gold is run through with molten green, tiny rivers caressing the metal.
I touch the blunt teeth and the head shudders awake. It recognizes me, the mouth creaking open. A golden tongue emerges, presenting a mushroom, as it does every year.
Perhaps my fear of the golden head comes from my desire to see it again, to hold close what it gives me.
And Piack, he’s here because I am. And because this is the sort of door he could never open on his own.
Last winter, I found a sapphire key under a snowbank. The jagged edges left indentations in my palm, and underneath the paint, bits of rust shone through. It reminded me of the golden head, the way the corrosion ran through it, a once-loved thing, now forgotten.
When I showed it to Piack, he tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll see if I can find what it opens,” he said.

Every year, the head gives me a mushroom laid out on its golden tongue. Each time, I imagine how that mushroom came to exist, how a sprawling web of hyphae had to converge, each tendril working its way through the soil.
I have a theory that the head was once like me, a person who had an obligation. Little gods often are. It could have been a simple responsibility, perhaps to mend a bridge after a blustery storm or to make sure the beehives were tended. Perhaps the head was once a person who knew where to find the best mushrooms, the ones that weren’t poisonous.
When we find these little gods in the world, we have to tend to them, don’t we?
And all this one seems to want is for me to take the mushroom that it offers. This is a simple request, and so I fulfill it, every year when the dragonflies emerge.
This year, the mushroom is rough under my hands, still clinging to bits of earth. I wash it off in the river.
I have never eaten a mushroom that comes from the golden head.

* Author : Lalini Shanela Ranaraja
* Narrator : Shweta Adhyam
* Host : Eric Valdes
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously Published in Strange Horizons, 15 August 2022 Issue.



Content warnings for animal cruelty, blood, and suicide


Rated PG-13
Tusker Blue
by Lalini Shanela Ranaraja
 
You still remember the first time Hailé visited the pharmacy, because that was the day the rogue battle elephant overturned the village water tank and flooded five stores on Sacred Heart Road. The pharmacy was one of them, and you were bailing it out with a plastic jug, swearing a blue streak, when the bells jangled over the door. Without turning, you shouted, “As you can see, the pharmacy is closed today!”
“Please help me,” begged a voice hoarse with smoke, and you plunged your arm into the yellow water and cursed Raj, as you’d done frequently since the wedding, for leaving you to handle customers along with everything else. “If you just walk to Trincomalee Street, the surgeon’s office will be opening soon — ”
“Please,” the voice begged again, and this time there was something terribly familiar about how it wisped at the edges. You turned and Hailé was hunched by the counter, holding the Rift in his bare stomach together with his hands. Blue memory fluid, almost but not quite the shade of an April sky over the paddy fields, flowed through his fingers and down his sarong before coiling away through the ankle-deep water.
You said, “God’s sake, come here,” and hauled him into the alcove where you kept the extra bindings, because you already knew this color wasn’t on the pharmacy’s regular shelves. Hailé was taller than Raj and solid with farmer’s muscle, but in that moment he was unfathomably light under your tugging hands, his bones shifting about like the limbs of a stringless puppet. You left him on the tiled floor while you climbed the shelves, all the way up to where Raj stocked the blues, wringing dung water from your fingers as you scrambled for a shade that wasn’t there. Hailé tipped back his head to watch you.
He was your first Bereaved after your grandmother died. Raj liked to think he was better at treating the Rifts, and he wasn’t, but after her funeral he’d ordered a whole new inventory from the city and made you sell it while he received the Bereaved. So you were far from your best healing self when Hailé showed up. Even after you found bindings that almost matched the bleeding, dyed navy and cyan and cobalt but never that one elusive color, it took you four tries to wrap the Rift. The linen kept snagging on your wedding ring and the colors seeped through for another hour.
You remember that by the end Hailé dragged himself off the floor and helped you finish bailing out the pharmacy, even though the water had stopped rising; neither of you said a word, not about what triggered the Rift, not about what he owed you for binding it, not about the consequences he might have brought upon both of you by entering the village, never mind the pharmacy. He was gone long before Raj came home, filthy and loaded with arrack after a fruitless search for the rogue elephant, and you prayed any witnesses would hold their tongues, because if Raj didn’t know it happened he couldn’t beat you for it.
The entire corner where Hailé collapsed was stained bright blue, and you scrubbed it for weeks with the coir brush, but the color never faded.

* Author : Stephanie Malia Morris
* Narrator : Dominick Rabrun
* Host : Wilson Fowlie
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes


PodCastle 909: Resurrection Rum is a PodCastle original.


Content warnings for death, gun violence, and racism


Rated PG-13
Resurrection Rum
by Stephanie Malia Morris
After Kraus’s The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch
 
ALBEMARLE COUNTY, July 1927: WANTED! One ROBERT HOWARD for the MURDER of JOHN LITTLE. Physical description: NEGRO MALE of lightish hue, aged SEVENTEEN or EIGHTEEN, of LOW STATURE and AVERAGE BUILD, head PEANUT-SHAPED with CLOSE-CROPPED hair. Known to dress above his station in GENTLEMAN’S SUITS, outrageous HANDKERCHIEFS, and WING-TIPPED SHOES (stolen, all). Wanted also for the illegal possession and transport of RESURRECTION RUM across county lines. KNOWN ASSOCIATES: a gang of six or seven Negro rumrunners both MALE and FEMALE variously aged TWELVE to NINETEEN (descriptions, sketches below). DANGEROUS BY ASSOCIATION. REWARD $100 for information leading to hideout and/or capture. Suspect known to be ARMED and HIGHLY DANGEROUS. DO! NOT!! APPROACH!!! Report all sightings to the Albemarle County Sheriff’s Office at the following address: ——
One hundred dollars! Robert Howard — he declaimed to his KNOWN ASSOCIATES, speaking from the pulpit of Ma Marian’s kitchen table while his company of six or seven dug into peach cobbler and amened, brother, amened — Robert Howard was worth a million, gazillion, fafillion times that dead, let alone alive. And the rest of it? Low-stature, peanut-shaped head, above his station? His suit and shoes, stolen? Man, Robert Howard ordered his suits from Richmond. He made more cash money dollars running a crate of resurrection than Sheriff Little had made five years in office. But what did the chief of pigs know? Scared motherfucker, calling Rob out his name from the safety of a wanted ad, claiming him ARMED and HIGHLY DANGEROUS, his handkerchiefs OUTRAGEOUS. Blaming Rob for John, when all present knew the Sheriff himself had pulled the trigger, and John his own son. Sheriff wanted MURDER so bad, Rob would drive up to Charlottesville today, let his piece do the speaking. Now that would be murder.
His known associates shouted him down. Sugared crust and glistening brown chunks of peach sprayed from their protesting mouths, spattered the wooden table beneath their pounding fists and the planks beneath their drumming feet. They called themselves the Browntown Boys, preferring alliteration to accuracy, there being half as many FEMALE as MALE among them, and one or two with no interest in claiming either one. They all knew Rob for innocent. Sheriff Little had murdered before. Look at Pops B. But there wasn’t a soul in Albemarle would contravene him. If the Sheriff said Rob did it, Rob did it. Half the county was on the hunt. The drive from Browntown to Charlottesville crawled with pigs, rum-running rivals, Klan. Best lie low until things cooled down, the Browntown Boys said. Best let Sheriff Little’s falsehood stand. It was his loss. What sick bastard killed his own goddamn kid, whatever side of the law he was on?
Rob bristled from scalp to gold-cuffed sleeves. “Naw, son. John was one of us. He didn’t deserve that bullet. We ain’t taking his daddy’s shit lying down. Pops B. wouldn’t. I ain’t about to neither. We still got a job to do.”
The drumming and pounding slowed. The Boys reared back. Their chairs creaked in astonishment. “Not the man in Norfolk,” said a Browntown Boy, incredulous.
The man in Norfolk,

* Author : Dani Atkinson
* Narrators : Andrew K. Hoe, Kitty Sarkozy and Katherine Inskip
* Host : Eleanor R. Wood
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously ran as episode 722 and first published by Daily Science Fiction


Rated PG-13
Said the Princess
by Dani Atkinson
 
Once upon a time in a far-off land, in a tiny room, in a tall tower, at the centre of a vast and impenetrable maze, the princess Adrienna cocked her head and frowned.
“Who said that?” said the princess.
She looked around the tower room, but saw no one.
“This isn’t funny. Who’s there?” said the princess.
She crouched by the bed. Underneath it she found the chamber pot and a nervous brown spider. The princess shuddered. Straightening up quickly and dusting off her rosy skirts, she paced the circumference of the room, searching every inch. There were not many inches to search, as after all it was a prison, and not elaborately furnished or overburdened with good hiding places.
“Where is that coming from? Who are you?” said the princess, stopping by the barred window.
“No, really, who are you? And quit saying ‘said the princess’ after everything I say!” said the prin . . . Oh.
“Yes, ‘Oh’.”
The princess . . . probably wasn’t supposed to hear that.
“Why wouldn’t I be able to hear you?” said the pri —
“Stop that.”
Sorry. Ah, it just seemed like the princess . . . shouldn’t have been able to. Hear that. Somehow. It seemed quite against the rules.
The princess flicked her yellow hair back over her shoulder and scowled uncertainly at the stone ceiling, lacking any better direction in which to look.
“What rules? Yours?”
. . . I . . . I? Was I an I? The word did not seem to fit. The . . . voice . . . did not know whose rules they were. It was simply the way things were expected to be.
“Is it another rule that you always have to talk in the past tense?”
. . . Yes. Yes, the voice believed it was.
The princess slumped down the wall until she was sitting on the cold stones. She rested her forehead in her hands. “And I suppose it’s another rule that you have to describe everything I do, as I do it?” she muttered through a curtain of yellow ringlets.
Sorry.
“Stop saying sorry! Stop saying anything! It’s really getting on my nerves!”
The princess pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a headache. She closed her eyes and stayed absolutely still for a moment. Then another. For a long while the princess did nothing but breathe. Then she tried holding her breath for a while, which just seemed silly and possibly unhealthy. Her breath whooshed out of her in a gush, disturbing the spider which had gone exploring beyond the world of the bed and was now crawling on her knee.
“What? AAAGH!”
The princess leapt up and batted furiously at the terrified spider until it tumbled off her skirts to the floor. She glared once more at the ceiling, then sighed.
“Oh, never mind. I suppose you can’t help it. I can’t imagine choosing to follow a shut-in around remarking on everything she does.”
The voice agreed. The voice couldn’t really imagine choosing anything else ...

* Author : A. D. Ellicott
* Narrator : Emma Osborne
* Host : Wilson Fowlie
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously Published by Body of Work, ed. C.Z. Tacks, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (2023)


Content warnings for fatphobia and eating disorders


Rated PG
Maintenance Phase
by A.D. Ellicott
Mary woke in an unfamiliar bed, gasping for breath.
She recalled the shots, the dancing, the giggling stumble into a stranger’s apartment while they pulled off each other’s dresses. Her internal organs felt cramped up together, as though they were rats fighting for scarce space in the sewers. Her plan was to sneak home later in the night and return to her own form, but instead she’d slept shifted. She groaned and smacked her hand over her eyes.
“She wakes!” someone yelled from outside the open bedroom door. Her bedmate from last night walked in, red hair in a messy bun and spatula held aloft. “Want pancakes?”
How long had it been since she had pancakes? Real pancakes, not the almond meal monstrosities her mother made.
“Yeah, I’d love some,” she croaked. “Just let me, umm, freshen up.”
“Sure thing, buttercup,” said the other woman, and left humming in the direction of the kitchen.
Mary grabbed her discarded dress off the floor, slipped into the bathroom, and made sure to lock it behind her. Then she let go of the self-image she’d been clinging to all night.
She felt a surge of relief as she relinquished the crushing grip her mind held over her body. She looked in the mirror. Gone were the smooth curves of last night, the defined chin, and the dip of shadow at her collar bones. Instead of flowing, her curves rolled, overcame her. She felt skin press against skin where her neck met her chin, and felt the urge to pull her hair forward to cover newly-rounded cheeks.
The form in the mirror wouldn’t fit into her little red dress. It didn’t fit into any of the clothes she owned.
She took her first deep breath of the morning — her only deep breath until she made it home — and then set about chiselling her facade back in place.
Out in the kitchen, sunlight streamed onto a bench covered in flour while the woman mixed something in a large bowl. What was her name again? Kate? She looked up at Mary’s entrance and smiled.
“Pancakes are warming in the oven. Help yourself. Toppings on the table.”
Mary grabbed a fork and plate from the table, then pulled open the oven. Inside was a stack at least six high. She pulled two onto her plate. At the table, she drizzled maple syrup sparingly, added a spoonful of strawberries and bananas, and ignored the chocolate spread and cream.
Kate washed the flour off her hands and came to sit with her at the table, hands curled around a coffee mug. “They were all for you, don’t worry. I already had mine.”
“It’s okay, I’m not that hungry,” she lied. She was starving, but trying to cram down anything else right now would make her sick.
Her doctor was worried about vitamin deficiencies and kept telling her to add things to her diet: more greens, red meat, fruit. But she couldn’t figure out how to fit it all in without making herself vomit or making herself bigger.
She made it through half the serve she dished out for herself before setting her knife and fork down lengthways on the plate — the way she’d been taught to politely indicate that she was done, even though food remained.

* Authors : Amanda Helms and Anne Leonard
* Narrators : Cherrae L. Stuart and Christiana Ellis
* Host : Eric Valdes
* Artist : Eric Valdes
*
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“The House, The Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks” Previously published by Lightspeed,
“To Pluck a Twisted String” Previously published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction


Rated PG
The House, the Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks
by Amanda Helms
 
The house wakes from its somnolence as the witch trudges up the path made of tarts. Through its rock-candy windows, the house scans her figure for any signs of hurt. The witch’s errands in the city make her nervous. And the house, being made of her magic and therefore of the witch, worries along with her that the wrong person might recognize her, or simply think they do. “They say Creoles all look alike,” she’s said, bitter.
It astounds the house, that the witch could be mistaken for any other but herself. That someone could fail to identify her tightly coiling black hair, her agate eyes, her russet skin as the witch’s, and the witch’s alone.
Her hair remains neatly tucked under her wrap. In a basket, balanced against her hip, she carries a basket full of linen bags. Flour and sugar. Though her steps are weary, she’s not limping. A successful outing, then.
Pleased she’s safe, the house opens its front door and rolls out a rug of pie pastry.
“Thank you, House,” the witch says, and walks in, letting the house close its door behind her.
Despite the muggy heat that makes the house’s pecan praline shingles stick together, the witch doesn’t roll up her sleeves till she’s set her basket on the single molasses-cake table. With a groan, she lifts her skirt to perch on a stool made of brioche. She pulls off her boots, wriggles her toes in their stockings, and frowns.
The house flares its brazier in question.
“Ran into someone I knew once, while I was in the city. Got a decision to make, now.” She grimaces. “I keep thinking we oughta leave New Orleans.” She doesn’t go into why, but from the witch’s dreams, the house already knows. She presses a hand flat to the brioche wall. “Hide for now, yes?”
It does. It’s made of sugar and magic, after all; and like sugar in a glass of water, it appears to dissolve into nothing, but it’s still there, just too fine to see.

When the house wakes next, the witch is on its roof, prizing off a pecan praline shingle. Once it’s loose, rum jelly oozes, filling in the naked spot. Though another praline will grow back by morning, the house rattles its tartelette shutters and puffs a clot of meringue from the chimney.
“Hush, now. I’ve decided.” The witch gives it a pat and plucks a few more pralines. “We’re gonna have some company.”
Displeased, the house blows out more meringue.
“Never you mind.”
The witch scurries down the brioche siding, then strides toward the swamp, where towering cypress trees grow, where sometimes the witch has to hiss the secret words to send away an alligator or cottonmouth. The only words she whispers now are those directing the river where to take the pralines and what they should say when they arrive.
The house watches anxiously as the witch returns. It knows she can take care of herself — she wouldn’t have been able to create it if she couldn’t — but she also created it...

* Author : Jeanna Mason Stay
* Narrator : Valerie Valdes
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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PodCastle 905: The Next Dead Wife is a PodCastle original.


Content warnings for coercive control, domestic violence, and murder


Rated PG-13
The Next Dead Wife
by Jeanna Mason Stay
 
Every time a new wife crosses my husband’s threshold, I tell myself this time will be different. This time I’ll go free.
As her body falls to the floor, I’ll seize my opportunity. As her soul rises from her body, I will snatch what should be mine — no cliched tunnel of light, just a doorway into the afterlife. But it will be my turn this time, my door. I’ll take it before she can.
Not that I’ve been able to yet. When the moment comes, I am frozen in place. I can only watch as she enters the door and disappears. And I hate her for it.
But my plan is not impossible. It has worked before. It was done to me. I remember staring down at my lifeless body sprawled across the carpet. I remember seeing a door appear. Feeling it beckon to me with a promise of peace. Then before I could respond, a ghostly form — the wife before me, I assume — threw it open. She looked at me a moment, shrugged in half apology, and slipped through the door. Which disappeared after her. Leaving me stuck here.
But not for much longer. When he murders his next wife, I will steal her way out. It’s only fair. That’s what I tell myself, at least. Every time.
I hear him now at the door, the regular kind. He opens it and carries her across the threshold.
“Here we are,” he says, his script old and tired to me but fresh for each new wife. “Your home, Mrs. Blake.”
I notice her elegant dress and her black hair curling around her face, the ring sparkling on her finger — and I freeze. I’m right, this time is different. Because it is my ring, the one he took off my hand before it was even cold.
I imagine how she felt as he slid it onto her finger, like he did with me. She probably smiled as it glittered in candlelight. Neither of us knew what was coming.
Her gaze sweeps the room as I stand there, anger roiling through me. And then, something else is different. Because her eyes suddenly stop, widening almost comically.
She is staring directly at me.
She looks away immediately. She turns back to her new husband, her future murderer, and begs him to show her around the house. She has never been here, no wife ever comes here before the marriage. Maybe if we had, we would have sensed the wrongness of this place. Or maybe not.

 
I know she sees me — know it because of how she stutters to a stop when she enters a room I am in. How her eyes flick to me and away again whenever I appear. But she pretends I don’t exist, and I pretend nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter that she sees me, since she’ll be dead before long. And I cannot make friends with someone I mean to betray.
I wonder how I look to her. Does she see the last dress I wore, the way I’d done my hair so carefully? Does she see the wound in my chest? It is unsettling to know she sees me at all.
At least he continues oblivious to my existence. He would otherwise find some way to torment me still.
She settles in, unpacking clothing, tucking her toothbrush in the holder next to his, washing her morning coffee cup. I roam the halls as I always have, bound to this place and this man.

* Author : Sarah Prineas
* Narrator : Steve Anderson
* Host : Wilson Fowlie
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously ran as episode 18 and first published by Strange Horizons


Rated G
The Illuminated Dragon
by Sarah Prineas
Rafe Greatorex thought he’d spotted a dragon. From where he stood on the cobbled street that ran between the leaning tenements, only a narrow strip of sky was visible. Rafe craned his neck. He was sure — almost sure — that something had flown by, above. A black shadow, an X against the distant blue.
He looked down again, rubbing his neck. No, it was nothing. Dragons had been outlawed thirty years ago. He must have imagined it. Sighing, he adjusted his glasses, took up the string bag of potatoes with one hand and the canvas bag of books and supplies with the other, and trudged on toward home.
Finding the supplies he needed for his work on the bestiary had been difficult. He must have walked for miles through the tangled streets of the city to get it all. Gold leaf was almost more than he could afford; he had a bit of it pressed between the pages of a Rationalist text in his breast pocket. The inks, he could still find, and the paper and parchment, but the brushmakers had cast furtive looks up and down the street when they took out their wares, had accepted his payment and scurried away into dark alleys. Of all the paraphernalia of illumination, the colors had been the hardest to find; they would be illegal soon, one pigment-grinder had whispered. “You must take what you can afford now, sir,” the woman had advised, “for it may not be here tomorrow.”
Rafe plodded on. Arriving at the open space before the cathedral, he looked up again. Still no dragon, and the blue sky had faded to the more typical glassine white which would in turn darken to heavy gray and rain before nightfall. Rafe sighed, switched the book bag from his right hand to his left, and went on. Then he stopped and looked up again. Something was different.
As usual, the cathedral loomed over one side of the square, buttresses sprawling. The body and the soul, Rafe always thought, when he saw it. The heavy gray stone of the massive cathedral was the body crouching beneath the weight of its sins, while the surprisingly airy filigreed-stone steeple strained toward heaven, the soul hoping for release from the gravity that bound it.
Rafe frowned. Something was missing. . . . The gargoyles. They’d hacked off the gargoyles. Just last week he’d come this way and the dragons and he-goats and demons had poked their smirking faces from drainpipes, from above doorways and along rooflines. But they were gone now; only stumps of stone remained.
Rafe stared. Bad enough that all of the statues were gone, not to mention every tapestry and painting in the city. But gargoyles? What would they take next? Graffiti? Tattoos? Children’s drawings?
Illuminated texts? Shaken, Rafe considered it. His work, he’d always told himself, was close enough to writing, sufficiently unlike representational art, that he was safe from the ponderous wheels of law that ...

* Author : Charles Chin
* Narrator : Eric Valdes
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes


PodCastle 903: On the Shoulders of Giants is a PodCastle original.


content warning for suicidal ideation


Rated PG
On the Shoulders of Giants
by Charles Chin
I was born a T12. Sure, it was the lowest of the thoracic vertebrae, but it was higher than any of the lumbars. I should be thankful to have been born high enough to see above the clouds. The L2s and L3s that climb beside me spent most of their youth in the haze below, unable to see the sun, not knowing how much more of the giant there was left to climb. But not me: fortunate me.
I grasp at rocky outcroppings and pull myself up the well worn stairs, carved into the ground by those who came before me. Moss hangs from the edges where feet avoid stepping, lest they slip down into the endless void of white below. The wall to my left rises as a sheer cliff of granite, or perhaps marble. It is difficult to know from the amount of lichen and foliage that hang down like curtains. But through the small holes cleaned out by the hands of travelers before, I can sometimes see the glint of the giant who breathes underneath.
Another step, another step. I hang my free hand into the air and feel the breeze, looking out to a flat horizon. I squint at a dark object in the distance. Another giant, perhaps. Impossible to tell, as they never get close enough to truly see. I turn back to the stairs and find a small cavern ahead, a respite from the daily climb.
A few other travelers have already taken shelter, gathering around a small fire in the center of the cavern. I find an empty place and sit, taking a moment to rub the calluses on my bare feet.
“Hail, traveler,” one says. “I am an L1. What are you?”
“I am a T12.”
“Ah, a young Thora, I see. Sturdy legs, Thoras. By the look of your feet you have made good progress, yes?”
I smile weakly at him as I place my hands near the smoldering fire. “Yes, good progress.” I glance around at weary faces, dimly lit with orange and red. I wonder if my face shows the same sunbaked features as theirs, or if perhaps I still had the luster of youth that seems to fall away with every step up the giant. In the silence, I feel compelled to fill the air. “Do you wonder what stands at the top? Or think about why we climb?”
“Because we must,” he says in a voice that tells me there will be no further elaboration, and that asking for such would be pointless. The others around the fire nod in agreement, repeating the phrase in a murmur.
I drop the subject and look around at my surroundings, finding at the back of the cave a figure hunched in the darkness, the texture of her skin blending in with the rocks around her. If not for the faint movement of her breathing, I would have not noticed her.
“Who is that?”
He glances over briefly. “An old L5. She does not speak, and has been here since before any of this group entered the cave. This will be her final place, back to the stone of the giant.”
I look to the others around the fire, but none react. “We should help her climb,” I offer to no one in particular.
They chuckle amongst themselves. Another traveler with a stick points it at me. “Young Thora. You can be forgiven naivety now, but you must learn quickly if you are to make it to the top.” He lowers the stick and plunges it into the fire, embers crackling at the disturbance. “If you stop to help every traveler on the way, they will keep you from your potential.

* Author : E. M. Faulds
* Narrator : Eliza Chan
* Host : Devin Martin
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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PodCastle 902: Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike is a PodCastle original.


Content warning for ableist attitudes


Rated PG-13
Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike
E.M. Faulds
 
I remember your mum telling me, after it all went down, that during the lockdowns you washed your hands so often your skin cracked and turned scaly and angry red, but you had to keep going just in case neglecting it killed her.
It echoed, not much later, when the worst of the pandemic was past, only it wasn’t just your hands. All your skin changed into islands of mottled gray or khaki, building up tire-rubber thick in patches, and turning numb where your body just up and decided to not work the same anymore. It was all part of what you were becoming, whether you liked it or not.
There were days, fewer and farther between, where she could still see a glimpse her son Michael, the gorgeous boy you used to be: a spill of curls that fell down one side of your brow, a diffident slant to shoulders on a gangly frame, eyes the clear amber of long-steeped tea, that knowing grin. She’d see a ghost of that smile and be transported back through the ages of you, all the way to when you first announced yourself with a wriggle-kick to her womb. Then your grin would slide away as the pain did its thing and the beautiful boy submerged so your new self could rise, wrathful.
Early on, you spent long hours in the bathtub but your remnant humanity wasn’t built for it. You’d end up with curdled finger pads and stripped of any remaining skin oils to protect you from drying out. You spent months in bed, a place you used to enjoy, and it became a prison. You memorized every crack in the ceiling, watched car headlights migrate across the chalk-white steppes of it. Eventually, you recovered enough to stand for more than a few seconds at a time.
Well, “recovered” isn’t quite the right word. It was more that you decided to ignore the screams of your body because the alternative was never getting out of bed ever again.
You mentioned the day you tottered and stooped along to the kitchen in your Mum’s tenement apartment and how you’d never forget her look of who is this invading my home? before she realized it was you, but taller, and more, well . . . lizardy, and she rushed over to fit herself into the places she knew were strong enough to be hugged. You towered over her.
Even the hug told you that you were different now, and the likelihood of ever going back to who you used to be dwindled to nothing. So, instead, you tried to look forward.

When the pandemic had faded from everyone’s collective conscience just enough, our job said we had to come into the central Glasgow office again. Working from home had been okay for you; you’d made it back from your long-term sick leave, even got in a few prescribed exercises over lunch breaks. It wasn’t always the best and you hated being on top of your mum all the time but at least you could keep your cool packs in the freezer without some asshat moving them to put in their frozen yogurt.
None of the managers on the All-Hands call could give a real answer when you asked why going back to the office was mandatory if you got your job done from home? What the difference was if you were assigned tasks lying in bed or sitting in a conference room?

* Author : Christine Lucas
* Narrator : Kat Kourbeti
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Abyss & Apex



Content warnings for ableist slurs and attitudes, violence, and misogyny


Rated PG-13
Moths in a Fluttering Heart
by Christine Lucas
 
When Maria returned to her village, she found it burned to the ground. Nothing was left of her kinspeople but blackened corpses littered across the village square. She searched around, with the moths in her gut a panicked swarm, stinging to be let out. Everyone else had been shot on the narrow cobblestone streets. On weak knees, with eyes burning from the lingering smoke, she turned towards the woods, her moths breathless with guilt and relief in equal parts. If Evdokia, the midwife, hadn’t sent her to the herbalist two towns over, she’d be dead too. At the edge of the village, Maria stumbled on Papa-Kostas, shot by the Virgin’s shrine, in a pool of blood.
Maria sniffled and he raised his head, his eyes unfocused.
“Maria? Is that you, girl?” Barely a whisper.
Maria gawked, then nodded. He’d called her just Maria. Not Zavo-Maria. The slur that the villagers had attached to her name had stuck enough that its omission made Maria uncomfortable — as though it made her less and more at the same time.
“Nazis,” Papa-Kostas managed. “Looking for resistance fighters. We didn’t tell.” A fit of cough. “Evdokia . . . dead too. See to Charon’s supper, girl. Don’t leave us here, stranded.” He raised his right hand, the tips of his first three fingers brought together, and air-crossed her, before his arm fell limp. “May gods old and new bless you, child. Forgive me.” And he spoke no more.
The Ferryman’s supper. Maria’s moths fluttered all at once. She picked up her skirts and ran into the woods. Dawn hadn’t broken yet. Would she make it on time?
She ran up the nearby hill and then downwards into the small ravine, to the banks of the creek. Not far from there, the ravine opened up to a deep canyon, its slopes a forest of pines and ancient oaks: the sisters of the Dodona Grove. The creek swelled and joined with more creeks to become Acheron, before the dark depths of the world siphoned its waters beneath the surface. Maria headed away from the Acheron, towards the little hut and the nearby cavern, where the villagers brought their herds every November to outwait the winter’s cold.
It was safe inside the hut — few people could find it, most of them dead now. Dishes were stacked on a narrow table by the cold hearth, and sacks of grain and buckets for milking the goats at the other side. Maria sat on an old, creaking stool to catch her breath. Her panicked moths had fled her gut and plodded through her blood now, making her dizzy. She took deep breaths to rid her nostrils from the stench of burned flesh, inhaling the scents of curdled goat milk and pinewood. Then of other, unsettling scents, of murky waters and dead tadpoles, and just a whiff of honeysuckle . . .
The Ferryman’s scent, and the scent of the death that followed his heels.
Maria sprang to her feet. The supper! She really was zavo, sitting idle while Charon waited. If she angered him, would he forsake the souls of her kin? Would he release the dead upon these lands as punishment? She shook her head until the moths with wings of guilt scattered from her thoughts. No.

* Author : Gillian Knox
* Narrator : Karen Menzel (née Bovenmyer)
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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PodCastle 900: Sour Fruit is a PodCastle original.


Content warnings for domestic abuse and the death of a parent


Rated PG-13
Sour Fruit
By Gillian Knox
 
The large open field was encircled by forest. Its sandy soil was home to scrubby flowers and grasses whose spindly roots reached deep into the loose ground, teeming with ants for whom the medium was perfect. Not quite in the middle was an old apple tree, twisting up from the ground, this way and that. Short and stubby. The fruit it produced was the sour, small sort that puckered the mouth with every bite. The sort that farmers had been trying to breed out of existence for countless generations. Yet, it lived. Thrived, even, in the clearing in the middle of the woods.
Fish would run to it when the lake grew too loud. Snuggling herself inside its crooked roots, stretching her small hand upwards to poke into the hole that had rotted through the middle of the old tree, watching the sun as it came through her fingertips.
The tree was the one place on the peninsula where the lake would soften.
It was still there — the constant shush-shush of waves on rock was inescapable — but it faded into the background.
It was a mild day in late September when Fish found the first gift. That’s how she thought of them. Gifts.
Jorgi had been teasing her all through the school day, pelting her with bits of chalk until the lake rushed into her ears, drowning out Teacher’s lecture on Pythagoras. She ran as soon as the bell on Teacher’s desk was rung. Out across the browning prairie grass to the twisted pine trail, over the rocks and into the field.
She cried to the tree, letting all her frustration and childish hatred out with each salty tear. Calmer, she reached up into the rotten hole and her fingers found paper.
There was no real explanation for why a bag of flour sat in the rotted-out crook of the old tree, but Fish knew immediately that it had been left for her. She stood to pull the first gift close to her chest, crinkling the paper and sending small puffs of white out from the corners. It would get on her shirt, and Mama would be cross, but it didn’t matter. Finding the treasure had lifted the weight of the day and quieted the lake enough that she could go home.
Once she got there, though, the flour became a problem. If she were to bring it inside, surely Mama would find it, take it from her, use it in her dry, crusty bread. The kind that hurt Fish’s mouth.
She stood outside the kitchen door, listening to the sounds of bustle on its other side for a full five minutes before deciding. She was the last one in that evening, and there would be no reason for her parents to leave until the next morning. She would leave it outside on the porch, wake early, be the first one out the door in time to retrieve it in the morning, and find a safer, secret space to keep it, far from Mama’s kitchen.
Papa barked when she came in. Where had she been, why had she not been helping Mama, she was a useless girl. Mama nodded along, as though she agreed. As though she wanted Fish underfoot in the afternoons. As though she wasn’t always shooing her away to run in the woods.
Fish said nothing, looking chagrined and soulful so that Papa felt his words held weight.

* Author : Cat Rambo
* Narrator : Cat Rambo
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by UNLOCKING THE MAGIC, edited by Vivian Caethe



Content warning for PTSD, suicidal ideation, and body horror


Rated PG
Broken All My Boughs and Brittle My Heart
by Cat Rambo
 
It was a lizard dropping on her face from the ceiling that woke Ambra in a panic. They ran back and forth all night, feasting on spiders and midges and the slower moths, but they were sticky-footed and rarely lost their grip. This one scampered away while she smacked herself in the face, much harder than she’d intended, so that she saw stars and bit her tongue, all at one.
Dawn, seeping gray, outlined the window, showing the shutter slats as faint lines of light. She nursed her tongue, which felt awkward and painful in her mouth, and swallowed blood as she swung herself up and out of bed, abandoning thought of sleep. Once she’d had a soldier’s knack of being able to sleep anywhere, anytime, but nowadays that skill was long gone and she was lucky to pluck a few uneasy hours from a night.
Cold stone struck her feet as she stood, and she fished around under the bed for the knitted socks that served her as slippers, disreputable and threadbare but warmer than being barefoot. The narrow chamber had only the single window; she moved to it and swung the shutters open, then leaned out on the wide stone sill.
From this vantage point, you could see the hospital’s main courtyard, empty now except for the caged roses set among gravel and a single servant using a rake to set that gravel into long, undulating lines running from north to south. By midday the gravel would be covered by footprints and the porch underneath her window, the only spot where the hamper-addicts could smoke the licorice-scented weed, would be surrounded by crumpled butts. For now, though, everything was silent and still.
Pulling her head back, she shrugged on a robe even more disreputable and went down to look for breakfast.

In theory, they were served every morning at the second turning, but old dietary habits died hard, and Ambra was unused to waiting to eat while on campaign. She was not the only one — most of the patients here were Knights or other military — and so the cook kept jars of jerky and field-cookies on a counter, and the kettle of water above the kitchen fire was always hot for tea, tended by a sleepy-eyed kitchen minion during even the smallest hours of the night.
The kitchen was already awake, though, sliding paddles covered with loaves of bread as well as fancier pastries into the already-roaring ovens. The subcook frowned into a vat of sour gruel being heated, stirring to break up larger lumps. Ambra poured herself lemon tea, then grabbed a field-cookie and took it with her, nibbling at the grainy edge, its flavor more hearty than sweet.
Outside in the garden, she paused to survey her surroundings, eyes narrowed as her head swept across the humped, flower-laden graves, a few small memorial benches, the field supplying the hospital’s vegetable needs, and the hedge-maze. She couldn’t see into the last but moved to a bench near its entrance, sitting down with a sigh.
“Have you thought about my request?” a voice said beside her elbow.
She jumped, startled. “Dammit, Gray, I told you to stop doing that.”
“I wasn’t,” the voice began, then paused. “Well,

* Authors : J. R. Dawson and John Wiswell 
* Narrator : John Bell
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Artist : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Haven Spec


Rated PG
This Mentor Lives
by J.R. Dawson & John Wiswell
 
 
Abraham was rushing through his miracles. He drew out the rune-etched broadsword of young Haddad’s great-grandfather and laid it in the boy’s hands, along with the elegant sheath that lunar moths had woven from their own silk. Then came the maps that would send Haddad on the next leg of his journey: those that told how to navigate mountains by constellations of the sky, and those of the eight oceans that could only be read amid sea breeze.
Underneath that pile of iron and parchment and enchantment, the little Haddad wriggled. He was barely visible under the pile of destiny he held.
“Wait! What do I do with this one? Does it re-dead zombies?”
Abraham couldn’t see which item he was holding up and asking about, not under that mess of rainbow folds and sacred cartography. Did he have time to help the boy sort all this out? He fished around his robes with his gnarled hands until he felt the chill touch of the astral pocket watch. He flicked it open and gaped. He was three hours behind.
Haddad’s head poked out from under the cloak and broadsword, his brown eyes wide and imploring. “Wait! Just one more minute. Which way do I take through the Forest of Tombstones?”
“You’re the hero. You need to figure these things out on your own.”
“I’ve been trying, but assembling my party is hard and nobody has escaped the Forest of Tombstones alive. They all come back zombified. Please, I just need to know whether to go east or south.”
Oh, the Forest of Tombstones. Abraham had been through that blighted place twice in his younger years, on other business trips with other heroes. He really ought to install a signpost at the entrance.
“Go south,” he said. “The real trick is to go slowly. If you try to rush through the Forest of Tombstones, its curse will wake more of the residents. It’s like quicksand, but with ghosts.”
“Is there quicksand?”
“Yes. But again, you . . .”
“I need to figure these things out myself. Yes, sir.”
Then Abraham flicked the astral pocket watch closed, and its enchantment opened the gateway. Light spilled into the clearing, splitting open a circular portal in the murky air. Its radiance drove every bug and rodent from its sight. Even Abraham had to shield his eyes from it. He needed new glasses.
As he stepped through, he thought the boy thanked him. It went too fast for him to be sure.
As soon as the radiance faded, he stepped into the next world, a humid bog where his shoes sank into the earth, and the drooping willow trees blocked out the moon and brushed the point of his hat. Immediately the young heroine Rania darted close, getting nose-to-nose with him, her green eyes bloodshot and furious. Her voice was hoarse and phlegmy, as though she had a cold that, with her proximity, he’d soon enjoy as well.
“Where have you been? I’ve been almost dead for a week out here.”
Before he’d met Rania, she’d been under a curse and forced to live the life of a stable boy. She broke the curse on her own, reclaimed her name, found Abraham, demanded he mentor her, and they’d gone on many adventures since. She’d always known exactly what she wanted.