* Authors : Aimee Ogden, Shawn Proctor and Katherine Kendig

* Narrators : Alasdair Stuart, Tatiana Grey and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

Three Cats at the End of the World

By Aimee Ogden

On the heath at the beginning and the end of the world, a witch once built a cottage where she could live with the past, the present, and the future. They are hers, and she is theirs, for as long as life and as deep as death.

The past is a ragged old tom who never strays far from home, forever wanting to lie on the witch’s lap or drape her shoulders. Too easy to forget his nearness until he twists about her ankles and trips her up. The past is warm and comforting, and forever in the way.

Each day the matronly mouser that is the present drops a litter of kittens: behind the kitchen door, in a chest of blankets, beneath the witch’s bed. By the next dawn, the kittens are gone, to find their own way in the world, yes, sometimes, though often as not their mother devours them. Back into the belly that made them, to try again on the morrow. And now and again the witch wakes to find a single kitten licking its mother’s white bones. Even if she could devise a spell to forget such a sight, she would not. Someone ought to know, and there is only she to bear that particular burden.

But it is the future who troubles her most. He disappears for hours, and when he comes home at last each night, he is raked with war wounds. When he loses an eye, the present licks clean the wound with the gore of her kittens still clinging to her chops. The future never stays for long. He has his own battles to fight. But they wait for him to come home. They are all always waiting. Always, though the present lies down to suckle her latest brood, though the past drifts in and out of sleep in the light from the window. Some things simply must be waited for, and after all, he always comes back.

(Until he does not.)

The witch stands in the doorway that gives out on the silent heath as shadows stretch dusk into night. The present yowls from the kitchen window and the past sleeps fitfully in the draft from the open door. When the sun finally sinks out of sight, the witch shuts the door and hopes the stray finds her before sleep does.

In the morning, the witch wakes with the present adoze on her chest. There are no kittens to be found, not in the bedding nor the blankets, nor anywhere in the cottage on the heath at the end of the world.

Have This Wish I Wish Tonight

By Katherine Kendig

That night Orion left his belt on my floor. Half under the bed, curled next to my jeans, barely glittering in my bright bedroom light. I poured a bowl of cereal and read half a chapter of my book in the living room. Out of the corner of my eye, the faintest shifts of light flattened and flared. I didn’t touch it, didn’t drape it carefully over the back of a chair. But when I turned the light off, I found I couldn’t stand it shining there in the wrong darkness. It gave my eyes a different gravity, and had he realized it was missing? Did he — did he have a spare? I turned the light back on, laid the belt over my shoes in their uneven kicked-off line, right by the unlocked door. He wouldn’t even have to wake me up.

I had only ever seen him in starlight. In street light he was solid and inexact; his eyes looked back at me and his breath misted thick and the thinnest glow seeped from under his coat. The whole city sprawled around us, millions of people, heavy clothes and hunched shoulders — how had he picked me?