* Author : Ryan Row

* Narrator : Tina Connolly

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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Previously published by Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.

Content warning for the death of a child.

They make my heart out of stone. A slate-colored hunk of granite run through with thin veins of fool’s gold like silver cracks that the father found in the mountains outside of town. He had been gathering lackweed to chew, so that he could make himself numb, and could fall asleep in the meadows, in nests of dry grass like a bird. The afternoon sun burned his skin, and he felt almost as if the light were passing through him. He felt like a window. Like a single pane of a glass.

He couldn’t sleep at home anymore. The old feather bed was too soft. The mother slept turned away from him, and the curve of her neck, in the blue moonlight, looked to him like a hooked knife. The silence there had a body and a mouth, and he could feel, always, its teeth against his neck. Silence was a vampire.

He had broken their clock weeks ago with a fire poker. Back then, the ticking noise had hurt him somehow. Now it was the silence.

When he first saw the stone, he was rising from a dream in which the moon was his heart and the sun was his mind. His teeth ached and were stained black from the lackweed, which tasted almost the same as licorice. The stone, from his low angle, was like a mountain, poking out of the grass. Still thick-headed with lackweed, his mind and heart spinning like divine bodies, he began thinking on what, exactly, made a heart beat.

The mother whispers to my heart for hours. She cradles the stone in a small room at the back of their lab while sunlight strains through a small window, and tallow candles burn, and fits of black smoke spin above her in the amber light like the insubstantial bodies of angels or demons. She tells my heart all of her sins and hopes. Her skin seems brittle and yellow, like fine, aged paper, and I worry that even the soft fingers of the prayer smoke may damage her. The first stage of the ritual, they have decided together, is confession.

“I have never,” she says, stroking a silver vein of pyrite in my heart, “loved anything more.”

Her words braid together with the threads of smoke, and disappear in the light.

Together, they soak my heart in seawater thick with violet flower petals and crushed sage. They boil my heart in calf’s blood and vinegar. They cut it into a perfect sphere and bless it under the full, blue moon, surrounded by an array of mirrors designed to capture the light. The night is wild, and I can hear ancient chanting from across the mountains. The stars sing in silence. The mother makes exact notes on the quality of the light and on the degree of the moon on a length of lamb skin while the father performs the blessing.

The father dances naked with fistfuls of red flowers. He dances around my heart and the mirror labyrinth in the center of a dodecagram drawn exactly in salt and iron dust. He feels wild. He hears, without hearing, the song of the stars. He breathes heavily and sweats into the earth. His lungs feel like the famous hot air balloons of the coastal cities. His blood is expanding inside his body. He eyes the mother. Her skin is whiter and more terrifying than bone.

“You may stop,” she says, making a final series of notations with quick, sharp motions. At last, she looks up and meets his stare.

* Author : A. T. Greenblatt

* Narrator : Mike Flinchum

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

*

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Previously published in Mothership Zeta.

Rated PG for Mild Language and Bold Monsters.

A Non-Hero’s Guide to The Road of Monsters

By A.T. Greenblatt

1. The Siren

There are three basic guidelines that any idiot can follow when faced with a shape-shifting Siren hell bent on drowning you. One: Plug your ears and sit tight. She’ll tire eventually. Two: If easily visually swayed, use a blindfold. Three: Don’t be a hero.

Which around here is like telling people not to breathe.

The Siren guarding the bridge at the end of the road is a beauty in the classic sense and she’s relentless with all those brave, brave heroes attempting to cross the river. From the way her lips linger over syllables, I can tell she’s singing some slow, breathy song and between the lulls in victims, she brushes her radiant hair with a flimsy dollar-store brush and glares at me, challenging me to approach.

I don’t, of course, because unlike heroes, I’m not easy prey. Instead, I smile at her and wait, sitting in the hot, dusty road a healthy hundred meters away with my headphones turned up to deafening. (I forgo the blindfold because I do have a measure of self-control.)

But soon enough, a new hero crests the hill and the Siren’s appearance begins to morph; her hair becomes blacker, her features finer, her figure curvier. In short, one stunning beauty becomes another and that poor sucker running down the road doesn’t stand a chance.

This time, the hero is a girl who runs with such speed and grace a gazelle would be jealous. She almost makes it too; the bridge is within her reach but at the last moment, she veers and stretches out her arms towards the Siren instead. The Siren’s smile glimmers in the sunlight as together, hand in hand, she and her victim slip into the water, sinking lower, deeper, until the river swallows both of them whole.

Now, if I were looking to avoid a confrontation with a monster, this would be a perfect time to cross that bridge.

But I’m not.

A minute later, the Siren returns. Alone. She shoots me a glare so fierce and hostile that even from this distance would burn new holes in my tattered jeans if looks held any power at all. I reply with my most endearing smile.

You see, I’m not a hero. No old crone bothered to whisper a prophecy of greatness (or doom) over my cradle. My mother didn’t meet an untimely demise, and my father religiously reappeared for dinner every night. If I wanted to face monsters, I needed a better excuse than glory. I needed a real quest.

Luckily for me, I’ve scored a job on The Road of Monsters, the place where the rarest creatures are fabled to live.

Forty-three heroes approach the battered bridge this morning. Most are idiots, charging down the hill, weapon of choice in hand, bloodlust in their eyes. On average, they last about five steps before the Siren snares them. It’d be a massacre if heroes weren’t so unnaturally lucky when it comes to washing up on beaches half-drowned but breathing.

To be fair, not all of them were hopeless. A few jammed their fingers in their ears when they saw her. The really clever ones also closed their eyes and ran. One actually took out his phone and read the Wikipedia article on Sirens before approaching. Also, glared at me when I cheered.

* Author : A. T. Greenblatt

* Narrator : Mike Flinchum

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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Previously published in Mothership Zeta.

Rated PG for Mild Language and Bold Monsters.

A Non-Hero’s Guide to The Road of Monsters

By A.T. Greenblatt

1. The Siren

There are three basic guidelines that any idiot can follow when faced with a shape-shifting Siren hell bent on drowning you. One: Plug your ears and sit tight. She’ll tire eventually. Two: If easily visually swayed, use a blindfold. Three: Don’t be a hero.

Which around here is like telling people not to breathe.

The Siren guarding the bridge at the end of the road is a beauty in the classic sense and she’s relentless with all those brave, brave heroes attempting to cross the river. From the way her lips linger over syllables, I can tell she’s singing some slow, breathy song and between the lulls in victims, she brushes her radiant hair with a flimsy dollar-store brush and glares at me, challenging me to approach.

I don’t, of course, because unlike heroes, I’m not easy prey. Instead, I smile at her and wait, sitting in the hot, dusty road a healthy hundred meters away with my headphones turned up to deafening. (I forgo the blindfold because I do have a measure of self-control.)

But soon enough, a new hero crests the hill and the Siren’s appearance begins to morph; her hair becomes blacker, her features finer, her figure curvier. In short, one stunning beauty becomes another and that poor sucker running down the road doesn’t stand a chance.

This time, the hero is a girl who runs with such speed and grace a gazelle would be jealous. She almost makes it too; the bridge is within her reach but at the last moment, she veers and stretches out her arms towards the Siren instead. The Siren’s smile glimmers in the sunlight as together, hand in hand, she and her victim slip into the water, sinking lower, deeper, until the river swallows both of them whole.

Now, if I were looking to avoid a confrontation with a monster, this would be a perfect time to cross that bridge.

But I’m not.

A minute later, the Siren returns. Alone. She shoots me a glare so fierce and hostile that even from this distance would burn new holes in my tattered jeans if looks held any power at all. I reply with my most endearing smile.

You see, I’m not a hero. No old crone bothered to whisper a prophecy of greatness (or doom) over my cradle. My mother didn’t meet an untimely demise, and my father religiously reappeared for dinner every night. If I wanted to face monsters, I needed a better excuse than glory. I needed a real quest.

Luckily for me, I’ve scored a job on The Road of Monsters, the place where the rarest creatures are fabled to live.

Forty-three heroes approach the battered bridge this morning. Most are idiots, charging down the hill, weapon of choice in hand, bloodlust in their eyes. On average, they last about five steps before the Siren snares them. It’d be a massacre if heroes weren’t so unnaturally lucky when it comes to washing up on beaches half-drowned but breathing.

To be fair, not all of them were hopeless. A few jammed their fingers in their ears when they saw her. The really clever ones also closed their eyes and ran. One actually took out his phone and read the Wikipedia article o...

* Author : Natalia Theodoridou

* Narrator : Tanja Milojevic 

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

*

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* Originally published in KROnline.

Rated PG-13, for war and all its wounds and sorrow.

The Ravens’ Sister

by Natalia Theodoridou

There are many ways to tell this story.

All of them are true.

Verses of the House

* I have seven ravens for brothers.

* My brothers went to war and came back black-feathered, bead-eyed; they fell on our battened door, demanding entrance. Father knew it was them as soon as they barged in and took their familiar places in our room: Zoran by the east-facing window, now shattered and taped shut with newspapers; Aleksandar by the door, standing guard; Mihailo on the table, tucking his broken wing behind him; Goran on the cupboard which used to be our fridge; Đorđe on Father’s shoulder, pecking at his greyed hair; Vukašin, the youngest, at the gutted armchair, by Father’s feet; and Slobodan kept flying in circles near the ceiling, breathing the night air from the hole in the roof.

* This city is made of rubble and rust. I rummage through the debris for edibles. Sometimes I find tin cans. Or just things to burn. These are good too.

* Nothing grows here any more. My brothers fly out at dawn and come back when the sun plunges again behind the broken skyline of the city. Their mouths smell of death. They stand on one leg and watch over us all night long. Dark plumage covers my eyes and suffocates my dreams.

* Senka, Father said to me one day. I can no longer live like this. I want my boys back, he said. I want to hug their bodies, run my fingers through their hair. Kiss their wounds. I’d rather lay them in the ground as men than have them here as birds until the day I die.

* Can a raven change back into a man? Can a man become a raven and then again a man, or will he always be a bird, deep down? Were my brothers men when they went to war? Had they always had the hearts of birds?

* Change them back, Father said. Find a way. Change them back, Senka.

* And so I walked through the city and peeked through the bullet holes in the walls, not knowing what I was looking for. I walked from morning till noon, when the sun blazed hot on my skin. I walked on the black asphalt until it burnt the soles of my shoes and the air trembled, boiling where it stood. And then the luminous man appeared at the crossroads between the north side, where death reigned, and the south side, where death reigned too. And the man said, what do you seek, girl? And I said, my brothers are men no more. I want my brothers back. And the man said, I know what you have to do. Come closer. And I asked, who are you? Come closer, he said. He kept still, emanating heat. Come closer. And I did, I walked towards him and I felt all the water in my body evaporate through my skin. You are too hot, I said. And he said, as hot as the Sun, am I? Let me hold you, girl, he said, and I’ll tell you how to get your brothers back. I walked closer. But if you hold me, you will burn me, I said, and I will die. And the Sun said, then you won’t care about your brothers any more, will you? Let me hold you, stupid girl.

* I ran away. The Sun stood motionless, blazing away like a man in eruption, turning the heart of the city to ash.

* I walked through the city from noon till dusk.

* Author : Natalia Theodoridou

* Narrator : Tanja Milojevic 

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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* Originally published in KROnline.

Rated PG-13, for war and all its wounds and sorrow.

The Ravens’ Sister

by Natalia Theodoridou

There are many ways to tell this story.

All of them are true.

Verses of the House

* I have seven ravens for brothers.

* My brothers went to war and came back black-feathered, bead-eyed; they fell on our battened door, demanding entrance. Father knew it was them as soon as they barged in and took their familiar places in our room: Zoran by the east-facing window, now shattered and taped shut with newspapers; Aleksandar by the door, standing guard; Mihailo on the table, tucking his broken wing behind him; Goran on the cupboard which used to be our fridge; Đorđe on Father’s shoulder, pecking at his greyed hair; Vukašin, the youngest, at the gutted armchair, by Father’s feet; and Slobodan kept flying in circles near the ceiling, breathing the night air from the hole in the roof.

* This city is made of rubble and rust. I rummage through the debris for edibles. Sometimes I find tin cans. Or just things to burn. These are good too.

* Nothing grows here any more. My brothers fly out at dawn and come back when the sun plunges again behind the broken skyline of the city. Their mouths smell of death. They stand on one leg and watch over us all night long. Dark plumage covers my eyes and suffocates my dreams.

* Senka, Father said to me one day. I can no longer live like this. I want my boys back, he said. I want to hug their bodies, run my fingers through their hair. Kiss their wounds. I’d rather lay them in the ground as men than have them here as birds until the day I die.

* Can a raven change back into a man? Can a man become a raven and then again a man, or will he always be a bird, deep down? Were my brothers men when they went to war? Had they always had the hearts of birds?

* Change them back, Father said. Find a way. Change them back, Senka.

* And so I walked through the city and peeked through the bullet holes in the walls, not knowing what I was looking for. I walked from morning till noon, when the sun blazed hot on my skin. I walked on the black asphalt until it burnt the soles of my shoes and the air trembled, boiling where it stood. And then the luminous man appeared at the crossroads between the north side, where death reigned, and the south side, where death reigned too. And the man said, what do you seek, girl? And I said, my brothers are men no more. I want my brothers back. And the man said, I know what you have to do. Come closer. And I asked, who are you? Come closer, he said. He kept still, emanating heat. Come closer. And I did, I walked towards him and I felt all the water in my body evaporate through my skin. You are too hot, I said. And he said, as hot as the Sun, am I? Let me hold you, girl, he said, and I’ll tell you how to get your brothers back. I walked closer. But if you hold me, you will burn me, I said, and I will die. And the Sun said, then you won’t care about your brothers any more, will you? Let me hold you, stupid girl.

* I ran away. The Sun stood motionless, blazing away like a man in eruption, turning the heart of the city to ash.

* Author : Julie C. Day

* Narrator : Lisa Hicks

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

*

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Previous published in Interzone 271.

Rated PG-13. Take cover: contains more than 5 F-bombs.

Sarnai

I sit at my kitchen table and watch as my soon-to-be ex-husband, David, assembles cardboard boxes and labels each one in neat block letters. This is David’s third packing weekend and once again our daughter has made herself scarce; Sophie has no problem with late-at-night drunk mom or lonely stoned dad, but watching us sort through the flotsam of our former marriage — it’s too much.

“What’s up with those burn marks on the driveway?” David says. “I can set up the fire pit if you want.”

“No. Thanks.” Burn marks? I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not that I’m going to admit that particular fact, or any of the other “wrongness” that has invaded my life. These days I wake up sweat-soaked each morning from the same dream: a rocket-launch conflagration — my charred body no longer screaming beneath the flames. The dream is bad enough, but there are other more corporeal sources of anxiety: Sophie’s almost complete silence. The way she locks herself in the shed for hours at a time.

David bends his head as he frames another box, intent on overlapping the flaps, then pauses.

“Hey.” I hesitate. “Did you see the mourning doves at the bottom of the yard?”

“I can’t find the fucking packing tape.” David glances in my direction. “Wait, what? Mourning doves?”

“Tape’s to the left of the box. The birds are missing chunks of feathers. Looks like someone maybe pulled them out.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounds too tight. “Poor bastards. I don’t think they can fly.”

David holds the tape as though momentarily unsure of its use. “Didn’t see them.” He seals the bottom of the newly folded box, then begins wrapping one of his mother’s rose-infested china plates in newspaper. “Not sure what you want me to do.”

“It’s fine. I’ll handle it. I can set out some bird food or something.” I take a sip of my coffee, consider how wrecked my face looks in the bright morning light. “Well put together” is not a phrase anyone would ever apply to me. An aging soon-to-be divorcée, an Asian-American, a transplanted Floridian, those are my special labels. Along with rocket farmer, though that is a label I keep to myself.

“When’s the last time you bothered to clean up, Sarnai? This place stinks.” I watch David’s gaze take in the dirty dishes, the toppling stacks of mail, laundry, and God-knows-what-else.

“The house smells just fine,” I reply, and I realize that I’m lying. Underneath the coffee grounds and the overfull compost bin, there’s something new and yet all too familiar; the house smells of Florida sunshine and car exhaust. More than that, it smells of my father’s fields of aluminum and titanium, his barrels of carbon fibers and all those fuels: ammonium perchlorate, kerosene, gunpowder. Lord, I’m such a fool.

For weeks now, Sophie’s hands and arms have been pockmarked with angry, red scars, the same marks I got as a kid working in Dad’s hidden rocket field. It’s not just the scars. There was a flush on Sophie’s face last night when she’d told me — weeks too late — about Sam Pesce’s “slanty-eyed Chinaman” comment.

“But Mom, we’re Mongolian,” Sophie said, as though the real problem was the boy’s grasp of geography.

I know my daughter as well as anyone can be said to understand her.

* Author : Julie C. Day

* Narrator : Lisa Hicks

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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Previous published in Interzone 271.

Rated PG-13. Take cover: contains more than 5 F-bombs.

Sarnai

I sit at my kitchen table and watch as my soon-to-be ex-husband, David, assembles cardboard boxes and labels each one in neat block letters. This is David’s third packing weekend and once again our daughter has made herself scarce; Sophie has no problem with late-at-night drunk mom or lonely stoned dad, but watching us sort through the flotsam of our former marriage — it’s too much.

“What’s up with those burn marks on the driveway?” David says. “I can set up the fire pit if you want.”

“No. Thanks.” Burn marks? I have no idea what he’s talking about. Not that I’m going to admit that particular fact, or any of the other “wrongness” that has invaded my life. These days I wake up sweat-soaked each morning from the same dream: a rocket-launch conflagration — my charred body no longer screaming beneath the flames. The dream is bad enough, but there are other more corporeal sources of anxiety: Sophie’s almost complete silence. The way she locks herself in the shed for hours at a time.

David bends his head as he frames another box, intent on overlapping the flaps, then pauses.

“Hey.” I hesitate. “Did you see the mourning doves at the bottom of the yard?”

“I can’t find the fucking packing tape.” David glances in my direction. “Wait, what? Mourning doves?”

“Tape’s to the left of the box. The birds are missing chunks of feathers. Looks like someone maybe pulled them out.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounds too tight. “Poor bastards. I don’t think they can fly.”

David holds the tape as though momentarily unsure of its use. “Didn’t see them.” He seals the bottom of the newly folded box, then begins wrapping one of his mother’s rose-infested china plates in newspaper. “Not sure what you want me to do.”

“It’s fine. I’ll handle it. I can set out some bird food or something.” I take a sip of my coffee, consider how wrecked my face looks in the bright morning light. “Well put together” is not a phrase anyone would ever apply to me. An aging soon-to-be divorcée, an Asian-American, a transplanted Floridian, those are my special labels. Along with rocket farmer, though that is a label I keep to myself.

“When’s the last time you bothered to clean up, Sarnai? This place stinks.” I watch David’s gaze take in the dirty dishes, the toppling stacks of mail, laundry, and God-knows-what-else.

“The house smells just fine,” I reply, and I realize that I’m lying. Underneath the coffee grounds and the overfull compost bin, there’s something new and yet all too familiar; the house smells of Florida sunshine and car exhaust. More than that, it smells of my father’s fields of aluminum and titanium, his barrels of carbon fibers and all those fuels: ammonium perchlorate, kerosene, gunpowder. Lord, I’m such a fool.

For weeks now, Sophie’s hands and arms have been pockmarked with angry, red scars, the same marks I got as a kid working in Dad’s hidden rocket field. It’s not just the scars. There was a flush on Sophie’s face last night when she’d told me — weeks too late — about Sam Pesce’s “slanty-eyed Chinaman” comment.

“But Mom, we’re Mongolian,” Sophie said, as though the real problem was the boy’s grasp of geography.

* Author : Sabrina Vourvoulias

* Narrator : Sandra Espinoza

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

Fat Girl in a Strange Land.

Contains nondescriptive references to sexual abuse.

Rated PG-13 for noble luchadores and kickass luchadoras.

La Gorda and the City of Silver

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

I.

I was born on a Wednesday, in the middle of a chapuzón.

The sudden squall of sky water bears little resemblance to a thunderstorm — it’s more like a vertical flood, though very brief.

I considered Chapuzón for my luchador name — I had poured out of my mother with the same fulminating relentlessness and washed her into the hereafter — but fate took a hand, and the name is still available to anyone who wants to design its mask and come up with some signature moves.

Fate always takes a hand and leads us where she will. Fate is not funny, although she thinks she is as she laughs at us. When I meet her face to face I intend to talk to her about it. Maybe I’ll body slam her while I’m at it.

But until then I’m stuck with the name she set out for me when I packed on weight on my way to adolescence: La Gorda. The Fat One.

It’s okay. I am fat, though not compared to the luchadores in my father’s company. But they’re men and are allowed to be corpulent. They’re also allowed to be luchadores in the ring and on the screen and in the cantina — where they swallow their tequilazos through the mouth holes of their masks because otherwise no one would recognize them and they’d have to pay.

There is no ring for me, and no movies, because women are not luchadores. That’s what El Patojo and El Súper Fly and El Diablo Colorado tell me when they come to my father’s house for the Sunday tamalada. I make the tamales, of course, and after they’ve eaten their fill my father gets out his camera and films another one of their episodic adventures right in our backyard.

A week later, I see them up on screen, in the packed Zone 7 movie palace some five blocks from our house. El Diablo Colorado is the villain, of course, since his name has the word devil in it. And his mask is red with flames, with a puckered hornlet near each temple. He’s the only luchador with a three-dimensional component to his mask and he’s very proud of this innovation. People hate him and love him at the same time, and when he’s wrestling in the ring they throw things at him: bags of mango slices coated with flaked chile, packs of Payaso cigarettes (reputedly made from the tobacco scavenged from discarded butts collected off the streets) and week-old lottery tickets with sad, unwinning numbers.

When the night is over I help clean up. We toss everything but the mango slices. We aren’t rich and the mangoes are good eating. Sometimes, if we’re particularly tapped out, El Súper Fly keeps the Payasos, too. F  f

El Súper Fly is the hero of my father’s movies and lucha libre events, and El Patojo is his young sidekick. Nobody throws anything at them, though I think this will change now that El Patojo has turned from gangly to cut and the girls have started squealing when he gets tagged in. I think someday there’ll be underwear in the ring for me to clear away.

They are all my godfathers, this company of good and evil, and I love them even without their masks. But they are not smart, and they don’t know the first thing about women. The more they tell me no, the more I think yes, and one of these days La Gorda will show up in the ring and blow them all away.

* Author : Sabrina Vourvoulias

* Narrator : Sandra Espinoza

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

Fat Girl in a Strange Land.

Contains nondescriptive references to sexual abuse.

Rated PG-13 for noble luchadores and kickass luchadoras.

La Gorda and the City of Silver

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

I.

I was born on a Wednesday, in the middle of a chapuzón.

The sudden squall of sky water bears little resemblance to a thunderstorm — it’s more like a vertical flood, though very brief.

I considered Chapuzón for my luchador name — I had poured out of my mother with the same fulminating relentlessness and washed her into the hereafter — but fate took a hand, and the name is still available to anyone who wants to design its mask and come up with some signature moves.

Fate always takes a hand and leads us where she will. Fate is not funny, although she thinks she is as she laughs at us. When I meet her face to face I intend to talk to her about it. Maybe I’ll body slam her while I’m at it.

But until then I’m stuck with the name she set out for me when I packed on weight on my way to adolescence: La Gorda. The Fat One.

It’s okay. I am fat, though not compared to the luchadores in my father’s company. But they’re men and are allowed to be corpulent. They’re also allowed to be luchadores in the ring and on the screen and in the cantina — where they swallow their tequilazos through the mouth holes of their masks because otherwise no one would recognize them and they’d have to pay.

There is no ring for me, and no movies, because women are not luchadores. That’s what El Patojo and El Súper Fly and El Diablo Colorado tell me when they come to my father’s house for the Sunday tamalada. I make the tamales, of course, and after they’ve eaten their fill my father gets out his camera and films another one of their episodic adventures right in our backyard.

A week later, I see them up on screen, in the packed Zone 7 movie palace some five blocks from our house. El Diablo Colorado is the villain, of course, since his name has the word devil in it. And his mask is red with flames, with a puckered hornlet near each temple. He’s the only luchador with a three-dimensional component to his mask and he’s very proud of this innovation. People hate him and love him at the same time, and when he’s wrestling in the ring they throw things at him: bags of mango slices coated with flaked chile, packs of Payaso cigarettes (reputedly made from the tobacco scavenged from discarded butts collected off the streets) and week-old lottery tickets with sad, unwinning numbers.

When the night is over I help clean up. We toss everything but the mango slices. We aren’t rich and the mangoes are good eating. Sometimes, if we’re particularly tapped out, El Súper Fly keeps the Payasos, too. F  f

El Súper Fly is the hero of my father’s movies and lucha libre events, and El Patojo is his young sidekick. Nobody throws anything at them, though I think this will change now that El Patojo has turned from gangly to cut and the girls have started squealing when he gets tagged in. I think someday there’ll be underwear in the ring for me to clear away.

They are all my godfathers, this company of good and evil, and I love them even without their masks. But they are not smart, and they don’t know the first thing about women. The more they tell me no, the more I think yes,

* Author : LaShawn M. Wanak

* Narrators : Jen R. Albert and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Host : Summer Fletcher

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

Rated PG-13 for mild language.

There Are No Wrong Answers

by LaShawn M. Wanak

Please select the answer below that feels most comfortable to you. There are no right or wrong answers. Your results will be tallied at the end.

Question one: If you were to arrive at your apartment to find your front door ajar and your chocolate Labrador missing, would you:

* Wander about the apartment complex, tapping a can of Alpo with an opener and calling (softly) “Here, Marti! Here Marti!” Grin sheepishly when the Filipina neighbor across the hall peeks from her apartment, then swear when she slams the door.

* Call the police and argue with the dispatcher. “Of course it’s an emergency, she’s a chocolate lab, dammit. You know how much money I paid for her? Hello? Hello?”

* Screw it. Go fix yourself a margarita because Marti is bound to get bored at some point and come back. Stupid dog.

Lana Hayek was very, very tempted to go with c). But she considered herself a responsible dog owner, and having already completed options a) and b) a few weeks ago, she had an inkling where her dog had gone. She grabbed Marti’s leash.

She stomped the back entrance of her complex, crossed the alley, and pushed open the wrought-iron gate that led to Madame D’s bricked-in garden, resplendent with flowers, a koi pond, and Marti, getting her ears scratched by the garden’s owner.

“Oh, there you are,” Madame D sang in contralto. The purple silk scarf wrapped around his head matched the dress that flowed to his ankles and bared his light brown shoulders, fetchingly. He could have easily passed for a black woman in her early 30s if not for the pencil-thin mustache and the muscular arms. “Marti just came over for a little visit, didn’t you, girl?”

Marti panted in happiness. She was a true chocolate Labrador with a rich coat a couple of shades darker than Lana’s skin. If Marti had the capability to take the Myers-Briggs, she would score high as an extrovert, which could explain her penchant for breaking out whenever she was left alone in the apartment.

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry,” Lana realized she was using her clipped voice she used in job interviews. “I’ll get my landlord to fix that lock.” She didn’t want to appear overly friendly. Bad enough that Madame D looked classier in drag than she did on her best dressed days, but God help her if he started talking about his “profession”. “Come, Marti.”

Marti stubbornly stayed put. Madame D rose to his soft-slippered feet. “Leaving so soon? I have fresh mint. I can make you up some tea.”

Lana gave up. She went over to Marti, snatching at her collar to snap on the leash. “Oh no. Thank you, really, no — ”

“Girl, I’m not gonna bite. You just look a little stressed. We’ll chat, drink tea. Maybe I can do a palm reading . . .”

“Look.” Lana finished snapping the leash on Marti and straightened, placing her hands on her hips. “Let’s get one thing straight right now. I don’t do psychic readings.”

Madame D held up his hands. “Hey, it’s what I do. You pretty much do the same thing.”

“For your information, I assess personalities. That is totally different from making up mumbo-jumbo about the future.”

When Lana was a little girl, she discovered an article in one of her mother’s Ebony magazines: “Is it Love, Lust, Infatuation — or Addiction?”

The questions, the multiple choices, the scores — they drew her in.