PodCastle

By Escape Artists Foundation

The Fantasy Fiction Podcast... more

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The podcast currently has 776 episodes available.

PodCastle episodes:

March 13, 2018 PodCastle 513, ARTEMIS RISING: We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes

* Author : Eleanna Castroianni
* Narrator : Danielle Imara
* Host : Stefani Cox
* Audio Producer : Pria Wood
* Artist : Geneva Benton
*
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PodCastle 513, ARTEMIS RISING: We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13, for war and gore.
We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes
by Eleanna Castroianni
August 14th, 1949
Near Kançikon, Pindhos
The heart had already stopped beating — small animal in glistening glory, trapped between rosy lungs. Burgundy liver and sickly gall I passed; bones and marrow hold more secrets. Intoxicated, I shoved my hands into the soldier’s lush entrails — still so warm — and moved them around, making them swish and rustle like mouldy autumn leaves. I sought for patterns; I listened, waiting for echoes of the Next World, waiting for the Voices that Know and Tell.
My breath got caught in my throat and for a few moments I couldn’t find air. As I hastily drew my bloodied hands out of the soldier’s belly, I burst into a cough so strong I thought I’d spit my guts on top of the butchered soldier. Vanghelio, battling her sickness at what I had been doing, turned to face me. She grabbed my wrists and steadied me on the ground.
“Nafsika,” she begged, “what happened? What did you see?”
I won’t write what I saw, not until we are closer to Base. Bones and entrails never lie and I’m not risking the enemy getting hold of this notebook. Before I joined the army I was a butcher’s daughter who saw the future in the remains of dead animals on my father’s table. Every single time I was right, no matter how little the Major wanted to believe me. Now I need to write this story down because I know what I saw in those bones, because our comrades are in danger, because soon the royalist fascists will be here. Because Major didn’t believe me and now I have a chance to save myself, to save Vanghelio.
We’re going back, mission aborted.

August 15th, 1949
We have camped for a few hours out in the mountains, only Vanghelio and I, only the two-person squad the Major sent for the bone reconnaissance. It is the 15th of August, 1949 — the Virgin’s day — and we’re soaked in blood. It would have been a holiday back in our villages, but neither Vanghelio nor I have families any more. I witnessed my home burning down to ashes by the fires of the National Army. I didn’t wish to join the Communists — I didn’t wish to join any faction in this damned civil war — but, really, they left me no choice. The Communists took women in. They trained us at how to carry arms and taught us letters.
Five days ago, the Major sent us to a bone reconnaissance but we never did it. This morning we turned back. That’s when I started keeping this journal — to make a record of what really happened in this mission. Vanghelio is pleading me to reconsider; I won’t. Surely enough, I don’t like the Major, but Vanghelio downright hates her.
“Fucking bourgeois, she is,” she said when we first set camp on this mission. I tried to ignore my aching stomach — we had nothing to eat and we were used to it. “Did you know her father is a banker in Thessaloniki? A fucking banker, of all things! And now she’s here, trying to teach us how to be good Communists?”
Her words stunned me. I had no idea. Major Kalaitzidou always looked like a model partisan, the only woman to have climbed up so high in the ranks.
...more
50min
March 13, 2018 PodCastle 513, ARTEMIS RISING: We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes

* Author : Eleanna Castroianni
* Narrator : Danielle Imara
* Host : Stefani Cox
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
* Artist : Geneva Benton
*
Discuss on Forums

PodCastle 513, ARTEMIS RISING: We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG-13, for war and gore.
We Head for the Horizon and Return with Bloodshot Eyes
by Eleanna Castroianni
August 14th, 1949
Near Kançikon, Pindhos
The heart had already stopped beating — small animal in glistening glory, trapped between rosy lungs. Burgundy liver and sickly gall I passed; bones and marrow hold more secrets. Intoxicated, I shoved my hands into the soldier’s lush entrails — still so warm — and moved them around, making them swish and rustle like mouldy autumn leaves. I sought for patterns; I listened, waiting for echoes of the Next World, waiting for the Voices that Know and Tell.
My breath got caught in my throat and for a few moments I couldn’t find air. As I hastily drew my bloodied hands out of the soldier’s belly, I burst into a cough so strong I thought I’d spit my guts on top of the butchered soldier. Vanghelio, battling her sickness at what I had been doing, turned to face me. She grabbed my wrists and steadied me on the ground.
“Nafsika,” she begged, “what happened? What did you see?”
I won’t write what I saw, not until we are closer to Base. Bones and entrails never lie and I’m not risking the enemy getting hold of this notebook. Before I joined the army I was a butcher’s daughter who saw the future in the remains of dead animals on my father’s table. Every single time I was right, no matter how little the Major wanted to believe me. Now I need to write this story down because I know what I saw in those bones, because our comrades are in danger, because soon the royalist fascists will be here. Because Major didn’t believe me and now I have a chance to save myself, to save Vanghelio.
We’re going back, mission aborted.

August 15th, 1949
We have camped for a few hours out in the mountains, only Vanghelio and I, only the two-person squad the Major sent for the bone reconnaissance. It is the 15th of August, 1949 — the Virgin’s day — and we’re soaked in blood. It would have been a holiday back in our villages, but neither Vanghelio nor I have families any more. I witnessed my home burning down to ashes by the fires of the National Army. I didn’t wish to join the Communists — I didn’t wish to join any faction in this damned civil war — but, really, they left me no choice. The Communists took women in. They trained us at how to carry arms and taught us letters.
Five days ago, the Major sent us to a bone reconnaissance but we never did it. This morning we turned back. That’s when I started keeping this journal — to make a record of what really happened in this mission. Vanghelio is pleading me to reconsider; I won’t. Surely enough, I don’t like the Major, but Vanghelio downright hates her.
“Fucking bourgeois, she is,” she said when we first set camp on this mission. I tried to ignore my aching stomach — we had nothing to eat and we were used to it. “Did you know her father is a banker in Thessaloniki? A fucking banker, of all things! And now she’s here, trying to teach us how to be good Communists?”
Her words stunned me. I had no idea. Major Kalaitzidou always looked like a model partisan,
...more
50min
March 06, 2018 PodCastle 512, ARTEMIS RISING: Scar Clan

* Author : Carrow Narby
* Narrator : Becky Stinemetze
* Host : Eleanor R. Wood
* Audio Producer : Pria Wood
* Artist : Geneva Benton
*
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PodCastle 512, ARTEMIS RISING: Scar Clan is a PodCastle original.

PG-13, for graphic monster gore.
Find this year’s glorious ARTEMIS RISING art by Geneva Benton on her website here. Additional ARTEMIS RISING 4 swag is available on Redbubble and Teepublic.

Host Notes:
“Forgetting by Commemoration, or, the Disrespect of Respect,” by China Mieville
“They Should Be Afraid of Old Women” by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Scar Clan
by Carrow Narby
Sage doesn’t ask me to go with her when the call comes in. She doesn’t say anything at all except, “It’s Thunderhead again.” She ducks into coveralls, tosses some shovels into the bucket truck, and speeds away. We call it the “bucket” because of how we use it. It’s not one of those trucks with a boom on it that they use to fix the power lines.
I sit trembling by the phone, sometimes getting up to pace the desolate office, until Sage reappears. Her sleeves are greasy-looking and streaked with pinkish stains. She beckons me to suit up and join her. “There were some folks around to help me get her off the road,” she explains. “But I need you to help unload the truck.”
“What happened?”
“Hit by a semi.”
My whole body tenses up. I must be looking at Sage as if she’s a pair of oncoming high beams, because she adds, “You can do this, right?”
I nod but all around me the night is receding into a dark blur. I’m just a body poised in space, a machine, marching across the yard, perching over the truck bed, nudging at something heavy and slick. Sliding it piece by piece into Sage’s big, orange wheelbarrow. One, two, three, four trips between the bucket truck and the outer door of Thunderhead’s usual room.

I’m lucky, really, to have landed this job. Officially, Red Oak Animal Hospital is a respectable veterinary practice at the southwestern edge of Sudbury. Sage, the owner, is Cornell-educated in equine medicine. The area is semi-rural, but it’s also full of rich people, so we do pretty well. Sage has steady work at a couple of hobbyist stables, and there’s no shortage of pampered labradoodles and wannabe backyard farmers.
I do work the regular day shift sometimes, during the weeks when the moon is slender or dark. It feels like a reprieve to vaccinate a puppy while it squirms and tries to lick my hands, or even to grapple with a spitting cat. But anybody could do that sort of work. Sage hired me to help her run the secret night clinic. The wolves just call it “Sage’s place.” Like a regular emergency room, we have what you’d call “frequent fliers.”
I haven’t been here long, so I’ve only seen Thunderhead once before. It was just about a month ago. She was in one piece then, for the most part. Sage had called me in to help her suture some bite wounds around an anesthetized patient’s neck and wrists: common injuries for wolves who are prone to fighting. “Oh,” I must have said, surprised,
...more
42min
March 06, 2018 PodCastle 512, ARTEMIS RISING: Scar Clan

* Author : Carrow Narby
* Narrator : Becky Stinemetze
* Host : Eleanor Wood
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
* Artist : Geneva Benton
*
Discuss on Forums

PodCastle 512, ARTEMIS RISING: Scar Clan is a PodCastle original.

PG-13, for graphic monster gore.
Find this year’s glorious ARTEMIS RISING art by Geneva Benton on her website here. Additional ARTEMIS RISING 4 swag is available on Redbubble and Teepublic.

Host Notes:

“Forgetting by Commemoration, or, the Disrespect of Respect,” by China Mieville
“They Should Be Afraid of Old Women” by Mary Anne Mohanraj
Scar Clan
by Carrow Narby
Sage doesn’t ask me to go with her when the call comes in. She doesn’t say anything at all except, “It’s Thunderhead again.” She ducks into coveralls, tosses some shovels into the bucket truck, and speeds away. We call it the “bucket” because of how we use it. It’s not one of those trucks with a boom on it that they use to fix the power lines.
I sit trembling by the phone, sometimes getting up to pace the desolate office, until Sage reappears. Her sleeves are greasy-looking and streaked with pinkish stains. She beckons me to suit up and join her. “There were some folks around to help me get her off the road,” she explains. “But I need you to help unload the truck.”
“What happened?”
“Hit by a semi.”
My whole body tenses up. I must be looking at Sage as if she’s a pair of oncoming high beams, because she adds, “You can do this, right?”
I nod but all around me the night is receding into a dark blur. I’m just a body poised in space, a machine, marching across the yard, perching over the truck bed, nudging at something heavy and slick. Sliding it piece by piece into Sage’s big, orange wheelbarrow. One, two, three, four trips between the bucket truck and the outer door of Thunderhead’s usual room.

I’m lucky, really, to have landed this job. Officially, Red Oak Animal Hospital is a respectable veterinary practice at the southwestern edge of Sudbury. Sage, the owner, is Cornell-educated in equine medicine. The area is semi-rural, but it’s also full of rich people, so we do pretty well. Sage has steady work at a couple of hobbyist stables, and there’s no shortage of pampered labradoodles and wannabe backyard farmers.
I do work the regular day shift sometimes, during the weeks when the moon is slender or dark. It feels like a reprieve to vaccinate a puppy while it squirms and tries to lick my hands, or even to grapple with a spitting cat. But anybody could do that sort of work. Sage hired me to help her run the secret night clinic. The wolves just call it “Sage’s place.” Like a regular emergency room, we have what you’d call “frequent fliers.”
I haven’t been here long, so I’ve only seen Thunderhead once before. It was just about a month ago. She was in one piece then, for the most part. Sage had called me in to help her suture some bite wounds around an anesthetized patient’s neck and wrists: common injuries for wolves who are prone to fighti...
...more
42min
February 27, 2018 PodCastle 511: The Fumblers Alley Risk Emporium

* Author : Julian Mortimer Smith
* Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Pria Wood
*
Discuss on Forums

Previously published by Urban Fantasy Magazine (December 2014).

Rated PG.
Desperation was the worst thing you could bring to the Emporium, but there was nowhere else to go. The Emporium was the only place that would have what I was looking for. It always had what I was looking for. So I brought my desperation with me, like an albatross around my neck, like a black spot.
You could get it all at the Emporium. But not for money; Mr. Handlesropes didn’t operate that way. Sometimes, one of the art addicts who dealt in the alley would come in and offer huge sums of stolen cash for one of his items — a piece of cured human skin bearing a rare tattoo, or the shell of a dodo egg hand-painted by a prisoner on the day before his execution — but Mr. Handlesropes would just laugh.

“You’ve got to play the game like everyone else, son,” he would say, even if the petitioner were a woman many years his senior.
During the day, the Emporium acted as a gallery of sorts, its display cases overflowing with rare artifacts and curiosities. But if you wanted to possess one of the items that Mr. Handlesropes stocked, you had to wait until closing time when he would blow out his lanterns and lead you down the narrow twist of a staircase into the cold, stone basement where his balance was set up on a circular bar table.
I was a habitué in the basement of the Emporium. I often came seeking treasures that could not be had anywhere else. But that night was different. I was all atwitch with worry and exhaustion. I hadn’t slept in as long as I could remember. I was kept awake by gallons of cheap coffee and the buzz-saw whine of anxiety. Usually there was a sense of excitement when Mr. Handlesropes led the hopefuls down to the basement, but that night I only felt panic and paranoia.
There were three others there that night. Two were regulars — Mama Alphonz-Custer and Dame Prudence Weakforce. I had seen them many times in that cellar, playing for outrageous prizes, risking priceless treasures, losing as often as they won. Sometimes we would meet up afterward to celebrate or commiserate or strategize over pints of Hogtown Peculiar at Crobbleknock Tavern. We called our little club The Aficionados. We prided ourselves on being expert at Mr. Handlesropes’s game, but we all knew that nobody was truly expert.
The third player that night was a newcomer. A small, fox-like man with sharp eyes and a glittering smile. I had never seen him in the Emporium before but I instantly disliked him. He sat in silence as Dame Weakforce and Mama Alphonz-Custer offered unsolicited advice.
“It’s all in the materials,” whispered Mama Alphonz-Custer. “Mr. Handlesropes knows how much your wager is worth, and that determines the material of the token, and the weight. You can never get away with trying to cheat him. You’ve just got to offer him a fair deal and you’ll win every time.”
“It’s more than that,” Dame Weakforce chimed in. “He knows how much your wager is worth to you. Or the tokens do, at any rate. And what’s more, he knows how much you want the thing you’re playing for. You’ve got to be honest with yourself. What would I give to obtain this tchotchke or that kickshaw? How much would I really be willing to part with?”
The fox-like man smiled and nodded. I shivered and kept silent.
One corner of the cellar was always hidden from view by heavy curtains,
...more
32min
February 27, 2018 PodCastle 511: The Fumblers Alley Risk Emporium

* Author : Julian Mortimer Smith
* Narrator : Wilson Fowlie
* Host : Setsu Uzume
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
*
Discuss on Forums

Previously published by Urban Fantasy Magazine (December 2014).

Rated PG.
Desperation was the worst thing you could bring to the Emporium, but there was nowhere else to go. The Emporium was the only place that would have what I was looking for. It always had what I was looking for. So I brought my desperation with me, like an albatross around my neck, like a black spot.
You could get it all at the Emporium. But not for money; Mr. Handlesropes didn’t operate that way. Sometimes, one of the art addicts who dealt in the alley would come in and offer huge sums of stolen cash for one of his items — a piece of cured human skin bearing a rare tattoo, or the shell of a dodo egg hand-painted by a prisoner on the day before his execution — but Mr. Handlesropes would just laugh.

“You’ve got to play the game like everyone else, son,” he would say, even if the petitioner were a woman many years his senior.
During the day, the Emporium acted as a gallery of sorts, its display cases overflowing with rare artifacts and curiosities. But if you wanted to possess one of the items that Mr. Handlesropes stocked, you had to wait until closing time when he would blow out his lanterns and lead you down the narrow twist of a staircase into the cold, stone basement where his balance was set up on a circular bar table.
I was a habitué in the basement of the Emporium. I often came seeking treasures that could not be had anywhere else. But that night was different. I was all atwitch with worry and exhaustion. I hadn’t slept in as long as I could remember. I was kept awake by gallons of cheap coffee and the buzz-saw whine of anxiety. Usually there was a sense of excitement when Mr. Handlesropes led the hopefuls down to the basement, but that night I only felt panic and paranoia.
There were three others there that night. Two were regulars — Mama Alphonz-Custer and Dame Prudence Weakforce. I had seen them many times in that cellar, playing for outrageous prizes, risking priceless treasures, losing as often as they won. Sometimes we would meet up afterward to celebrate or commiserate or strategize over pints of Hogtown Peculiar at Crobbleknock Tavern. We called our little club The Aficionados. We prided ourselves on being expert at Mr. Handlesropes’s game, but we all knew that nobody was truly expert.
The third player that night was a newcomer. A small, fox-like man with sharp eyes and a glittering smile. I had never seen him in the Emporium before but I instantly disliked him. He sat in silence as Dame Weakforce and Mama Alphonz-Custer offered unsolicited advice.
“It’s all in the materials,” whispered Mama Alphonz-Custer. “Mr. Handlesropes knows how much your wager is worth, and that determines the material of the token, and the weight. You can never get away with trying to cheat him. You’ve just got to offer him a fair deal and you’ll win every time.”
“It’s more than that,” Dame Weakforce chimed in. “He knows how much your wager is worth to you. Or the tokens do, at any rate. And what’s more, he knows how much you want the thing you’re playing for. You’ve got to be honest with yourself. What would I give to obtain this tchotchke or that kickshaw? How much would I really be willing to part with?”
The fox-like man smiled and nodded. I shivered and kept silent.
...more
32min
February 20, 2018 PodCastle 510: My Heart is a Prayer

* Author : Ryan Row
* Narrator : Tina Connolly
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Pria Wood
*
Discuss on Forums

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. The father has the sensation of looking through a telescope and observing the l...
...more
26min
February 20, 2018 PodCastle 510: My Heart is a Prayer

* Author : Ryan Row
* Narrator : Tina Connolly
* Host : Setsu Uzume
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
*
Discuss on Forums

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.
...more
26min
February 13, 2018 PodCastle 509: A Non-Hero’s Guide to The Road of Monsters

* Author : A. T. Greenblatt
* Narrator : Mike Flinchum
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Pria Wood
*
Discuss on Forums

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.
...more
43min
February 13, 2018 PodCastle 509: A Non-Hero’s Guide to The Road of Monsters

* Author : A. T. Greenblatt
* Narrator : Mike Flinchum
* Host : Setsu Uzume
* Audio Producer : Peter Wood
*
Discuss on Forums

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...
...more
43min

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