* Author : Rebecca Fraimow

* Narrator : Barbara Krasnoff

* Host : Jen R. Albert

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 448: Shaina Rubin Keeps Her Head Under Circumstances Nobody Could Have Expected is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

This story is the sequel to “Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman,” which originally ran at Diabolical Plots and also ran on PodCastle.

Shaina Rubin Keeps Her Head Under Circumstances Nobody Could Have Expected

by Rebecca Fraimow

People in our neighborhood are always saying what a pity it is that two such fine-looking people as my cousin Bluma and her husband have no children yet. I don’t see that they’re so fine-looking as all that. Still, I’ve often thought that if Bluma had a little bit more business of her own to worry about, she might have less time to waste getting into mine.

It wasn’t even my idea to sneak out to the Yiddish theater, that unlucky night I’m telling you about. It was my friend Gittel who really wanted to go. She’s always saying she’s going to do something wild like run away with an actor, so in fact it was a mitzvah for me to say I would go with her and make sure she didn’t do anything foolish—but you just try explaining good sense like that to anyone in my house, especially my cousin Bluma.

Most of the time my father’s too busy disapproving of my brothers to mind what I do and don’t do, but Bluma’s another story. She’s only three years older than me, but she’s more full of advice than a kugel’s full of noodles. Personally, I think people ought to mind their own affairs. Do I ask where Bluma’s mother disappears to at nights, when most women of her age are snoring in their beds? I certainly don’t, and I don’t want to know the answer, either. When Bluma spent a whole summer going back and forth about who she should marry, and if she should marry, and when and why and where—well, did I say a thing about it? The whole neighborhood had an opinion on that, but you didn’t catch me gossiping one way or the other.

All right, perhaps I expressed one or two opinions to personal friends. But a person is allowed to have personal friends, and certainly a person is allowed to have opinions on a subject like whether or not her cousin is going to marry a rich man and finally move out of the house!

But my cousin Bluma, who thinks she’s so much more sensible than anybody, never does take the really sensible course. One day she turns down two proposals flat, and the next day she swears she’ll never marry anyone. Finally, after taking some time to think it over, she decides that she still won’t have the rich one, but the penniless man is just the one for her.

Now we’ve got the both of them in our house, Bluma and her husband, and they’re always either quarreling or making up to each other. For the person who has to live in the next room, the one is just about as bad as the other. I share a room with Bluma’s mother, and you should see the way her face goes red as she’s pretending she can’t hear. Then you’ve got my father and brothers—they all quarrel with each other even more than Bluma and Yudah. And even that’s discounting Bluma’s mother, my Tante Leah, who’s still so grateful to my father for taking her and Bluma into our household that she’s spent seven straigh...

by Rebecca Fraimow

read by Richard Dansky

First published in Diabolical Plots. Read it here.

Rated PG.

Dear Bluma,

I heard that Hershel Schmulewitz, that blockhead, has also presumed to ask for your hand in marriage, which gives you two proposals to consider. Now, you needn’t worry that this will be a sentimental or a wheedling sort of letter. You already know how I feel, and I suppose Hershel’s not so much of a blockhead that he doesn’t feel the same way. I’m simply writing to lay out the reasons, plainly and concisely, why it would certainly be more to your benefit to marry me.

Rebecca Fraimow is an author and archivist living in Boston. Her marketable skills include identifying old videotape formats, typing extremely fast, and stealing ideas from Sholom Aleichem.

Richard Dansky is the author of several novels and a video game designer who works for Ubisoft.

* Authors : Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw

* Narrator : Dagny Paul

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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PodCastle 447: It’s a Wonderful Carol is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG.

It’s a Wonderful Carol

by Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt

“Who the hell are you?”

The man is standing in my walk—in closet. Except he’s not. He’s also standing at the foot of my bed. And he’s sitting in my window, languid like a pampered cat. Everywhere my eyes go, there he is. He’s so beautiful my teeth ache when I look at him, like I just bit into a piece of cake that is too sweet to taste good. Then he speaks, and my ears shiver in a glorious golden aural bliss.

“I’m your muse, Colleen.”

I want to scoff, deny his existence, refuse to believe him. But I do believe him. His voice rings truth like a perfectly tuned fifth.

Yes. That’s my muse standing there beside me, and sitting beside me on my bed, and flipping through the sheet music on my vanity chair.

“Damn. My muse is hot.”

He smiles and the room lights up rosegold in a way that warms me from the inside out. “Yes, Colleen, you have one of the very best muses in the business, if I do say so myself.”

This time his voice is mellifluous, like he’s the best soloist in a choir of angels. He’s a baritone, but I have no doubt he could hit the mystically low bass notes of the opening of Mahler’s second symphony or the clear highs of a Wagnerian heldentenor

“So, um, this isn’t a new assignment for you, right? I mean, you’ve always been my muse?”

He grins the self—satisfied grin of someone who’s on top of the world and striking a pose there. “Right.”

“So you’re the bastard that’s responsible for Jolly Bells?”

His perfect forehead wrinkles a bit. I let out an involuntary sob as the rosegold light flickers and I’m hit with an overwhelming emotion I can’t name.

“That… was you. It’s all you. I provide the inspiration. You decide what to do with it.”

“Great. So it’s all my fault.” I sigh. I try to look away from Mr. Golden Muse but he’s everywhere I look, even behind my eyes when I close them. “So, to what do I owe this in—the—flesh visit?”

“Well, it’s about that thing.”

“What thing?”

“Jolly Bells.”

“Of course it is. Everything is about the Jolly Bells.”

“Hmm. That’s what I’m talking about. Your attitude. It’s….”

“What, I’m not grateful enough about it?”

“It’s not that, exactly. It’s your dissatisfaction.”

“If I’m supposed to be satisfied about Jolly Bells, I’d rather be artistically frustrated, thanks.”

“I’m here to address that frustration.”

I perk up at this. “You can fix it? You can make it so I’m no longer the Leonard Nimoy of the composer set? I think about him a lot. He was a photographer, a writer, a drama teacher, but all anybody remembers is pointy ears, a goofy hand greeting, and Pon Farr.”

My muse cocked his head adorably. “You’re in more of a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle situation. Sure, everybody knows Sherlock Holmes, but there are fans who recognize his other work.”

I shook my head. “It’s really more like poor Bobby McFerrin. The man’s an astonishingly capable and insightful musician and composer, but he’ll never escape the shadow of ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’”

“Is that so bad? People love that song. It makes them happy.”

“So? Corn syrup makes people happy. Reality television makes people happy. And, sure,

* Author : Thoraiya Dyer

* Narrators : Loulou Szal and Nathalie Cerin

* Host : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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Rated PG-13

First published in Lightspeed Magazine’s People of Color Destroy Fantasy.

The Rock in the Water

by Thoriya Dyer

Throw them in the water where nobody will see, the head cook told Yveline right before sunrise, but there’re already so many people washing their clothes in the river that Yveline holds the string bag of stinking, empty shells behind a banana tree and cries in dismay without making a sound.

She’s seven years old. Too big to be crying like a baby. Yveline scrubs at the tears with the back of her lambi-smelling hand and strains to see a place without people. Too many fishing boats with tyres hung over the sides. Too many men pulling their nets up onto the silver silt. Too many trucks in the pebbly shallows, filling containers with dirty river water while children who still have parents swim and laugh.

Yveline wants to shriek at them not to drink the water. Not to swim in it. Don’t they know anything? Her parents drank the dirty water and died. Now Yveline belongs to Msye Maurice. She works in his big house, sleeps on the floor, and answers to a new name. The head cook is supposed to send her to school but instead sends her to hide the lambi shells.

Msye Maurice ships things to Miami. Bad powder to make people crazy. Trays labelled frozen fish that are really frozen lambi. He swaps them for things from Miami that nobody else in Port-de-Paix can get. Radios and bicycles. Parts for cars. They’re stolen, but Msye Maurice says he’s like Robin Hood, stealing from the rich.

They don’t even notice what’s missing, he laughs. The rock in the water doesn’t know the pain of the rock in the sun.

* Author : Charlie Allison

* Narrator : Summer Fletcher

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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First published on the Aspiring Writer’s Society website in June 2016

In Mixcoatl’s Net

by Charlie Allison

Sunny abandoned her house the day after she buried Anna and struck out for the western metropolis of Palotl. She gathered up all her practical effects in no time at all: a sharp knife, matches, a map, and a pair of good blankets—one from her childhood, one from Anna’s.

Anna’s blanket was a mess of Evenki winter scenes: the Old Witch’s Comb, a strutting rooster and the gaping grey jaws of wolves.

Sunny sniffed. It still smelled like her.

Her own blanket was decorated with Quetzal mosaics in bright reds and greens: the Flower Goddess bringing life to the desert, Mixcoatl the Hunter casting his net through the stars, headless Night Axe terrorizing travelers.

Sunny rolled up the blankets along with a bedroll and stuffed them into her backpack.

She packed a sensible amount of food (turkey and dog sausages, tortillas, a few ears of corn and as much water as she could fit), strapped on her boots, and stomped to her front door for the last time.

Sunny didn’t so much as glance at the home where Anna had breathed her last and their adopted daughters had grown up— a pair of chattering dandelions. Red had settled in the Final Carnival in Palotl while Nissa headed north to glacial Vasirland. Sunny didn’t spare a glance at the tapestries and portraits she’d weaved and sketched of her family. It would do about as much good as praying, which is to say, no good at all.

Katzin yawned in amusement from his customary sunbathing perch on the windowsill.

Sunny gathered up her heavy yew cane, shawl, and knitting supplies last. The cane was a joking gift from Anna for her sixtieth birthday. She propped open the front door with a foot.

“Katzin,” Sunny called, securing her knitting needles in her bun—a practical choice and a sentimental gesture. Anna had given her the scrimshawed needles during their courtship, all those years ago, so they held a special place in Sunny’s heart—and in her follicles.

“We’re leaving.” Sunny announced, adjusting the cloth around her hair to lessen the heavy beating of the sun. She didn’t know why she said it—certainly there was nobody without fur to hear the words. They stepped out of the bungalow, Sunny tossing the key to one side. Let someone unburdened by memories have it.

Katzin drifted towards the west—Sunny followed him, heading towards the trade-road to Palotl. Sunny walked, ignoring the chirping of doubts in the back of her skull.

She didn’t wave to the neighboring bungalows, clay and glass and wood eyes set low in the desert soil.  Most of their inhabitants had commuted to work in the city-center some twenty miles distant—transported on synchronized cyclones, carpooling on block-sized behemoths or riding into the office on feral bolts of lightning.

Such methods might be swift, but Sunny had always trusted her feet more than sorcery, applied zoology, and weather systems.

Sunny was alone but for Katzin, the desert wind and her thoughts.

Katzin ambled after her, taking his time to swat at offending butterflies, mosquitos and tardy kangaroo mice.

Sunny trudged forward, disturbing dust. It would take a few days to reach Palotl on foot. If she had been thinking ahead, she would have sent a message to Red to expect her one ...

* Author : Rowena Cory Daniells

* Narrator : Barry Haworth

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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Rated PG-13

First published in the Legends 2 anthology, Stories In Honor of David Gemmell.

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.

Rowena Cory Daniells’s series King Rolen’s Kin has just been released (with stunning new covers) in the US by Solaris Classics. Head on over to amazon to pick up the series now!

The Giant’s Lady

by Rowena Cory Daniells

As we entered the white-walled courtyard, the music stopped and every islander turned. Wyrd, they whispered.

Wyrd, they whispered. My lady stood tall, her pale hair glinting in the hot noonday sun. A full-blood T’En throwback, she

My lady stood tall, her pale hair glinting in the hot noonday sun. A full-blood T’En throwback, she did not try to hide her hair or her six-fingered hands, and her distinctive wine-dark eyes held quiet defiance. As for me, I was not a Wyrd, not even a half-blood, just a freakishly big True-man, and an ugly

one at that.

My lady headed for two seats at the end of a trestle table. By the time we reached it, the table was empty. She sat, turning her long legs to the side. Dropping our travelling bags, I took the opposite seat, where I could watch the courtyard gate.

* Author : Faith Mudge

* Narrator : Loulou Szal

* Host : Cat Sparks

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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First published in Hear Me Roar

Rated PG-13.

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.

Blueblood

by Faith Mudge

It is an insult to die at midday.

In the mountain country where I was born, such things take place in the dark of night: the fall of an axe, the knotting of a noose. Here, it is a spectacle. From the narrow window of my tower room, I can see the road that leads away from the castle, down to the sea; it is already lined with people, jostling and squabbling amongst themselves for the best view of my execution.

In this place, a town will turn out to watch a man kill his wife, and call it justice.

My husband wants me to see this, to spend my last hours thinking about what will happen when the sun hits its zenith. Very soon he will step from the great oak doors, and a guard will come to bring me down. The crowd will get what they hunger for then. I hope it haunts them. It probably won’t.

By this point it makes no difference. He can break every bone in my body and shed every drop of my blood and he will still be the fool.

Elyse will still be gone.

This is the story I stole. It began without me, in a city I will never see again.

Elyse was the queen’s seventh child and the first to survive infancy. By then no one expected a son; it had begun to be doubted there would be an heir at all. The rumours that had plagued the queen from her first miscarriage grew louder, circumventions around a central point, delicately half-said by people who mattered. The outlandish death of the queen’s mother. Her difficulty birthing a healthy child. In the early years of her marriage, the servants swore it had rained when she cried, and stormed when she raged.

Witch blood, was what they wouldn’t say out loud.

So on her fifth birthday Elyse was paraded through the streets in a palanquin, a poppet princess waving solemnly to the curious populace, drowning out the gossip in a rush of loyalist sentiment. Daughters have their uses.

For the queen, however, it opened a new quandary. Elyse was now too old for a nurse, yet too young for lady’s maid. She needed a companion—a handmaid close to her own age, quiet, quick and competent. There were plenty of servants to suit already at work in the castle, but while commoner girls were good enough to scrub floors and pluck chickens, even the daughter of a better sort of merchant was never going to be the confidante of a princess. To say the queen was a traditionalist would be to say that a tree is made of wood; her daughter had to have a companion of good noble blood, as generations of heirs had before her.

Unfortunately, while the practice was still favoured by the royal family, the sense of it being an honour had declined amongst the nobility. They would rather send their daughters abroad to the new academies, to forge friendships that might mature into advantageous political alliances and acquire a cultured polish that would appeal to wealthy husbands. Royal patronage could only take you so far; a future marchioness was much better off learning to talk about art in five languages.

That was never going to be my life.

My father’s title was the only aristocracy my family could claim.

by Suzanne J. Willis

read by Graeme Dunlop

Hosted by Aidan Doyle

First published in SQ Mag.

Spring had stretched the daylight hours and dried the damp-weather rot in my hands by the time the old woman, Emmeline, began visiting the orange grove. By then, I knew enough to see she wasn’t well. I had been placed in the grove to scare away the mynahs pecking incessantly at the fruit. At first, I couldn’t remember being made, or recall the hands that sewed my body and my clothes. Who was it that stuffed me full so I plumped out like a real man?

Click here to continue reading.

Rated PG-13.

Suzanne J. Willis is a Melbourne, Australia-based writer, a graduate of Clarion South and an Aurealis Awards finalist. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in anthologies by PS Publishing, Prime Books, Fablecroft Publishing and Fox Spirit Press, and in Fantasy Scroll Magazine, SQ Mag, Mythic Delirium, Capricious SF and the British Fantasy Society Journal. Suzanne’s tales are inspired by fairytales, ghost stories and all things strange, and she can be found online at suzannejwillis.webs.com.

 

by D.K. Mok

read by Graeme Dunlop

First published in Insert Title Here.

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.

Hosted by Margo Lanagan.

What is time?

It’s a question I never asked myself while I was still alive, and now, I suppose time is something that happens to other people. Gainful employment, on the other hand, only happened to me after I’d died.

My colleagues call this place the Wings—we’re the before and the after, enfolding the stage of the world. Here, in my lonely turret on the hill, the sun is always noon overhead. Go seaward, towards the misty waters of Unan, and the sun hovers in eternal dawn. Go worldward, towards the Golden Vale, the realm of Transformation, and the sun dips into the cusp of night. Travelling across the Wings can give the illusion of time passing. Long ago, I found it comforting. Now, it makes me vertiginous.

Click here to continue reading.

Rated PG-13.

D. K. Mok is a fantasy and science fiction author whose novels include Squid’s Grief, Hunt for Valamon and The Other Tree. D. K. has been shortlisted for three Aurealis Awards, a Ditmar, and a Washington Science Fiction Association Small Press Award. D. K. graduated from UNSW with a degree in Psychology, pursuing her interests in both social justice and scientist humour. D. K. lives in Sydney, Australia, and her favourite fossil deposit is the Burgess Shale. Connect on Twitter @dk_mok or find out more at www.dkmok.com.

* Author : Lisa L. Hannett

* Narrator : Cian Mac Mahon

* Host : Angela Slatter

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

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First published in The Dark Magazine.

Rated R.

Part of our Aurealis Month, celebrating the Australian Aurealis Awards.

A Shot of Salt Water

by Lisa L. Hannett

Accordions unpleated welcoming songs the day the mermaids returned.

The first notes droned joyful at dawn, played by young men with wool collars unrolled against the wind. Mattress-clouds bulged above land and water, miles of damp cotton dulling the fishermen’s music. As the sky blanched, fiddlers sawed harmonies, horsehairs screeching on weather-warped bows. Bodhráns were rescued from blanket boxes and cupboards, clatter-spoons from the backs of junk drawers. Soon drummers thumb-pounded down autumn-gold slopes from the village. Beats jigged and reeled past the wharves, along the coast, then splashed through froth seething to shore.

Sparking a cig, Billy Rideout watched the procession from the dunes. Nodded at the lack of flute-wailing. That hollow music wasn’t fit for a homecoming, he thought. Too much like drowning-storms. Like last breaths blown through old bones.

There’d be singing later, in Ma Clary’s kitchen. And in the tavern. In the shipyards. Up and down the waterfront, men were already warming throats with liquor and oil, preparing for tonight. Mermaids liked a bit of haze in his tenor, or so Billy-Rid told himself, sucking smoke.

Half a day’s sail away, the first tall masts striped the gunmetal surf.

“Get your arse down here, Rid,” called Eli Stagg from the strand, carrying an armload of tinned gooseberries. “Grab a basket on the way.”

Billy-Rid pocketed the half-burnt stub, did as told.

On the beach, musicians and local b’ys milled. Horsing around between tunes, they swigged from jars while uncles and grandys set up trestles. Ankle-deep in the shallows, ancient sea-salted women supervised, criticising with squints and scowls but few words. Pointing out which tablecloths needed pinning down. Tsking at the smell of charred griddle-cakes. Snapping knot-knuckled fingers as Billy-Rid made a mess of the buffet, jumbling savouries and sweets on the boards. Between snorts, the matrons snacked on baked haddock. Sucked on bottles of spiced rum, dipper, screech.

“Full sail,” said the eldest, her white hair still plaited in maid’s ropes. Keen eyes trained on the horizon, she talked around a half-chewed wad. “Fleet’s racing the rain.”

Innards clenched, Billy-Rid pretended not to see the sharp-nosed schooners spearing closer. Distant fuzz-dots slowly hardening into crows-nests, smudged lines into hemp ropes. Coffin-dark jibs fading to shades of burgundy and mud on approach.

Beneath the proud sails, tall figures flitted to and fro on deck. They climbed the rigging, easy as flies. They swung the boom. They white-waked it for home.

Rid turned away, fumbling a plate of currant loaves. Gulls swooped, crammed their gullets with sweet white bread, as rowboats were lowered over gunwales a mile off shore. Ducking to avoid claws and beaks and wings, the b’ys each took up a shot of salt water.

“Fill yer guts,” they said, tossing it back for luck.

“Good lads,” said the nans, shooing the squawkers. Smirking when Rid suggested a second shot.

“Only takes one,” they said.

“Better safe,” Billy Rideout replied,