The wooden detour barricade is barely in place when I spot the car closing fast from the east. Just a glint of light against the desert hills, yet I know it is his car. I ignite the last flare and toss it onto the centerline of the lonely rural two-lane highway. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
She paced the stones, her feet separated from the chill by sable-lined slippers. She was cold despite them, cold from her toes to her crown. Perhaps it was the vengeance of the fire, that she had not joined her husband in its embrace. Long ago, he had decided that he wished to be immolated in the manner of their ancestors. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mabel blurred through the Doorway and stumbled into a wall. She groped for a fingerhold, anything to prop herself up until the gut-twisting vertigo passed. Every time she experienced the blur it got a little worse. All that worse added up to worst because she had made hundreds of auditing trips to the past during her thirty-nine year career in cross-time accounting. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tristram was certain she would never have made the attempt had she not heard that it was a thing other children often did. She did so want to be like other children—lolling about like great striped cats, batting at moths with oversized paws, snapping at dust-motes with wet pink jaws. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A faint, steady vibration carried through the igloo’s massive ice walls—a vibration that shouldn’t have been there. Jayne heard it in her sleep. Age had not dulled her soldier’s reflexes, honed by decades spent on watch against incursions of the Red. Her eyes snapped open. She held her breath. The vibration hummed in the walls, in the bed frame, in the mattress, perceivable even over Carly’s raspy breathing. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...
I found my friend Desmond Kean at the northeast corner of the penthouse viewing terrace, assembling a telescope with which to look at the world below. He took a metal cylinder holding a lens and screwed it into the side of the telescope, then put his eye to the lens, the picture of concentrated absorption. How often I had found him like this in recent months! It made me shiver a little; this new obsession of his, so much more intense than the handmade clocks, or the stuffed birds, or the geometr...
The apartment was in his name, and the Accord was in hers. It took Lauren less than a minute to step out one door and into the other. She put her suitcase in the floorboard and her laptop bag in the passenger seat. Her container garden fit snugly in the back. Narrated by Heather Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Missouri Banks lives in the great smoky city at the edge of the mountains, here where the endless yellow prairie laps gently with grassy waves and locust tides at the exposed bones of the world jutting suddenly up towards the western sky. She was not born here, but came to the city long ago, when she was still only a small child and her father traveled from town to town in one of Edison’s electric wagons selling his herbs and medicinals, his stinking poultices and elixirs. Narrated by Susan Hanf...
Sitting on the sun-warmed step at the end of her workday, Birha laid her hand on the dog’s neck and let her mind drift. Like a gyre-moth finding the center of its desire, her mind inevitably spiraled inward to the defining moment of her life. It must be something to do with growing old, she thought irritably, that all she did was revisit what had happened all those years ago. Yet her irritation subsided before the memory. She could still see it with the shocking clarity of yesterday: the great, ...
Something is eating the starship Stephen W. Hawking, chewing it slowly and efficiently to pieces. Hurtling through hyperspace, or merely hanging suspended therein (who can really tell about hyperspace?), the vessel has become entangled with an unknown entity that exhibits at least one recognizable attribute: curiosity.stev Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nicole Sanders was beautiful. One night after work, she stopped off at a bar downtown, which is where she met the beast. “Hi,” the beast said, in a gentle voice. “Can I buy you a drink?” Narrated by Janis Ian. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ella sat by Nana’s body for two days before she pushed it out the window. She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do. It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains. Narrated by Christie Yant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I wait outside the speaking chamber, where the young Speakers learn to Hear and Speak. The walls and carpeted floor are purest white, the color of this God place and the Speakers who live here walk by, all dressed in white like the walls and the floor, their palms on the shoulders of their guides. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
My curse is that I set off alarms. Smoke alarms. Car alarms. House alarms. It doesn’t matter what kind; I set them all off as soon as I get close to them. Close is usually about thirty feet. I don’t know why I set them off. I haven’t always been like this. I used to be fairly normal. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Carefully, with gloved hands, she removed the object from its stone niche, where it had rested for centuries deep underground, inside the dormant volcano where the mysterious Icelandic cult that guarded it made its home. It hardly weighed anything. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the asteroid belt you either have fast reflexes or you’re a statistic. I slammed into the airlock bulkhead and stopped dead, waiting to see where the laser beam would hit next. Narrated by John Rubinstein. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The fox shoulders and wriggles from between her jaws, first the whiskery, pointed muzzle and then all the rest. Finally free, it shakes its sodden coat and shoots Rosa a disgusted look. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Dandelion lost structural integrity so quickly that I doubt the bridge even had time for a distress call, and this escape pod’s radio is only sub-light. Narrated by Ted & Heather Scott. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lloyds was not willing to insure a phoenix egg, not even of the most impeccable pedigree. Hence the inspection of the purchase became a great deal more important. Narrated by Hillary Huber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jamie Keller and his partner hadn’t found the shoggoth larva smugglers yet, but his boss, the head of the Bureau of Paranormal Investigation’s southeast hub, had other things on his mind. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It’s getting harder and harder to pretend we aren’t racing along the edge of a knife, one box of flashlights and a fistful of batteries away from the mercy of the things in the darkness. Narrated by Cassandra Campbell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I gulp the whiskey and it burns my plastic throat, sets my nutrient sac on fire. I've got filters, but they haven't been changed in six months. Too expensive. Narrated by Joe Barrett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Makers had been dead for billions of years, yet Umos discovered one caught in the starship's net. A young one, naked, with still-fused dorsal fins. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Georgie got rid of most of what she'd inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn't really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
As her breath hissed out it thickened and spread and wrapped around the planet. Before long it was pushing everything down; my mother's breath became the atmosphere of Mars. Narrated by Claire Bloom. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The wan gray of polluted skies will weigh on your soul, and you will recall bluer days, and wish for your childhood, when the grass seemed taller and would rub your inner thighs as you rambled through the fields. Narrated by Stephan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her. Narrated by Kathe Mazur. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Somebody asked me if I'd heard that there were immortal people on the Yendian Plane, and somebody else told me that there were, so when I got there, I asked about them. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Serena still felt the heat of her passage through Kaluza space. That incandescent journey via the bowels of a singularity had raised her temperature dangerously near the fatal point. Narrated by Harlan Ellison®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you've asked for more information about us, which means you're thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all: You. Narrated by Arte Johnson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
