Dead Gulch lived up to its name. A two-bit hick town that was little more than a dirt track flanked by a couple dozen wood shacks. My beast growled low and mean as I started through and then reared up in yet another fool attempt to unseat me. I had to dig those rusty spurs in long and hard, twisting the boot heel like I was squishing a scorpion. My Halfie let out that familiar nerve-gnashing howl and settled down real quick. | Copyright 2017 by Ashok Banker. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn ...
Feb 21, 2017•1 hr 2 min
Still in the hospital. Radiation burns suck. Mom came to see me, though, which was nice. She probably had to argue with that dick of a boss she works for to let her off early. You’d think since I nearly died because superheroes were fighting above my school that I’d get some sort of benefits or medical insurance, but noooo, it’s all on me and Mom to foot the hospital bills because fights are not a novelty anymore. | Copyright 2017 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about ...
Feb 14, 2017•1 hr 4 min
“You must wait here,” the Highest of the High Priests told her. “We will return and bring you back to the Land of Nibiru once we have found the circlet to place upon your head.” The very mention of the circlet made the High Priest tremble with joy. Though the journey through the portal had been brief, the Land of Nibiru was many universes away from where Corrina now stood—in her own small kitchen, in her own small house. | Copyright 2017 by Kelly Barnhill. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn mo...
Feb 07, 2017•1 hr
Donna had picked up Jared’s favorite--Romano’s to go, he liked the rosemary bread and the penne rustica---and was just putting it in the oven to keep warm when they brought him in. _They_ being EMTs, after pounding urgently on the door, and _brought him in_ meaning he was on a stretcher. He had an IV in his arm and his eyes were bandaged with thick layers of gauze. | Copyright 2017 by Molly Tanzer. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 24, 2017•58 min
As much as the other kids in my neighborhood like to tell me I’m a know-it-all, I realize just how short the list of things I actually know is one cold winter morning in 1987. I know my vocabulary words, everything that can be known about the Bermuda Triangle, and how well-liked a kid is by who they walk to school with. | Copyright 2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jan 17, 2017•55 min
They hate me. They have told me this, again and again, starting from almost the first day of the mission, and continuing every day since then, carrying their hostility well outside the confines of the solar system and into the realm of bentspace. Their hatred does not quite extend to the realm of murder, at least not yet; but it does include telling me every day, in every possible way, that they find my presence intolerable. | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Lear...
Jan 10, 2017•26 min
When I was a child, my mother would tell me stories of the sea. When I couldn’t sleep, when I was restless, when I burned with some childhood fever, she would sit by my side, and conjure something wonderful and strange, something half-magic, from the ocean for me. “Mara,” she would say, smoothing the hair from my forehead as she tucked the covers around me, “did you know that to summon a selkie, you must shed seven tears into the ocean?” | Copyright 2017 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Bonnie Burgess...
Jan 03, 2017•24 min
Paul Bunyan has died. Paul Bunyan has died and Johnny Appleseed is heading north. Not for vengeance, like Paul would have wanted. Not to beat the hills red or divert a river over those responsible for killing the legend, but because it finally seems time to revisit old scars, old pains. “We were the fire in the night,” Johnny remembers Paul saying one night, so long ago. | Copyright 2016 by Charles Payseur. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoic...
Dec 27, 2016•24 min
This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside. | Copyright 2016 by Violet Allen. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad ...
Dec 20, 2016•1 hr 3 min
There are things you know and things you don’t know. You find it helpful to make lists. For example: THINGS YOU KNOW: — A Wrinkle in Time is bullshit. You don’t care if it’s Riley Chu’s favorite childhood book, because she also identifies with Holden Caulfield, and thinks spiders are adorable. Riley’s opinions are not to be trusted. | Copyright 2016 by Carlie St. George. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 13, 2016•45 min
Sarge knew before I did, of course, but I still had to take him the transfer orders. I didn’t know how to feel on my way to the officers’ mess. I would miss my unit and I would miss my Sarge, but it was an honor, everyone said, to get shifted up to Incisive Maneuvers. To work with the Cyborg. The Tinman. The Merchant of Death. | Copyright 2016 by Rich Larson. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 06, 2016•31 min
Before Jack can apologize to Nancy, she has to believe that dragons exist. Nancy’s mad at him because they were supposed to perform a skit at the talent show and he stood her up. They’ve been practicing it for two summers. It’s called “I’ve Come to Marry the Princess.” When Jack didn’t show, Nancy had to go on stage all by herself. He didn’t ditch her on purpose; his dragon egg was hatching and he needed to be there. | Copyright 2016 by Helena Bell. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about ...
Nov 22, 2016•40 min
As I shrug on my jacket, moving across the carpet as quietly as I can, my sister Xuemei pushes her blankets aside and rolls over onto her belly with a soft murmur. “Liin jie. Where are you going?”Fuck. I glance at her across our shared bedroom, her pale skin glimmering in the near darkness. My shoes are already on; no use lying about it now. “Go back to sleep, kiddo.” | Copyright 2016 by Alyssa Wong. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 15, 2016•38 min
It took a while, but in the end we bargained it down to a shot right on my chest, with his mom’s gun. I didn’t know anything about guns, but the thing he showed me looked safe enough, a little pistol that was smaller than the palm it rested on. Then we ran into another problem: Nick wanted to bring his buddies, or at least the ones he trusted. | Copyright 2016 by J.B. Park. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 08, 2016•21 min
Another rock fell today. Jaurez, on 54b. Pretty sure that’s who it was. Maybe. Didn’t talk much during the daily vidcalls, brown eyes peering out from beneath his shaggy black hair, floating every which way in zee-g. Supposed to keep it short, but company regs don’t apply. Not anymore. His kids were on Croia Hab. Partner too. Three of thousands, now just clouds of matter joining all the other debris. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nov 01, 2016•16 min
Three families ahead of them in line. Many more behind, stretching along the beach; it had taken most of the day to get this far, and Eris’s sun was now setting, casting red-gold rays across the sand. Gwen resisted the urge to remind Jon to stand up straight. Their hosts--potential hosts--couldn’t stand up at all, and there was no reason cetaceans would even notice a human’s posture, much less care. | Copyright 2016 by Mary Anne Mohanraj. Narrated by Adenrele Ojo. Learn more about your ad choice...
Oct 25, 2016•35 min
My parents knew I was a witch before I was born. The signs were there, they told me. They were unmistakable. Well. Not all of the signs, or they never would have kept me as long as they did. But enough: My mother’s hair, previously sedate and well-mannered, turned curly and wild during her pregnancy, sometimes even grabbing forks from other people’s hands at meals. | Copyright 2016 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 18, 2016•35 min
I’ll be the first to admit that my homemade rover didn’t do the original justice and my color treatment was a better reflection of my Hollywood thinking than of the Martian landscape. What appealed to JPL was how I captured the tension of driving the rover across Gale, where every pebble can put years of training to the test. They were also impressed that I left my Curiosity outside Hanksville, Utah, not far from the Mars Desert Research Station, then controlled it and its cameras from a van sev...
Oct 11, 2016•34 min
“Is that the collapsible, carbon fiber ten-foot pole from TrunchCo?” I slammed my locker door and spun the combo lock, but it was too late; the fanboy already seen my gear. I didn’t know what his interest was, but I didn’t want to encourage him. I said nothing. He continued: “I’ve got the one from a couple of years ago that folds up. It sucks." Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Oct 04, 2016•1 hr 2 min
Prison 17 had been built long enough ago that it got next to no natural light—before all the studies that said that light was good for prison behavior and morale. And of course the rest of its district had been remodded in the past ten years, so the view from outside was a phalanx of solar panels over heat-reflecting paint, making a headache-inducing pattern of black and white. Prisons and hydroponics. Narrated by Jayme Grant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 27, 2016•1 hr 19 min
Everything we crocodiles taste in the water has meaning. It tells us about the people who live here: who does the washing, who harvests the water crops, what they are growing in their fields and belukar. We even know littler details: who is pregnant, who is dying, what couple has been frolicking in the river, heedless of the risks we pose to them. | Copyright 2016 by Jaymee Goh. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 20, 2016•19 min
The sirens are growing louder. Riley doesn’t know how the peacekeepers found out---he was so careful, so sure he’d covered every trace of his existence, all of it---but that’s less important now than getting away. He cannot afford to make any more mistakes. The night seems dark and empty as he leaves the warehouse through the back door. | Copyright 2016 by Sean Williams. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 13, 2016•15 min
There are woods, and the woods are dark, though there are lights hung from the trees. Many of the lights no longer light up. Around the edge of the clearing, someone has strung a long chain of origami animals on barbed wire, some gilded paper and some newsprint, some pages torn out of books, some photographs, each animal snagged on its own spike. The animals have been rained on, and more than once. | Copyright 2016 by Maria Dahvana Headley. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad c...
Sep 06, 2016•41 min
The day the dragons came, Neal kissed a boy. This span of months would later be remembered as the Awakening and condensed to precisely three pages in a tenth-cycle history text. Those three pages would lie nestled between twelve pages on the War of the Sea (when the merfolk rose up and attacked the trade ships in retaliation for an attack against their king) and twenty-four pages on the Reconstruction Age. | Copyright 2016 by Tristina Wright. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad ch...
Aug 23, 2016•1 hr
“There’s a stall in the new market where they cook just about anything on a stick.” These were the words, spoken by coworkers returning to the office from an early lunch, that drew me from my cubicle and onto the streets one late April afternoon. Everyone has their weaknesses, and mine has always been food. Anything? I thought. We’ll see about that. | Copyright 2016 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 16, 2016•1 hr 6 min
The world’s greatest assassin lives on a private island. That’s so much a given that you must have known it already. You’ve seen all those movies about master thieves, brilliant scammers, unflappable secret agents, dangerous people who live on their own tropical islands and must be lured into one last job. He was the source of the cliché. | Copyright 2016 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 09, 2016•38 min
The call came through as I paced outside the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, puffing on an e-cig and watching my breath turn to vapor in the chill. “Hello?” The bald, skeletal image of a stranger stared back at me on my phone. “Ava,” he whispered. “Oh, Ava.” It took me a few seconds to regain my composure. “Dad?” I said. | Copyright 2016 by Mercurio D. Rivera. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 02, 2016•46 min
Dear Scully, I should’ve been suspicious of the girl in the lab coat offering me psychic ice cream. But with you and your ponytail, the psychic ice cream just seemed so harmless. After it gave me a brain freeze that’d make the Sierra Nevada Mountains jealous, imagine my surprise when I started hearing people’s thoughts—thank science it’s only temporary! Good call on that, by the way. | Copyright 2016 by Jilly Dreadful. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki and Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choice...
Jul 26, 2016•29 min
Once upon a time, there was a man who was born, who lived, and who died. We could leave the whole story at that, except that it would be misleading to write the sentence only once. He was born, he lived, and he died, was born, lived, died, bornliveddied. The first few words of a story are a promise. We will have this kind of experience, not that one. Here is a genre, here is a setting, here is a conflict, here is a character. We don’t know what is coming next, but we do know what is coming next....
Jul 19, 2016•24 min
It starts with light. Then heat. A slow bleed through of memory. Catchment, containment. A white-hot agony coursing through every nerve, building to a sizzling hum---and then it happens. Change of state. And what comes out the other side is something new. The woman held up the card. “What color do you see?” | Copyright 2016 by Ted Kosmatka. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 12, 2016•48 min
