We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts. - Dr. Michelle Francl / In the beginning / In the beginning was the trigger warning: / Prepare for insects. Prepare for words in Latin and Spanish. Prepare for science and other species of the supernatural. Prepare for losses that rewire the chemistry of the brain. Prepare for aging and the way it flays you back to the first cell. Prepare for ghosts. | Copyright 2022 by Sabrina Vourvoulias. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about y...
Jul 12, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are always three: the father, the unfather, and the child. That’s why Vriskiaab threw my unfather off his back after she bore my baby sister, or so Vriskiaab tells me when he stops in the shade of a dune, his massive scales warm under my calves and the tail of him stretching behind me for leagues. My baby sister is soft and crimson-tacky in the crook of my arm. | Copyright 2022 by Sara S. Messenger. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 28, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast My mother tells me all the wrong stories. In our hut beneath the cypress trees, my mother opens up at story time. She steps away from her apron and her broom, her heaps of marjoram and pennyroyal, her pestle and her mortar, and her ingredients for medicinal soups. She throws off her scarf, and oils our hair with fragrant sedr oil. We keep company with her stories as the wolves outside howl their song to the moon. Just as their ancestors have and as their descendants always will. | Copyright 2022...
Jun 14, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Tell me again about the night I was born.” Li Shing drags the comb through her daughter’s oil black hair. Impermeable, like a starless sky reflected against a dense sea. Or a fish’s opaque cloudy eye as it gasps at the bottom of a boat. Li Shing’s fist accidentally brushes the creature’s clammy gray neck, and she tries not to shudder. | Copyright 2022 by K.J. Chien. Narrated by Judy Young, Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
May 24, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast The clatter of rain against the window draws Lesley close. “Hey,” she hisses from across the kitchen. She calls me by my old name and I don’t even flinch. It’s morning, and I’m trying to get breakfast done before Mom comes down, because a perfectly fried egg makes her more likely to say yes to what I’m about to ask. The light was coming through the windows over the sink all yellow and golden, but the storm blew in fast, and now there’s electricity prickling in the air and everything smells damp....
May 10, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn’t yet decided that separating them into parts like this—June’s left pinky finger one bee, her left ring finger another—is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are. Which, at least in the beginning, is best friends, living together on the outskirts of town, sharing a dresser full of secondhand band tees, squeezing lemon juice onto one...
Apr 26, 2022•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Zayyan meets Cecilia on the first day of freshman year. He does not believe in love at first sight, but he does believe in the scientific method, and what is this moment if not empirical evidence of the former? She is like no one he has met before. Black hair pulled into a messy bun, bare arms laden with books, brown eyes ardent as a summer storm. | Copyright 2022 by Hannah Yang. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 12, 2022•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast I am not an illness. I’m a soul with a goal. Everyone on this floor is here for intrusive thoughts, ideations, risk of harm to themselves or others. What society used to call possession, they now call neurotransmitter imbalance or schizophrenia or obsessive compulsion. | Copyright 2022 by Gabrielle Harbowy. Narrated by Gigi Yellen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 22, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is the dead thing becoming the body. This is the dead thing opening the body’s eyes. This is the dead thing rising from the grave. This is the dead thing saying “What the hell—I didn’t ask to be summoned. I was having a great time being dead and dreaming about nothing.” | Copyright 2022 by Isabel J. Kim. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mar 08, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, in a tangerine raincoat that did not suit her pallid skin tone, Phylicia Wimby smiled through her lies. There is an 87% chance of rain for tomorrow. Due to the high probability of unpleasant weather for the entire week, we predict the Cousins won’t be arriving until next week at the earliest, once the rain dries up. Her and all the other meteorologists in shiny citrus-colored vulcanized rubber swore to us that Cousins Season wasn’t coming for a while, that in Virginia we had more than...
Feb 22, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Darla Revere was born to live her whole life as part of a conversation, the outcome of which she would never know. She was raised to be certain of three things: 1. The leviathan will come for you. She will come suddenly and without warning. 2. You will feel great joy and pain at the moment she contacts you. Be prepared. You may only ask her one question. 3. If you change yourself too much—if you do not bear resemblance to your mother, your grandmother, the long line of women the leviathan has to...
Feb 08, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast The coffin lies at the curb, tilted aslant on the strip of grass next to the sidewalk. Old Mr. Byerly spies it on an evening walk through his suburban neighborhood. It’s been put out alongside a pile of other discards—an old-fashioned lawn mower, a chrome-legged kitchen table, a bookcase with only one shelf. The stuff is from a house that’s under renovation after sitting vacant for many months. | Copyright 2022 by Corey Flintoff. Narrated by Joshua Kane. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit m...
Jan 25, 2022•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the folds of banyan trees, between the treeish world and ours, are markets. Real markets, not the pale human sort that happen every week, as if things that are worth buying happen every week. A banyan market occurs one day a year, which is as often as trees are willing to entertain on such a lavish scale. And once a year is just barely enough time to make the stuff that trees dream of. - Revathi Kumar, ‘Markets: A Beginner’s Guide’ | Copyright 2022 by Shalini Srinivasan. Narrated by Stefan Ru...
Jan 11, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast “When in doubt—” I catch Thomas’s eyes and hold up a jar of sparkle lip gloss. “—add more glitter.” The mirror we face is cracked and wreathed in vanity lights that flicker in time with the strained chugging of the ancient generator outside. The smells of old perfume, road dust, and hush puppies fill the painted wooden wagon that serves triple duty as my transportation, home, and dressing room. I blame the generator for that last odour. We restocked on biodiesel at our last stop, and now everyth...
Dec 28, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rain soaks through my hair, stretching my coils to wavy locks streaming down my face. A cold gaze follows me through dark windows, reminding me of Lisa’s face. I complained about my parents, once. | Copyright 2021 by Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dec 14, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Madison S. didn’t show up to school, and word got around that it was because her boyfriend threw his phone at her mouth and knocked out four of her teeth, the junior girls of Clark High turned into monsters. Taloned, screaming things driven by rage and revenge. We swarmed her boyfriend, Josh C., by his car after school, and though he tried to beat us off with his lacrosse stick, our numbers were too great, our sisterhood too mighty. | Copyright 2021 by Genevieve Mills. Narrated by Judy Youn...
Nov 23, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast I was twenty years old when Hamida Bano, the Padshah Begum, supreme wife of the Emperor, entrusted her infant prince to my arms before fleeing across the Thar desert. Her opium-addled husband, steeped in the luxury of his harem, had no defense against Sher Shah Suri’s advancing armies, which squeezed Agra like a coal between tongs. The Sur Empire then settled its traitorous haunches on North India, and Hamida Bano, trailing her husband’s camel, trekked across the blistering desert, while I, stil...
Nov 09, 2021•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nellie kept moving, expecting to blend into the ridgeline, but the hiking guide spotted her. He called out in Italian first, then English. “I don’t think you belong out there.” His group, tourists with brimmed hats and walking sticks, stopped and stared with dull curiosity. The steep slope under her feet was loose gray rock, treacherous for amateurs perhaps, but she’d been wandering terrain like this almost forever. | Copyright 2021 by Pamela Rentz. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ...
Oct 26, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast I’m excited about this new apartment, its shining glass windows overlooking Harlem, until I see her peeing in the park one morning, shortly after we move in. Insulated glass dampens the screech of taxi honks and sirens below and gives us a great view of the nearby park: a huge swath of hilly green in the middle of the city, where evergreens reach up like pining lovers and silent figures walk along its paths. And yet one morning, while sipping my cinnamon coffee, I see her. | Copyright 2021 by Ze...
Oct 12, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast I have spent a lifetime in front of this window, mortality seeping out in waves of nausea and lost weight. There she is, just beyond the grime-cornered glass, in the yard, playing like all children should. I almost tap to get her attention, to give a weak wave of longing and vanished time, but I only watch her move through the grass and tree trunks, hair blown by the breeze. | Copyright 2021 by K.P. Kulski. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sep 28, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nanda hauls the bucket from the depths of the well, her palms aflame with red blisters from clutching the frayed rope too tight. The thick rope, screeching against the pulley, trembling under the weight of the water, becomes heavier by the minute. The minute she goes weak, the bucket will plunge, crashing into the sweet water below, and she’ll have to start the charade for the fourth time. | Copyright 2021 by Amal Singh. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaph...
Sep 14, 2021•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Clouds rolled across the evening sky, dark and low, dragging rain behind them. Desert washes ran dirt-red, and rocky mesas shone wet when lightning flashed. Rainwater frothed down the narrow slot of Sheep Drop Ravine, a chasm with overgrown edges that had claimed the lives of countless sheep and antelope, and of the entire “Handsome Jake” Jubles Gang as it had fled, on a similar night, from a posse of enraged Winslow, Arizona citizens. | Copyright 2021 by Inez Schaechterle. Narrated by Stefan Ru...
Aug 24, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast The oval fruit, uneven on all sides even when it’s ripe, is not just for eating. Spaces in the dust roads filled with reddish-brown wind are what she sees in her lost childhood. Jolainne wants to tell you, to tell anyone who’ll listen, of hiding in the leaves of a mango tree, witnessing what could have been the onset of an assault. | Copyright 2021 by Eugen Bacon and Seb Doubinsky. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Aug 10, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast I had only one defense against a woman who knew me. “Fine.” I layered venom into my voice, to make her think it a hard-won concession yet again. “I’ll prophecy for you.” Queen Iroda stood alone by the parapet, a dark silhouette against the mountains. The scant light caught the gold embroidery on her robe and the perfect braids of red and silver that draped down her chest like chains. | Copyright 2021 by Benjamin C. Kinney. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megap...
Jul 27, 2021•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Aunt Violet had been sick for a long time before she died. The doctor said cancer, but Louise’s Aunt Sinna said it was a soft heart. Louise was inclined to agree, knowing little of this cancer business. Anyway, Aunt Sinna never, ever lied. | Copyright 2021 by Lulu Kadhim. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 13, 2021•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast The designs weren’t in the window or in any of the shop’s sample books, but I caught sight of the tattoo artist tracing stencils onto transfer paper. I’d been looking for a place to finish my sleeves, and though the tumbling spike-thorn roses weren’t what I’d pictured, I could see them winding between my birds and beasts, viny tendrils and jagged rocks, the buds tempting and lush, the thorns sharp and deadly. | Copyright 2021 by Cara Masten DiGirolamo. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more abo...
Jun 15, 2021•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Your journey to Hell begins on a ferry. You clutch your ticket and line up in the stinging rain, waiting for your chance to board. You remember something about a river in Hell, and a ferryman, but in your memory, he rowed a boat more like a canoe in exchange for gold coins. You’re lined up to board a ship, a modern ship, the kind that might take you to an island. | Copyright 2021 by Rajan Khanna. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jun 01, 2021•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, David Lev descends into the library, flouting both Jewish law and university regulations. The building is closed, and he is supposed to be praying, or at least meditating thoughtfully on the wrongs he has committed over the past year, not committing new ones. This is an unfamiliar scale of sin for David, a rabbinical student whose usual Yom Kippur regrets are things like only skimmed a reading and said he’d read it or should call his mother more often....
May 25, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The sound they’ve all been waiting for finally comes at night. It’s a melting pot of noise ingredients: howls and claps, cries and stomps. Laughter and shrieks are sprinkled in like cayenne powder. It isn’t long before the sound crescendos, the pot overboiling with a furor that calls hearts and stomachs. Deron scrambles to the window, momentarily forgetting his tablet and the buggy application he’s been working on. | Copyright 2021 by J. L. Jones. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about yo...
May 11, 2021•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast I wake up at midnight for the third time this week. Some villain’s robbing a jewellery store. Can’t they get more creative? Maybe try . . . a high-end winter coat store? Or a candy store? Doesn’t make much sense economically, but that’s never stopped a supervillain before. Me? I’m MegaPunch. Just one of your many overworked, panda-eyed superheroes. | Copyright 2021 by Y.M. Pang. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Apr 27, 2021•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
