PodCastle Escape Artists, Inc

* Author : Sara S. Messenger

* Narrator : Cherrae L. Stuart

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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Previously published by Fantasy Magazine (Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol. 2, 2023, Pyr Books)





Rated PG-13

Potemora in the Triad

By Sara S. Messenger

 

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.

I cup her warm, wobbly head. Her birth shook the earth, and the sand shakes under us still.

We have no milk, I say.

Hush, child, says Vriskiaab, his voice a thrumming coil under my heels. That infant is not ours. Your unfather left me a riddle, and now I must solve it.

I don’t care much for the balance of our triad, but the earth will crack open unless he solves it, so I hug my sister to my chest. Her cries are so shrill, and they ring like struck ceramic.



Things I will say to my baby sister, come the end of the world: If you need to kill me, I don’t mind if you watch me kneel; and, vultures flock in odd dozens, and cactus fruit come in fours or seven, and you have two tiny moles under your left eye; and, I don’t care that you have a different father because we tread in the desert the same.



Vriskiaab names my sister Baaiksirv. This quiets the rumbling under our feet, but not entirely; some of the canyons we pass have already collapsed, and there are no altar-men where instead exists rubble. Vriskiaab goes without his slain offerings and drinks from a nearby river, muddier than befitting him, and he filters it as he trickles it down the length of his back to the ridged hood under which I live.

The water is cool and silty, and my tears hot, my mind empty.

Father. Unfather. Child.

My unfather’s stories never depicted a triad with a hole inside.

My father cradles my sister in his mouth, in a birthing pocket behind his fang. His eyes are hooded in consternation. The ground shudders still, but we are not bereft, yet.

It will be two years before I see Baaiksirv again.



Baaiksirv will smell like venom, a sharp, sour smell that rises from her soft cheeks and hair, but mostly her suckling mouth. Unlike me, she will have round pupils, and no scales anywhere, not even in a thin line down her spine. In that way, she is just like our unfather.



When I turn twelve, I will sneak off my father’s back during that rare time he is deeply sleeping, after he fondly observes one of his festivals. It will be a relief to get away from the endless hazy sand and the distant chime of diamond sparring against bone. I wear a deep cloak because the cities are unfriendly to things that look almost-human, and I get moderately drunk for the first time, even though it tastes somewhat like my prodigious sister smells.

It will be the first time I encounter a double history. Slumped in the shadows of the beer-merchant’s iron tent, the constant tremor of the earth a gentle ring up the walls, I listen to an elderly orator quarrel with a young woman about how the festival story goes.

It is the same everywhere, with minor variations, the orator says.

* Author : Alexia Tolas

* Narrator : Omega Francis

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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PodCastle 837: Good Fortune For a Beloved Child is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for the death of a child, racism, and allusions to sexual assault





Rated PG-13

Good Fortune for a Beloved Child

By Alexia Tolas

 

There ain’t no body for Thomas funeral, so we bury an empty coffin.

Not empty, Daddy did tell me as we followed the undertaker to the cherry-woods and mahoganies. The coffins they pretty up with ivory velvet and pillows and other shit the dead ain’t gonna care about ‘cause they dead. We don’t even know if Thomas really —

Quintia . . .

But I hear him at night. Singing.

Please!

When the tide goes out.

Enough!

The undertaker cleared his throat. Daddy nodded at the mahogany for $6,000.

For his mother’s sake, enough.

His mother.

Ain’t she my mother too? That’s what she told me the day we picked up the adoption certificate.

Since there ain’t no body to bury, we filled the coffin with the pieces of Thomas we find around the house. A softball glove. A crawfish spear. His favorite rashguard. There’s still pieces of him on the sleeves. His smell — sun-tan lotion and sugar apple. A strand of his yellow hair. I tried to keep it, but Daddy said Thomas needed to be laid to rest.

Mummy don’t want Thomas to rest. She near dead when she see Daddy pack the rashguard away with the other pieces of her child. Her cries did shake the walls. Her tears flooded the tubs and sinks. She did sink her words into the box, and with every plea and threat, she take back another piece of Thomas.

Was the coffin a dumpster?

Was Daddy that eager to give up on his one child?

Was Thomas so easy to replace?

But you can’t blame her for being angry. Every day there’s more and more blank spaces in Thomas room. And the more Daddy take away Thomas, the more he fill up the house with me.

I can feel her eyes burning through my skull as I walk up to the coffin to pay my last respects. Daddy and I avoid her hate by taking the side aisle back to our pew instead of the center aisle Mummy takes to the nave.

Mummy. That don’t sound right in my head no more.

Of all people, she should’ve believed me. She who follow Thomas singing to the bluff every night. She should’ve been happy to know that I too hear his voice riding the white caps to shore. But that ain’t all I tell her. I tell her something I ain’t tell the police. Something I ain’t tell Daddy. I tell her about the wet girl. The wet girl with barracuda teeth and backwards feet who pulled Thomas into the sea.

I run my tongue along the gash inside my cheek. That’s how hard Mummy slapped me.

Mummy rests her hands on the coffin, and a hush falls over the congregation. There’s a knowing in the people, a knowing I can touch but can’t feel. There ain’t no separate sorrows, just one mourning, like a song with many voices. Is not like the sorrow at my grandmother’s funeral where two of my aunts tried to jump into the grave. The wails at Grammy wake can’t compare to the stifling anguish in this room. What’s more, it’s a secret anguish, one that don’t show itself in tears (because there ain’t a wet eye in this church) – or in screams (because it’s so quiet I can hear my own blood rushing through my ears). It almost feels like . . . defeat.

* Author : Charlie Sorrenson

* Narrator : Rebecca Wei Hsieh

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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Previously published by Tor.com

 





Content warnings for violence, assault, misogyny, and PTSD.





Rated PG-13

Flight

by Charlie Sorrenson

 

Now

They are coming out of the woods when Mateo grabs one of Maggie’s wings and tugs, hard. This has long been his way of getting her attention and she has always let him do it, wanting to be a good mother, reminding herself that this is a phase, that he is only five years old, that little boys who do bad things are not destined to become bad men.

But now she wheels on him, the force of her movement yanking her wing from his grasp. “No!” she says, and he blinks and reels back. Two women are walking ahead of them with their children. At the sound of her voice, their heads flick back to watch. “You’re a big boy now,” Maggie says, her voice rising. “You can’t touch them anymore.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the women murmur to each other. Turning their smooth, wingless backs to her, they seize their children’s hands and hurry away. Maggie doesn’t care. Tears pool in Mateo’s eyes but she ignores them, stalking up the big, sweeping lawn toward the place where everyone parked.

Further up the slope, the man who is not Trace walks quickly, gripping his daughter’s hand. On her arm is a bruise the size and shape of Mateo’s fist. As Maggie watches, the girl tugs her hand out of her father’s and takes off, her empty Easter basket bobbing in her grip. Her father calls out but she keeps running and Maggie urges her on, her heart pounding on the girl’s behalf, as her head says: faster, and her heart says: it will never be fast enough, and all the places where the Brothers took her apart pulse with remembered pain.



Ten minutes ago

The man who is not Trace kneels in front of his sobbing daughter and hushes her. Neither he nor Maggie was there to see what happened, but the girl has just told them that Mateo hit her when she wouldn’t give him an Easter egg she had found. Now her father says, “I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt you.” He winks at Maggie; an invitation to a game she does not want to play. “You know boys.”

Maggie looks from her son to the bruised girl to the man who is not Trace but who is so much like him, and something flares within her that has been dead a long time.

“She has a right to her pain,” she says. “She has a right to it.”

“We’re going,” the man says, to no one in particular, and pulls his daughter away, his fingers wrapping around her hand and enveloping it completely.



Seventeen minutes ago

The Easter-egg hunt takes place at the home of some friends of her husband’s, wealthy investor types who live in Marin County and own several acres of old-growth forest. Maggie hasn’t set foot in a forest like this in years, but her husband is out of town and the things that happened to her were such a long time ago and so she agrees to take Mateo.

The moment she gets under the trees, she knows she has made a mistake. She sees the bobbing lights, hears the Brothers’ laughter, remembers running until she couldn’t. She grasps the trunk of a nearby redwood and inches her hands along its fibrous bark, noting its texture as her therapist has taught her. Gradually, her heart slows.

* Author : Lavie Tidhar

* Narrator : Ian Stuart

* Host : Eleanor R. Wood

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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Previously published by Apex Magazine and as PodCastle episode 304





Content warning for violence





Rated PG-13

Titanic!

by Lavie Tidhar

10 April 1912

When I come on board the ship I pay little heed to her splendour; nor to the gaily–strewn lines of coloured electric lights, nor to the polished brass of the crew’s jacket uniforms, nor to the crowds at the dock in Southampton, waving handkerchiefs and pushing and shoving for a better look; nor to my fellow passengers. I keep my eyes open only for signs of pursuit; specifically, for signs of the Law.

The ship is named the Titanic. I purchased a second–class ticket in London the day before and travelled down to Southampton by train. I had packed hurriedly. I do not know how far behind me the officers are. I know only that they will come. He made sure of that, in his last excursion. The corpses he left were a mockery, body parts ripped, exposed ribcages and lungs stretched like Indian rubber, he had turned murder into a sculpture, a form of grotesque art. The Japanese would call such a thing as he a yōkai, a monster, otherworldly and weird. Or perhaps a kaiju. I admire the Japanese for their mastery of the science of monstrosity, of what in our Latin would be called the lusus naturae. I have corresponded with a Dr Yamane, of Tokyo, for some time, but had of course destroyed all correspondence when I escaped from London.

And yet I cannot leave him behind. I had packed hurriedly. A simple change of clothes. I had not dressed like a gentleman. But I carry, along with my portmanteau, also my doctor’s black medical bag; it defines me more than I could ever define myself otherwise; it is as much a part of me as my toes, or my navel, or my eyes; and inside the bag I carry him, all that is left of him: one bottle, that is all, and the rest were all smashed up to shards back in London, back in the house where the bodies are.

 

Unfortunately we don’t have the full text to this one, but you can read the rest of the story here!

* Author : Marisca Pichette

* Narrator : Julia Rios

* Host : Kiran Kaur Saini

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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PodCastle 834: All the Better to Taste You is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for end of life and misgendering.





Rated PG-13

All the Better to Taste You

by Marisca Pichette

 

This morning I swallowed the Wolf.

I started with oatmeal — sweetened bitter by fresh maple syrup, sticky all the way down. On top I poured mead inherited from drunken bees bumbling through the windows I always leave open — wide, gaping, hungry.

I finished with the Wolf. He’s quite small now; time and peace have removed his claws, decades of sweetness have rotted out his teeth. An infestation of fleas conjured by my stepsister forced him to shave completely. His final years were pale, bald, shivering as I carried him from room to room.

At the end, all that remained to feed his once-formidable muscles were nightmares. First mine, then his — rousing him gasping at midnight. I brought him cocoa, warm milk with a dash of honey.

At the end, I slept soundly, snuggled in a bed that learned to fit me. I stopped having nightmares years before I swallowed the Wolf whole.

He stirs in my belly now. Treacle-slow, contemplative, tame. He knew today would come before I ever thought to make his end.



“You’ll eat me up,” he said the day we met. I wore my white cotton dress, cornflowers embroidered along the hem. He lay in bed under a blanket stitched of lace and grandmother skin.

Then he was large, gray as ashes, eyes algae-green. I’m sorry to say I was scared of him, thin as I was, still within reach of my teenage years. I couldn’t imagine a day when I would be stronger than the Wolf.

“With treats and dreams and moon-blood,” he told me the day I moved into the guest room. One suitcase, a twin bed dressed in faded linens. My hands — naked, cold. Standing there, one hallway away from him, I wondered if I’d made the right choice. I wondered if I’d had any choice to make.

We’d run out of space in my mother’s house. After college, my stepsister had married and brought the Woodsman home. It had never been a mansion, equipped with only enough rooms for a mother and her daughters. The addition of the Woodsman meant the subtraction of someone else.

My mother asked if I would mind moving out, living with our only other relative: the Wolf.

“Don’t let her bite you,” she told me as I packed pads and protein bars into my suitcase.

“It’s he,” I replied, resentful and a little petulant. I knew a little about wolves. My stepsister had known a few in college, though only tangentially. They came more to some families than others, and never before the age of sixty. He was our first, as far as I knew.

“No, it’s she,” my mother huffed. “She was your grandmother, before.”

“That doesn’t matter. Now he’s a wolf.”

She gave me a hand-me-down cardigan and left the room.



When I moved in, he cooked for me. Quiche in the morning, martinis at lunch, Bolognese for supper. His table manners gave me my first nightmares, mixed up with cold toes and shifting shadows. I rose each morning exhausted, longing for home. The cottage was too quiet. The Wolf didn’t speak much. He seemed as uninterested in my presence as he was unbothered by it. He spent more time in the garden, while I perused the living room,

* Author : Eleanna Castroianni

* Narrator : Kat Kourbeti

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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PodCastle 833: This Wooden Heart is a PodCastle original.





Content warnings for death and references to war and genocide.





Rated PG-13

This Wooden Heart

by Eleanna Castroianni

 

 

It starts with a seed in your grandfather’s beard.

Before you were born, when you and your brother were still seeds tucked deep inside your parents’ bodies, your grandfather dreamed for a while: of grainy bark, of sun-kissed leaves, of sweet purple fruit and of milky poison sap.

Your grandpa: you knew him for a while. He had the eyes of someone claimed by something bigger; the eyes of someone who has known secrets that take root deep below.

He had the eyes of your brother.

Your brother: you knew him for a while. His fire burned too bright. And everyone who shines brightly is sent to exile. To this day, your mother thinks her son — your only brother — is imprisoned on a faraway island.

She doesn’t know that your brother dreams of grainy bark and sun-kissed leaves. She doesn’t know that what started with a seed in her father’s beard has grown wiry roots and curly tendrils around this family’s hearts.

She can feel the thorns. She can hear the faint beating. She will clutch at her chest with every long breath. But she doesn’t know.

It starts like this.

 



 

The story of your grandmother goes like this — or so they told you.

Rumour had it that the fig grove surrounding the church of Saint Yerasimos in Tholaria could hide one from human eyes. When the Ottomans and the Moors raided, people took to the grove. They knocked on the trees and the spirits of the trees answered. They welcomed them, one trunk now holding two souls.

In the thick shade of the fig trees, with no birds singing, no cicadas trilling, no bees buzzing, the priest eyed your grandmother with a smirk on his goatish features. The irreverent call priests he-goats, but he truly was one: shiny horns and black jewel eyes, part of the beastfolk of Yerakari. He was the spitting image of Dark Father, one of the Cruel Saints that are honored only in Messara Valley. No doubt this chilling resemblance made him, ironically, popular with the pious. Goats have herbivore eyes; his eyes were a predator’s.

“It will cost you,” he said. “The church has needs, you know that, child.” He stroked the heavy cross hanging from his neck. The little jewels tucked in the insets must have cost a fortune. Among them, rubies shone bright red. Rubies were a sign of someone who had traded with the Ottomans. Someone who herded the serfs for the sake of the master.

She clenched her jaw. Of course. The beastfolk of Yerakari cared about one thing only: money. Sometimes it took the form of business, sometimes of sheer thievery. When it came to the church, the beastfolk were a natural partner to the biggest thieves in the country.

“Name the price,” she said.

The he-goat went silent for a moment to briefly weigh the odds. “Forty aiyes. With interest.”

That was a year’s income for a spinner, in good times. Your grandmother was resourceful; she could find a way to pay the instalments. “Expensive, but you have a deal. I have an upfront of ten.”

“Splendid. Dark Father thanks you.” His goaty eyes shone with greed, and his long-fingered human hands,