300 episodes

PodCastle is the world’s first audio fantasy magazine. Weekly, we broadcast the best in fantasy short stories, running the gammut from heart-pounding sword and sorcery, to strange surrealist tales, to gritty urban fantasy, to the psychological depth of magical realism. Our podcast features authors including N.K. Jemisin, Peter S. Beagle, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jim C. Hines, and Cat Rambo, among others.



Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.” Tune in to PodCastle each Tuesday for our weekly tale, and spend the length of a morning commute giving your imagination a work out.

PodCastle Escape Artists, Inc

    • Fiction
    • 4.6 • 494 Ratings

PodCastle is the world’s first audio fantasy magazine. Weekly, we broadcast the best in fantasy short stories, running the gammut from heart-pounding sword and sorcery, to strange surrealist tales, to gritty urban fantasy, to the psychological depth of magical realism. Our podcast features authors including N.K. Jemisin, Peter S. Beagle, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jim C. Hines, and Cat Rambo, among others.



Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.” Tune in to PodCastle each Tuesday for our weekly tale, and spend the length of a morning commute giving your imagination a work out.

    PodCastle 830: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – When Shadow Confronts Sun

    PodCastle 830: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – When Shadow Confronts Sun

    * Author : Farah Naz Rishi

    * Narrator : Nadia Niaz

    * Host : Matt Dovey

    * Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

    *

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    Previously published as PodCastle 526





    Rated PG-13

    When Shadow Confronts Sun

    By Farah Naz Rishi

    [Allah] will say, “Enter among nations which had passed on before you of jinn and mankind into the Fire.” Every time a nation enters, it will curse its sister until, when they have all overtaken one another therein, the last of them will say about the first of them, “Our Lord, these had misled us, so give them a double punishment of the Fire.” He will say, “For each is double, but you do not know.” (7:38)



    The paan seller’s cart has a very particular smell: burnt roses, sugar syrup, cumin. Spicy and sweet, like Nani’s sticks of sage, the ones she burns every Sunday after fajr to ward off jealous eyes and jealous spirits. But I am hungry and I breathe it in, letting the newfound familiarity of the fragrance settle into my bones.

    Perhaps if I smell like paan, this world would accept me as one of its own — because that’s what Pakistan is in Ramadan. Its own world.

    The paan seller greets us. The smell of his wares is its own lighthouse in the bustle of the market, still crowded in the long days of Ramadan. Beside me, Sayf’s chappals slap against the bottom of his bare feet with his every step. Nani is ahead, as she always is, her chin high and her dupatta low, revealing silvery strands of hair. She is very much at home here.

    I don’t really like paan; it tastes too much like grass and birdseed. But the paan seller with his pink and yellow teeth always gives Nani free paan and affectionately calls her Nani-ji. She loves paan, so I want to like it, too.

    The paan seller smiles at Sayf, my twin brother. And then he sees me. His smile falters, as it has every time he has seen me these past few weeks.

    “There is the paani bachi,” he says. Water child. I feel my own eyes brew with quiet annoyance. Mine are blue. Nani says blue eyes are a bad omen. It means I carry a watery, unstable personality. What she really means is rebellious. Secretly, though, I think she means this with affection.

    Sayf has brown eyes, round and gently inquisitive. He is petting a donkey’s velvet nose a few feet from the cart. His lashes are almost as long as the animal’s.

    “Maybe she’ll look like Aishwarya Rai when she grows up,” the paan seller suggests in Urdu. Whether he is trying to comfort me or Nani, I’m not sure. But I know he’s spewing nonsense. I am too short for my twelve years, my hair and eyebrows too thick and unruly, and my skin is just a shade too dark, even here. And now I am angry.

    Her blood pressure has prevented Nani from being able to fast in years; she takes the free paan he has offered. “Maybe,” is all she says. I can’t see her face.

    Warm fingers suddenly fold themselves between mine. Sayf smiles at me; besides Nani, he’s the only one that ever does. He reminds me that despite the paan seller’s coarseness, I still like it here. Flaws and all. I press my fingertip into one of his dimples, which makes his smile only wider.

    The azaan begins to echo through the market, a sound that gleams through the smog-tinted air.

    Nani sneaks the paan in her mouth and chews as she strides ahead. The market’s walls of stands and carts narrow, though many of them are closed during the day for the monthly fast. Above us, colorful signs plastered in Urdu — which I’d never learned to rea...

    • 37 min
    PodCastle 829: DOUBLE FEATURE: When the Giants Came Through the Valley and Floaters

    PodCastle 829: DOUBLE FEATURE: When the Giants Came Through the Valley and Floaters

    * Authors : Derrick Boden and Kevin Sandefur

    * Narrators : J.S. Arquin and Dani Daly

    * Host : Matt Dovey

    * Audio Producer : Devin Martin

    *

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    When the Giants Came Through the Valley – Previously published by Lightspeed

    Floaters – Previously published by Pulp Literature Magazine





    When the Giants Came Through the Valley – Content warning for references to suicide and parental death

    Floaters – Content warning for hospitalisation





    Rated PG-13

    When the Giants Came Through the Valley

    by Derrick Boden

     

    When the giants came through the valley, they made footprints as long as the Santa Monica Promenade, as wide as Dodgers’ Stadium. They crushed dance studios, keto cafes, a waterpark. They left trails of steep-sided ravines with walls of stratified clay and crumbling asphalt, and this is where we now live. Sunset comes earlier down here, but it could be worse.

    Our footprint is deep and arid and full of retooled strip malls. We dwell in the remains of Foot Lockers and tiki bars, tag our names out front in bold blue letters. Lazy Stan, Carmencita, Hot Hot Henri. We didn’t all live here, before the giants came through. We’re a product of collective chance. Grinding out another two-hour commute, heading for happy hour at The Village after working another double, the third this week. Some of us still have homes topside, in buildings the giants happened to miss. But that’s neither here nor there. The footprint is our home, now.

    No two footprints are the same. Ours doesn’t have much going for it, aside from a surprisingly fertile heel wall. Good for growing grapes, which has come in handy considering how the airdrops never include any wine. A few footprints down, they struck oil. Bleeding through the cracks in that old giant’s sole stamp. Most people topside say the footprints are a blemish, an embarrassment. Not that one. Excavators moved in overnight, kicked everyone out.

    The grapes are our little secret.



    When the giants came through the valley, they shed all manner of alien creatures. Land-crawling octopuses shaken from the hairs of their feet, huge spiders jettisoned from their vast dreadlocks. Razor-toothed frogs that are ninety-percent mouth.

    They scuttled about in a daze, like us, before aggressively laying claim to whatever residence they could find. The dusty asphalt crags of a basketball court, the ethernet-cable jungle of a ruined server farm. Most of them are herbivores, lucky us. Tomas took it upon himself to sort out which ones weren’t. He had a good run; we’re thankful for his contributions.

    Topsiders have a rule. Anything that breaches the surface that isn’t human, kill it. Down here, though, it’s live and let live. Sure, the critters aren’t always pleasant, but who can blame them? They’re just like us, clinging to some dispassionate monolith our whole lives because we’re all too scared to let go, even as it stomps and stomps and stomps on everything we’ve ever known. Until finally, through exhaustion or the sheer loss of will, we just can’t hold on anymore.

    So we let go.



    When the giants came through the valley, they caught everyone unaware. Where did they come from? The Moon? Mars? Bakersfield? Did they rise from an age-old slumber deep within the crust of the earth?

    • 32 min
    PodCastle 828: The Museum of Living Color

    PodCastle 828: The Museum of Living Color

    * Author : Ryan Cole

    * Narrator : Hugo Jackson

    * Host : Matt Dovey

    * Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

    *

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    Previously published in Museum Piece, from Metaphorosis Publishing





    Rated PG-13

    The Museum of Living Color

    by Ryan Cole

     

    Red lust, as usual, comes in the morning. Red in the way that you whisper my name, in the tender caress of your fingers on my neck, where my dry skin soaks up your technicolor world. Where you are my brush, and I am your canvas: pliant, eager, ready to be drawn.

    I smile as your scorched-earth skin comes to life. I swallow the vermilion heat on your tongue.

    And I take. I steal as much of you as I can.

    But it’s never enough. Not for me, or your family, or the portrait of us that they want you to create. The one that will hang in their gallery forever.

    And you and I both know that your red never lasts.



    Revised placard text for: The Portrait of Maurice and Henrietta Mildrin (1925; Great Falls, VA; property of the Mildrin Family Gallery).

    Maurice and Henrietta are pictured along with their six children on the azalea garden lawn of the Mildrin family estate. As is shown by the way that they gaze into each other’s eyes, red played a prominent role in the artists’ lives. Note the crimson undertones, the unabashed desire. Red lust is used to hide all of their flaws.

    Note also, however, the smear on Henrietta’s chin — the dark-golden anger, the same gold that glimmers in Maurice’s right pupil. The artists claimed that these were due to the aging of the portrait, and that they never would have used such an impure color — especially gold — to paint themselves. Mrs. Henrietta Mildrin, the original curator of this Gallery, took pride in showing which colors made an appropriate marriage. And until her recent death, that marriage — and its portrait — was what every Mildrin relative strove to achieve.



     Gold creeps in like the sun between the clouds. Your lust becomes a shadow of the fire that it was when you sculpted my skin with red-smeared hands. When you hadn’t yet dipped into your palette of emotions, the reminders of who you are and who you have to be — who we have to be — to have a place in your family.

    “I don’t think we should go,” you say through your tie. You wrangle the ends into a paisley knot around your throat. “You’re still not ready.”

    “I’m not ready?” I say, unsurprised, because I am no stranger to your swiftly changing colors — the inconvenient shades that you aren’t allowed to show. “It’s been seven years. I’ve learned what I need to know.”

    “Maybe it’s not enough.”

    I pull on my loafers, absorbing the words. Your gold never comes without a fine, serrated edge, forged in the heat of your growing frustration. At me. Your parents. Your bottled-up emotions. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” I say with years of practice.

    You sigh and rest the back of your hand on my cheek, staining me with all of your dark, dirty gold. One of the scant few colors you can share. “Alfie,” you whisper. “Don’t make me do this.”

    I try to pull away, but the color won’t let me. It continues to flow. “You can’t just cancel,” I say, my cheek burning. “We’ve had this scheduled for months.” As if there weren’t anything strange about scheduling an appointment to see your great-aunt, whom you’ve known since you were a child, who has probably already seen what you’re trying to hide. Don’t blame me for showing you who you really are.

    • 29 min
    PodCastle 827: Mom and Dad At the Home Front

    PodCastle 827: Mom and Dad At the Home Front

    * Author : Sherwood Smith

    * Narrator : Kaitlyn Zivanovich

    * Host : Matt Dovey

    * Audio Producer : Devin Martin

    *

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    Originally published by Realms of Fantasy





    Rated PG-13

    Mom and Dad At the Home Front

    by Sherwood Smith

     

    Before Rick spoke, I saw from his expression what was coming.

    I said the words first. “The kids are gone again.”

    Rick dropped onto the other side of the couch, propping his brow on his hand.  I couldn’t see his eyes, nor could he see me. It was just past midnight. All evening, after we’d made sure our three kids were safely tucked into bed, we’d stayed in separate parts of the house, busily working away at various projects, all excuses not to go to bed ourselves — even though it was a work night.

    Rick looked up, quick and hopeful. “Mary. Did one of the kids say something to you?”

    “No.” I had a feeling; that was all. They were so sneaky after dinner.

    “Didn’t you see Lauren —” I was about to say raiding the flashlight and the Swiss Army Knife from the earthquake kit but I changed, with almost no pause, to “— sneaking around like . . . like Inspector Gadget?”

    He tried to smile. We’d made a deal, last time, to take it easy, to try to keep our senses of humor, since we knew where the kids were.

    Sort of knew where the kids were.

    How many other parents were going through this nightmare? There had to be others. We couldn’t be the only ones. I’d tried hunting for some kind of support group on the Internet —Seeking other parents whose kids disappear to other worlds — and not surprisingly the email I got back ranged from offers from psychologists for a free mental exam to “opportunities” to MAKE $$$ IN FIVE DAYS.

    So I’d gone digging again, this time at the library, rereading all those childhood favorites: C. S. Lewis; Edward Eager; Eleanor Cameron; Edith Nesbit; and then more recent favorites, like Diana Wynne Jones. All the stories about kids who somehow slipped from this world into another, adventuring widely and wildly, before coming safely home via that magic ring, or gate, or toy rocket ship, or pair of shoes. Were there hints that adults missed? Clues that separated the real worlds from the made up ones?

    “Evidence,” I’d said, trying to be logical and practical and adult. “They’ve vanished like this three times that we know about. Doors and windows locked. Morning back in their beds. Sunburned. After the last time, just outside R.J.’s room you saw two feathers and a pebble like nothing on Earth. You came to get me, the kids woke up, the things were gone when we got there. When asked, the response was, and I quote, ‘What feathers?’”

    But Rick knew he had seen those feathers, and so we’d made our private deal: wait, and take it easy.

    Rick rubbed his hands up his face, then looked at me. And broke the deal. “What if this time they don’t come back?”

    We sat in silence. Then, because there was no answer, we forced ourselves to get up, to do chores, to follow a normal routine in hopes that if we were really, really good, and really, really normal, morning would come the same as ever, with the children in their beds.

    I finished the laundry. Rick vacuumed the living room and took the trash cans out. I made three lunches and put them in the fridge.

    I put fresh bath towels in the kids’ bathroom.

    At one o’clock we went to bed, and turned out the light, but neither of us slept; I lay for hours listening to the cl...

    • 30 min
    PodCastle 826: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – Study, For Solo Piano

    PodCastle 826: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – Study, For Solo Piano

    * Author : Genevieve Valentine

    * Narrator : Laurice White

    * Host : Matt Dovey

    * Audio Producers : Eric Valdes and Pria Wood

    *

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    Previously published by Fantasy Magazine

    Originally PodCastle 233





    Rated PG

    Study, For Solo Piano

    by Genevieve Valentine

    The Circus waits in leaking trailers while Boss takes her lieutenants through the house.

    Then, her lieutenants are Elena from the trapeze, and Panadrome the music man, who presses his accordion bellows tight to his side to keep it from sharp edges, and Alec, their final act, who folds his gleaming wings tight against his back so he can fit through the hole in the wall.

    Inside, the ceiling is waterlogged and sagging, but when Alec opens his wings even the nails sing for him.

    Alec laughs, and the birds in the rafters scatter as if he’s called them down.

    (Alec will be dead in a year; these are the last birds he sees.)

    • 34 min
    PodCastle 825: Flash Fiction Extravaganza!

    PodCastle 825: Flash Fiction Extravaganza!

    * Authors : Samantha Murray, Avra Margariti and Devin Miller

    * Narrators : Eliza Chan, Matt Dovey and Srikripa Krishna Prasad

    * Host : Matt Dovey

    * Audio Producer : Devin Martin

    *

    Discuss on Forums







    This Blue World Previously published by Fantasy Magazine (Issue 83)

    The Light At the Edge of the World Previously published by Flash Fiction Online

    Directions to the House of Unnumbered Stars Previously published by Flash Fiction Online, October 2022





    Rated PG

    This Blue World

    By Samantha Murray

     

    You leave while it is still dark. Your lover sleeps on his stomach, the sheet draped only to his waist.

    You don’t want to go. You want to slide back into bed and listen to him breathing. And for him to make you coffee later, dark and sweet.

    But you’ve never let anyone haunt you. And you’re not about to start now.

    Your car takes a few tries to get going, as if it is reluctant to move out of his driveway, as if it wants to stay, not to glide down his street in this blue world that exists just before dawn.

    There is light in the sky when you pull off the highway and wind through the suburban streets to your house. A woman is walking down the road, and she is surrounded by her ghosts. You try to count them unobtrusively . . . eleven? Crowding and cluttering behind her. She doesn’t look that much older than you, and how easy is her heart, did it just throw itself at anyone who came along? You wonder if any real people are waiting for her at home or if their ghosts were the only part she kept.



    You’ve always been able to see them. Most people can only see their own ghosts; only a rare few can see those that belong to other people.

    You’d confronted your mother once, when you were not much more than five. “But you should only love my dad,” you’d declared stridently, flushed and righteous. You knew which ghost was your dad, although he’d died when you were a baby. You’d curl up next to his ghost sometimes and tell him about your day. He never spoke back to you and his eyes were always on your mother.

    “I do, my dear,” your mother answered. And yet there was another ghost in your house, too. A younger man, with hair that fell forward over his forehead. “Once, it was something that was true,” your mother said when you’d huffed and puffed about it. The ghosts lingered, even once you’d stopped loving them. “I wanted to deny it later. Pretend he never meant anything to me, just a crush, an infatuation, a fling. But here he is, so . . .” she shrugged.

    “Do you haunt him too?” you’d asked. You hadn’t thought of this before; it was a new idea with tricky edges.

    Your mother looked very far away and oddly younger. “I should think it likely,” she said, with a very non-mother-like smile that you hadn’t seen before.



    You are in the middle of making yourself a cup of tea — peppermint, your tea of choice for afternoons, when you look up and see him. Sitting in your window seat, one hand folded under his chin.

    Too late. You are too late. Your hands grip the benchtop and you bite down hard on your lip. Too late.

    Surely your heart is sinking but if that is the case why is it hammering so hard in your chest?

    • 30 min

Customer Reviews

4.6 out of 5
494 Ratings

494 Ratings

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My heart belongs to PodCastle

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