old playing cards

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Cast of Wonders 651: The Liar

Image by Emilia from Pixabay

First published in The Book of Witches (edited by Jonathan Strahan, August 1 2023, Harper Voyager)

swearing, assault, murder

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:43 — 73.8MB)

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The Liar

by Darcie Little Badger

The Mysterious Woman

Jodie sat in a bench-filled lounge outside the Dominion Casino poker room. It was 6:18 p.m., and she’d been waiting for a table since 5:30. A 32-inch flat-screen TV on the wall displayed the standby list and indicated she was up next, along with four others identified as Pete M., Joe T., Olav A., and Bartholomew S.

Lowering her phone, she wondered if the sweaty, pink-faced man sitting next to her was Joe, Olav, or Bart. There were a dozen people in the room, but he was the most visibly nervous, his right leg bouncing.

“Howdy,” he said, noticing Jodie’s attention.

“Afternoon. What’s your name?”

“Pete.” He jabbed a thumb at the waitlist screen. “That Pete.”

“Call me Jodie.” (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 650: Witches Racing Cars

Cast of Wonders 650: Witches Racing Cars is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:25 — 39.0MB)

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Show Notes

Image adapted from a photo by JAMES OKAJA from Pixabay

Witches Racing Cars

by Nadav Schul-Kutas

A small crew is waiting at the starting line. They’re all buzzing around the car, poking and prodding and talking amongst themselves. It won’t start, which is unsurprising. The car never starts on its own, but the young men with big ideas want to know why and the thrill-seekers are worried their team will get disqualified if this goes on any longer. A woman named after a forgotten god points towards a ruined gas station. A figure draped in feathers and marked with machine grease appears from behind the ARCO’s crumbling walls.

Finally, the witch is here. (Continue Reading…)

silhouette of a woman with her arms raised against a backdrop of the golden gate bridge

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Cast of Wonders 649: Little Wonders 46 – Seize Your Future

Cast of Wonders 649: Little Wonders 46 – Seize Your Future is a Cast of Wonders original.

Abortion themes, loss of agency

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:17 — 25.1MB)

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Show Notes

What the Water Gave Her was first published in Pop Goes the Page, May 2023

What the Water Gave Her

by Race Harish

The witch was a small man, but otherwise rather ordinary. He had white hair, kind eyes, and a fondness for darjeeling tea. He called himself Mother.

The directions were unclear. But it was unwise to question a witch so she pays that as little mind as she can. The slip of paper bearing the directions crumples in the tight clutch of her fist, the writing surely too smudged and sweat soaked to be of any use to her now. She is glad that she had the sense to commit it all to memory before she began the journey. (Continue Reading…)

Nommo Award 2025 Short Story finalist: Bodies of Sand and Blood

We’re thrilled to share that Plangdi Neple’s story Bodies of Sand and Blood is a finalist for the 2025 Nommo Award for Best Short Story!  The Nommo Awards recognise works of speculative fiction by Africans, and are nominated and voted on by members of the African Speculative Fiction Society.

Bodies of Sand and Blood was first published in April 2024 as episode 580 with narration by Brent Lambert and featured as one of our 2024 Staff Pick episodes with new commentary as episode 621

You can read the other excellent Nommo Award finalists via the links on the award’s press release page.

 

Many congratulations Plangdi!

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 648: Precious Little Things

First published in Reactor (Tor.com), November 2019

Image by Kirill from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:31 — 66.6MB)

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Precious Little Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There is a book on the floor of Shelf Hall. Tam walks in its shadow, the spine raised above him like the ridge of a hill. His parents passed down to him the story of long ago when it held riches. The tribes had come to it from every dominion, braving the spiders of the Dusty Expanse, the rats of the Wall Paths and the fierce, infested tangles of the Bearskin Jungle, all to take their share of this fallen treasure.

Its title once read, in letters tall as Tam, On The Essence Vital And Its Uses. First they had stripped the gold from those indented characters and then begun the work of carving off the leather from the slanted slopes. The thread had been unlaced from its spine and the glue chipped off, to be taken and re-melted in a thousand pots.

These latter days, only the wood of its cover-boards remains. That and the mouldering paper within, which magicians still sometimes mine in search of legible lore beneath the rot.

Tam is not after wisdom, though. He is after gold.

High above that fallen tome is the Shelf. Craning the peg of his neck, Tam can barely see it, just a faint suggestion of form against the distant ceiling, like a cloud. He rolls his wooden shoulders and flexes the knuckles of his carven hands. He has a long climb ahead of him. (Continue Reading…)

a close up of a burning purple candle

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Cast of Wonders 647: What Good Daughters Do

First published in Apex Magazine issue 146, October 2024

Image by Pashi from Pixabay

Violence, Cannibalism. Death of a parent. Death of a bystander. Terminal Illness/Dementia Allegory

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:03 — 56.4MB)

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What Good Daughters Do

by Tia Tashiro

I’m not expecting it when my mother eats the bus driver.

My surprise comes mostly because I thought I’d gotten her under control. The bus ride—two AM on a Tuesday, servicing the night shift paycheck-to-paycheck workers at the meat factory a few miles out of town, predictably empty between the Turnpike Mall and Cedar Park stops (its last of the route)—is about as isolated as you can get. I wasn’t taking any chances with tottering old grannies in the accessible seats or teens who think they’re too cool to grab a handhold. (Continue Reading…)

a greyscale image of a ruined stone head

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 646: As Brittle as Granite

Cast of Wonders 646: As Brittle as Granite is a Cast of Wonders original.

Death of a parent

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 18:03 — 24.8MB)

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Show Notes

Image by darrenquigley32 from Pixabay

As Brittle as Granite

by Matt Tighe

Lisa’s father has a crack in his face. It isn’t even a small one, something that she could maybe dismiss as a shadow cutting through the warm afternoon light of the sunroom. It runs from his forehead straight down through his left eye, splits his cheek in half, and just touches the very corner of his top lip. The inside of the crack is grey stone with pale flecks of mineralisation.

“You have cracked, father,” she says. The words come out as they should, steady and measured.

When his eyes move to her, the part of the crack that runs through his eye also moves, sliding sideways with his gaze. He is calm.

“Tell your mother,” he says. (Continue Reading…)

illustration of a motel and parking lot

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 645: Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art

Cast of Wonders 645: Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:07 — 45.5MB)

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Show Notes

Image by Camila Denleschi from Pixabay

Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art

by Olivia B. Chan

In Chloe Chew’s suffocating hometown, there’s only one place fit for necromancy: the parking lot outside Em’s motel, where summer heat wavers above cracked pavement, blurring the darkness on the horizon. Forest fires have driven away all the tourists, so Chloe’s safe to prepare her resurrection materials between the yellow lines.

She presses her hands to the torn-up canvas as it flaps in the wind off the highway, Asperthbell’s skyline rippling in its peeling acrylic. Her victim is a painting she found in the back of Miss Plent’s classroom, wedged between old answer keys, entirely forgotten. Perfect for a resurrection. She recognizes Asperthbell’s gas station in its streaks of red, but besides that the painting’s portrayal of her hometown is unrecognizable—no ash. No smoke.

The painting’s ghost trembles in her hands. (Continue Reading…)

a painted starscape

Cast of Wonders 644: Nonstandard Candles

First published in The Sunday Morning Transport, March 6th 2022

Image by ANDRI TEGAR MAHARDIKA from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:55 — 31.5MB)

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Nonstandard Candles

by Yoon Ha Lee

I didn’t want to travel into the outer darkness, where all the stars were burned-out husks, but the mapmaker insisted. Our ship was vast, too vast for a single mapmaker and her apprentice, and its emptiness weighed on me. During the journey, whose length I cannot describe to you, the mapmaker kept me busy, and for the most part I didn’t think about the corridors and cargo holds with their surfeit of light, their attenuated shadows.

The mapmaker was the last of her kind, trained by a guild so old that its name could only be spoken in boustrophedon utterances. She had told me once, when she accepted me as her student, that a human could not pronounce her name, and not to try. I never saw her wear any colors but white embroidered in feathery patterns of red, the specific lambent red of a candle flame’s outer edge.

For her part, she had no such difficulty with my name, back when I still remembered it. The mapmaker told me it had three syllables, after the custom of my people, but she would not tell me what it was. She spoke all the languages of the outer darkness, and many more besides. When she was in a good mood, she would translate stories and stelae for me.

Most of our time, however, was taken up with the work of mapping. (Continue Reading…)

a sword hilt with dragon embellishments reflected on a mirrored surface

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 643: So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis?

First published in Lightspeed in April 2023

Image by Bruno from Pixabay

 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 11:09 — 15.3MB)

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So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis?

by John Wiswell

The next girl through the door was Robin’s prototypical customer.

She trotted in with her chin up, her posture so rigid she definitely had back problems. Her dress jacket was the color of newly hatched cardinals, and it was doubtless self-tailored, the material wearing out at the seams. Likely she was one of those academy girls who was paying their own way—so she was definitely shopping for a blade. (Continue Reading…)

Australian Billabong

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 642: Feeding Spirits

Cast of Wonders 642: Feeding Spirits is a Cast of Wonders original.

Friendly haunting, bereavement

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:39 — 35.2MB)

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Show Notes

Image by Daniel Burkett from Pixabay

Feeding Spirits

by Emmi Khor

What does one feed a hungry ancestor? Fish and chips, chicken parmi, or steak pie didn’t seem like something my recently deceased Popo would enjoy.

I’d just returned from my backyard swamp with a full trash bag, when the phone rang. The call bounced with around-the-world echoes and I’d barely said hello, when Ma started in on her visit to the medium.

“I asked your Popo if she was comfortable. Ai yah, Li-Li,” cried Ma, “she scolded me! She said: Twenty years my granddaughter doesn’t come home. I go all the way to Australia to visit and she doesn’t even offer me a meal.” The click of Ma’s tongue was like a slap. “You should respect your ancestors!” (Continue Reading…)

West Pentire headland, in sepia tones, with thrift in the foreground and waves crashing against the rocks

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 641: Bells Long Silent

Cast of Wonders 641: Bells Long Silent is a Cast of Wonders original.

violence (including gun-violence) in a historical setting, and the death of a relative

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:58 — 48.0MB)

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Bells Long Silent

by J. A. Prentice

All this happened long ago and even then, things were coming to an end. The great days of smuggling were behind us and the Revenue was tightening its noose. All tongues spoke of their new man, Captain Bray, who had hacked off a smuggler’s head with a single swing of his sword.

I lived with my mother and uncle in a white house with small glass windows that bent the light. I had of my father no memories and no inheritance save my features, which my mother said were the very model of his. Mother told me he was a fisherman, but often I suspected she lied, and he had been a smuggler. (Continue Reading…)