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"Do you remember that meme from way back when? Meme? Yeah, from the Age of Memes. Come on, you know the one. 2026 . . . Ah, I see where you’re going with this. In January they thought the Australian wildfires would be the biggest disaster of the year?...
When the surgeon showed me my pearl, the pearl that was to be mine, I thought it was a joke. The dragon pearl was a pinkish, milky drop the size of my pinkie nail, made of some jelly-like substance somewhere between liquid and solid. It was contained in a...
By the early days of the twenty-first century, advocates of book bans had managed, however accidentally, to elevate their hobby to the level of near-religion, and with it created a class of concepts that could only be called into existence if a person read...
You find yourself standing in a train station. People hurry past you, grunting and shuffling: a gaggle of girls wrapped in black cloaks; a family of five laden with alphorn cases taller than they are; a thickly mustached man tugging a roller bag with a...
Content note: mentions of suicide June finds the dragonfly the summer after Miko dies. Has died, June’s mother might say, shadow tremoring in the doorway to June’s room. Has been dead for months, Junebug. But not you. God, not you. But time for June has...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
The Sigil of Assurance You take a bit of wax and drip it over the em dash fresh out of the printer, working it over, building it up until it’s a little caterpillar crawling on the page, nestled between two words, perhaps burrowing into one—I’m so...
Nobody dances the way he does, and he knows it, and everyone can tell. The beat is something ancient and otherworldly, or that’s what it feels like; it wakes something inside him, half-remembered, half-submerged like the marble arm of a maiden or a piece...
sexual-contentviolence
Ending 1 The world decays. It is your fault. Ending 2 The world decays. It is only somewhat your fault. Ending 3 Do I need to say it? Are you beginning to understand? Ending 4 Clearly not. Ending 5 You cannot save him. Every time you try it only...
deathself-harmviolence
Content note: suicidal ideation “Please—turn it off!” A pained, painful wail from the room across the hall; soundtrack laughter dissolving into guttural thunder as a film projector slowed to a stop. “Well damn,” said the stranger who was entering the...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Feast #1 We stare at Judar of the Island, stunned, as he picks up a piece of roasted chicken and bites into the place where thigh meets leg, the marinade smearing the corners of his mouth. His teeth sink into the flesh again, then again, then again, until...
body-horrordeathviolence
For Seanan McGuire. And Coyote. Let me tell you about the year Coyote took the Devils to the State Championship. Coyote walked tall down the halls of West Centerville High and where he walked lunch money, copies of last semester’s math tests, and unlit...
sexual-content
Because it’s Carnaval, Iara wears a striped pirate shirt and a red pirate headband. And because of who she is, she sits on the bathroom floor, closes her eyes, and wears the perspectives of seven alley cats, three stray dogs, and a single pigeon for the...
sexual-content
Content note: suicidal ideation I am a star, falling. “Awake now?” My eyes open to words as an unknown face greets me, small with a curious gaze. She parts full lips to bare teeth and I tense. A threat? No. A smile. I stare back. “I didn’t think you’d...
slaverysuicidewar
Kate was cursed by her cousin on his deathbed to never stay. She and her cousin Bo didn’t hate each other—far from it. They’d grown up together: same small farming town in the inland northwest, population 394. So small that when Bo finished high school, he...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
1. A photograph in black and white, taken with a Zenit vintage Soviet camera. Taken outside what would much later become Tong Yun City, in the days when it was still just a cobbled-together mass of crash-landed jalopies, connected with primitive tubing...
death-of-a-loved-one
After the braiding, a low buzzing remains in Memoire’s ear. It reminds her of the low buzzing she heard while they shampooed her hair. They told her she could never submerge her head in water after the braiding. No more swimming. No more drifting on her...
body-horror
Before the world ends, Miri’s family saves up enough money to escape to 2004. 2004: a safe haven. The year lilts off the tongue, like a promise. Miri and Lise spend their last evening together in their favorite spot, sitting on the top of the holotower at...
Well, Officer, the trouble really start when Mr. Vincent dead. I shouldn’t have been surprise eh. My neighbour wasn’t studying he health at all. He was young still, in he sixties, so he spend a lot of time by the bar down by the football field drinking and...
“Always just. Always magical.” When the four of us first started working as Magical Girls, we penned the slogan in a McDonalds, giggling about how corny it sounded. Annie joked about how we’d still be calling ourselves magical girls when we were eighty,...
deathgoreviolence
LA NDRY or L UNDRY. Those were the two choices. You never knew which one you were gonna get. The letters took turns to be fickle, blinking and spluttering in a game of chance. Mr. Lee, the laundry-mat owner, was stingy with the upkeep. He let his...
The wall of the city is made of glass, smooth and clear, slippery and strong. The stranger and his dog wear a path outside it every day, watching, listening, waiting to be ready. The wall is about three times the stranger’s height, perhaps a bit taller. As...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Out in the great expanse of cosmos, little seeds float. They have been drifting for billions of years in the cold darkness of space from one planet to the other, driven by the need for survival and propagation, but most of all driven by spite (they will...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Unknown Compartment There is no door where there should be a door—no hall where there should be a hall. The house has reconfigured itself, again, and I find myself before […]
body-horrordeathviolence
"They are travelling in the great dark before them nothing behind them stars just the two of them the man that captains and the ship that sails darts flies through space —whoever said space is empty did not know what they were talking about space is full...
body-horrorsexual-content
"Sing. Sing the world into being. The world’s misty valleys and sunlit hills are described by the song of all things. So is the work of skilled hands and the begrudging march of soldiers’ boots. Every action, every object, in the past and the present and...
violence
"Peter and Isaac were the last remaining of their small, close-knit group. Isaac had been sick for several months, and Peter missed their weekly lunch get-togethers at the Café Sosie. His wife used to warn him he needed new friends. “Those old men are...
This episode features "How Does One Person Kill a Mountain?" written by Shi Heiyao and translated by Andy Dudak. Published in the October 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
This episode features "The Mari Lwyd" written by Fiona Moore. Published in the October 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore_10_26 Support us on...
Cannon-D’s body was spun from a 3D printer. It compiled fiber by artificial fiber, a loving replica of the protein strands and carbons that would have made up the real, […]
suicide
This episode features "A Vintage Kind of Death" written by Alex T. Singer. Published in the October 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singer_10_26...
suicide
Wine breathes, down here in the dark. It breathes, it ages. It is a living thing, the same as us. Inside each bottle is an ecosystem: a dark sea that […]
cannibalism
1 Bakili awakes before the sky outside the window has shown the early fish-belly white of dawn. He stealthily gets out of bed, alighting on tiptoe, kisses his sleeping wife’s […]
violence
Do you remember how it started? A bright light in the sky, a brave new moon growing bigger and bigger. We called it Little Prince because we were romantic and […]
sexual-contentsuicideviolence
All the world was blue. Above, below, surrounding, within. The blue of the sky when Bethony broke the surface of an endless ocean to breathe in sweet, oxygen-rich, unpolluted air. […]
cannibalismdeath
Morag took a firm grip on the end of her walking stick, looked down at her robot Seamus. “Here goes,” she said to the robot. “You go in first, with […]
“It’s not the same room,” Chiyo says staunchly. She’s sitting in her wheelchair, a faded quilt tucked around her legs. A Western plays on the TV, cowboys with scruffy chins […]
This episode features "Skin and Glass" written by R. P. Sand. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sand_09_26 Support us on...
death-of-a-loved-onepregnancy-loss
This episode features "Country Music" written by Madeleine Vigneron. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vigneron_09_26...
death-of-a-loved-one
This episode features "Fistful of Antimatter" written by Rich Larson. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/larson_09_26...
goreviolencewar
This episode features "And So I Open My Fists" written by Rachel Sobel. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/sobel_09_26...
sexual-content
This episode features "To Walk This Distant Shore with You" written by A.D. Sui. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
This episode features "When Humans Are No Longer Born Human" written by Zhu Yixuan. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
It was all the gossip in the marshlands when the youngest wife of the Hisanha chain brought home a young man from upriver. The young man, whose name was Aigistha, […]
sexual-content
If you drive far enough into the farmland around Kindersley, Saskatchewan, there’s only one channel on the radio. It’s a country music channel, of course. When I started to work […]
death-of-a-loved-one
Qopa was once a world of marshes. Visitors hear this often, in tones that range from apologetic to bitter, wistful to matter-of-fact—especially when they are shown the vast clay pan […]
goreviolencewar
I made eye contact today. I knew my life leaked, droplets of soul seeping from my pores, and I did not care. For those eyes were a pale sage glass, […]
death-of-a-loved-onepregnancy-loss
This episode features "The Universal Human Happiness Program" written by Y.M. Pang. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
mental-illnesssuicide
We’re ten and watching what must be the last physical television in what must be the last laundromat in the world. Your mom is on her third load, jeans this […]
Three aliens float across from Tabitha, their bodies undulating softly, wetly, like enormous raindrops filled with chrysanthemums. Petallike structures push against their transparent membranes, forming rounded shapes within, which curl […]
body-horror
This episode features "Water-Eaters" written by Beth Goder. Published in the September 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/goder_09_26 Support us on...
body-horror
01 The first time I saw her, she was trying to prove to a water dispenser that she was human. The dispenser wouldn’t give her any water because she still […]
This episode features "When You Give a Dokkaebi Taco Tuesday" written by H.H. Pak. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
abuseviolencewar
This episode features "Feed Them on Your Dreams" written by E.N. Auslender. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/auslender_08_26...
abuseslavery
This episode features "Piece de Resistance" written by D.A. Xiaolin Spires. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/spires_08_26...
death-of-a-loved-one
This episode features "Passenger Pigeons, Dodos, Neanderthals" written by Jordan Alexander. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
racismviolence
This episode features "All the Ruined Doorways of the Moon" written by Eilis O'Neal. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
abuseviolence
It was, Anna had to agree, a most excellent house. As the estate agent led them from room to room, Nigel admired the tall-shelved library, the long, ever-flowing swimming pool […]
abuse
Your first swim starts like this: your mother, checking the seal of your rebreather and the cables attached to the port at the base of your skull before lowering you […]
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
This episode features "As the Tide Loves the Diver, As the Diver Loves the Tide" written by Ravn J. Silver. Published in the August 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Vacule Grievouss, as anyone would suspect, wasn’t bequeathed much in the way of opportunities by his parents. He was the child of two stack zappers operating out of the newly […]
child-abuseslavery
I was a month into the Endangered Species Initiative when my case manager decided I was acclimated enough to Martian society to start working. When she told me what the […]
racismviolence
“All clear, go!” yelled Klara from beyond the plastic confines of the ball, and I came tumbling. Water sloshed against my feet, and adrenaline rushed from my stomach up my […]
death-of-a-loved-one
Dreamer AQ#1367-458-MATT stood on the scaffolding of an incomplete skyscraper, hair blown wild by the spring breeze. Skinny legs trembled inside skinny jeans, but he took one step, then another, […]
suicide
Of course I could kill him. If I wanted to, I would not hesitate to unhinge my jaw around his neck, skewering his trachea with my tusks and locking my […]
This episode features "Nesting Behavior of Imported Species Troglodytes aedon on Planet Americearth" written by R.L. Meza. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
body-horrorgoreviolence
This episode features "This Is an Emergency Broadcast" written by R.S.A. Garcia. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/garcia_07_26...
deathviolencewar
This episode features "Our Revels Now Are Ended" written by Thomas Ha. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha_07_26 Support us on...
body-horrorviolence
This episode features "The Animator and the Glazer" written by Ju Chu and translated by S. Qiouyi Lu. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
body-horrordeathself-harm
This episode features "Focus" written by Carlos Hernandez. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hernandez_07_26 Support us on...
deathviolence
This episode features "Cliff's Girl" written by Fiona Moore. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/moore_07_26 Support us on...
death
When Cliff came back home for Casey’s wake, he brought his robot Will, and he also brought a girl. A woman, Morag corrected herself. Just as she shouldn’t think of […]
death
—for Rory Cooney It’s July 23, 4:17 p.m., and I’m box-breathing like my life depends on it. My forehead is pressed against the door of the meeting room of the […]
body-horrordeathviolence
The other animals in my territory keep disappearing; it’s perfect. The yard is safer without the cats, so I’m free to search the bushes for unwanted guests while I consider […]
body-horrorgoreviolence
I first reached consciousness in a peaceful library. It looked like a library not far from my apartment, though not exactly the same. There were high ceilings and large windows […]
body-horrordeathviolence
1. Lu Yuan’s company was going to go under if he didn’t find an animator with great potential. Torrential rain thundered against the sheet metal roof. Before him sat ten […]
body-horrorself-harm
It was night on Endymion, and the pollen hovered, blue and luminescent, in the trees. Isaac’s camp lantern also burned blue. It was designed to interfere with the sensory systems […]
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
This episode features "The Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo" written by K. J. Khan. Published in the July 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
death-of-a-loved-one
. . . We interrupt our programming- “ . . . for this incredible announcement. The first one thousand customers get an extra 15 percent off during this holiday weekend and . . . ” “ . . . it’s buy one, […]
substance-useviolencewar
This episode features "Ice, Rock, Empathy" written by Damián Neri. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/neri_06_26 Support us on...
body-horrordeath
This episode features "Burning Day" written by Samantha Murray. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/murray_06_26 Support us on...
This episode features "A Life Measured in Seconds" written by Anne Wilkins. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wilkins_06_26...
abusebody-horror
This episode features "Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic" written by Pan Haitian. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
deathviolence
This episode features "The Floating Republic" written by Rebecca Campbell. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/campbell_06_26...
deathviolencewar
This episode features "The Potential Side Effects of Roleplay Stimulation Therapy" written by Claire Jia-Wen. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
abuseself-harmsubstance-use
Ashwan To be born in the year 2615 on the 21st of March was fortuitous, but to be born at 14:59:30 hours on that same day made you a God. […]
abusebody-horrorviolence
Part 1: 2075 <It might be good for you to take a new route,> said Aly. Xavi jogged out of his tenement building. He joined the stream of lunchtime runners […]
substance-usewar
This episode features "Aly" written by Grace Chan. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/chan_05_26 Support us on Patreon at...
mental-illnesswar
Teresa finds the first site right after she gets back from maternity leave, Daniel snug in a baby sling at her chest. He’s quiet as far as babies go, sleeping […]
death
This episode features "Archaeological Evidence for the Time Traveler" written by Tia Tashiro. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
death
“Rivers do not drink their own water; trees do not eat their own fruit; the sun does not shine on itself, and flowers do not spread their fragrance for themselves. […]
This episode features "Bend Like the Palm" written by David D. Levine. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/levine_03_26 Support...
You’d expected the gravity on Vixiv-11 to be fractionally more than that on Earth. It is not something you ever notice much, even in the beginning, beyond an exhaustion that […]
1 Mayzelle hurried from her hab-hut, tacked shut the canvas door, and hustled down the bamboo steps. She’d sworn she wouldn’t stand for this anymore. She’d sworn. In the clearing, […]
This episode features "Conquerors" written by Nick Wolven. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/wolven_05_26 Support us on Patreon...
Tell me a story where it all goes right. Say that we only ever stopped at the station with the largest wingspan and busiest fuel pipes, the fifty-something spears jutting […]
deathviolence
This episode features "Crosstalk, Elysium" written by Carolyn Zhao. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/zhao_03_26 Support us on...
deathviolencewar
When D0G hears the scream and streaks ahead down the leaf-strewn road through the fall-bright birch and beech and maple, I remember what my sister Taylor used to say: there […]
deathviolencewar
This episode features "D0G" written by Tania Fordwalker. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fordwalker_04_26 Support us on...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolencewar
Layla was bleeding out. Her neurons began to supernova and transmute into a new electrical form. A maglev of old memories zipped past her. She was thinking about that one […]
body-horrorgoreviolence
This episode features "Decimation Circles" written by Raahem Alvi. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/alvi_05_26 Support us on...
body-horrorgoreviolence
It’s the second Thursday of the month, so I spend the evening regenerating my skin. The procedure is painless but dull. I often fall asleep. It’s fine to do so; […]
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
This episode features "Eternity in Their Hearts" written by Katherine Khan. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/khan_04_26...
death-of-a-loved-one
The afterlife on Mars is different from the afterlife on Earth. I was the first ghost to experience both worlds: a pioneer like Neil Armstrong stepping on the Moon, minus […]
body-horrordeathviolence
This episode features "First Human Ghost on Mars" written by R.L. Meza. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/meza_03_26 Support...
body-horrordeathviolence
Notes on specimen “Efren Vargas” 1022/204.27.3: >> Supposed to be married to “Joan Dimagiba,” his fiancée. >> Was in bed with some other woman* a week (in human time) before […]
This episode features "Human Studies 401" written by Abby Nicole Yee. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yee_04_26 Support us...
Iridescent algae glowed upon the ice and rock of the world, signaling the start of a new day. The patterns of their light, which we had trained over many estrous […]
body-horrordeathviolence
Verity crawled through the endless dark of the tunnel, the false safety of her Colony home now half a mile behind her. All she could see in the dim light […]
deathillness-and-pandemic
This episode features "Macaroni Art in the Age of Filtration" written by Ryan Cole. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
deathillness-and-pandemic
Normally, Tillie didn’t mind being the object of everyone’s gaze. But today, the crowd loitering in the street wasn’t drawn to her orange-red curls or her height or regalness. They […]
deathsexual-contentviolence
This episode features "Paper Airplane Poet" written by Sheri Singerling. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/singerling_05_26...
deathgoresexual-content
I speak human very well, better than any of my colony. You can tell that I speak human very well because I didn’t make the obvious mistakes like “I speaking […]
violence
This episode features "Person, Place, Thing" written by Marissa Lingen. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/lingen_03_26 Support...
This episode features "Scion" written by Thomas Ha. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha_03_26 Support us on Patreon at...
body-horrorgoreviolence
I have done my best to transcribe the account found in the recently excavated cenotaph, but, as you’re aware, these experiential simulations don’t easily lend themselves to direct reproduction. Nonetheless, […]
death
This episode features "Scion: Afterword" written by Thomas Ha. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/ha2_03_26 Support us on...
EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT Name of Employer: Chaska Punku Space Port Administrative Authority (CPSPAA), based in Chaska Punku, Chile, acting in lieu of the European Space Agency (ESA), based in Paris, France […]
body-horror
This episode features "Shelter" written by Nadia W. Aldsen. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/aldsen_04_26 Support us on...
body-horror
CHAPTER ONE Captain Ignatius Faber’s eyes were full of halos, and each scratch in the Philoctetes’ viewscreens caught the light, bleeding across his retina like stars. His vision had weakened […]
deathviolencewar
There is no formula for forgetting. No precise way to erase the pain. Complete healing is impossible. Because there is always a little needle sticking inside. A pain so slight […]
death-of-a-loved-one
This episode features "The Forgetting Code" written by Malena Salazar Maciá. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/macia_04_26...
death-of-a-loved-one
Open your eyes. Look down at your hands. What do you see? Your life is never the same after you get into the car with that bitch Sophia, who was […]
abuseself-harmsubstance-use
DAY 1 Hello, little switch. Welcome to the world! I’m your Buddy, and I’m very pleased to meet you. You shouldn’t be afraid. Try to orient yourself, if you can. […]
violencewar
This episode features "The Profitable Sentience of Household Goods" written by Louis Inglis Hall. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
violencewar
This episode features "The Scent of Memory" written by Zhao Haihong and translated by S. Qiouyi Lu. Published in the May 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
The bus jerked, waking Shijun. The Greyhound was speeding down a wide North American road. What am I doing here? The coach window framed the landscape: White clouds floated against […]
1. Sky of Change Three hours ago, Dharsh had woken in his seaside colony with little more than a vague sense of himself. Now, he teetered on an obsidian ledge […]
This episode features "The Trajectory of Memory is Forward" written by Rajeev Prasad. Published in the April 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
body-horrorviolence
This episode features "Those Who Left History" written by Wanxiang Fengnian and translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
self-harmviolencewar
From his exclusive residence, Zhou Xiaoliang’s diary: I know you will never read this, but I have to pretend I am writing for you. Or else what’s left to do? […]
deathsuicidewar
The Tree Man’s Rebirth At the threshold to the Kuiper Belt in the outer solar system, Deep Space Gate was the largest station humanity ever built. The station psychologist Chu […]
abuseanimal-harmviolence
“We have a problem,” Major Needham said, marching into the office, but since she said that almost every day, Lucas didn’t really pay attention. He was a civilian contractor, so […]
war
This episode features "Up the Line to Death" written by Carrie Vaughn. Published in the June 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/vaughn_06_26 Support...
war
I warn my child about speaking to the humans: it kills them. Why? Awakened From Glacially Eroded Foliated Schist With Garnets And A Uranium Heart asks. Their bodies are like […]
This episode features "You Are Invited to Our SPRING CELEBRATION" written by Thoraiya Dyer. Published in the March 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker. The text version of this story can be found at:...
"Once upon a time,” outputted the algorithm, “there was an AI. “It generated recipes and ingredient descriptions for an online grocery store. The website said that this recipe was not just a squash soup recipe, but it also was a good diet recipe / keto...
"On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the...
death
Espie Droger dreams of war. What else can he dream of? There is nothing left. He has dreamed of world travel and expensive Scotch and lithe young women and sudden uncontrollable laughter. But his vitality has seeped from him like fluid from a dying tree....
deathillness-and-pandemicwar
"High above the Amazon Rainforest, Hynd circled, her massive wingspan only visible by the shadow she cast on the battlefield below. She felt the wind pass across her wings, whispering of torrential rain coming; not her concern, so far above the clouds, but...
body-horrorviolencewar
You have always guarded the tower, even before the king left the first orphan-daughter under the apple tree. Curled around its pearlescent moon dome, your black scales invisible against the night sky, your red eyes watch the courtyard where a little girl...
Night falls around you. The city redshifts into coral-snake shades as monuments and modernist architecture of government buildings fracture the horizon. Low-orbit satellites command it so, and Washington, DC Nocturnal awakens. Across the capital, lights...
You are: A disillusioned mathematical physicist with a wet open mind. Desperate for knowledge. A neo-masochist. A willing sacrifice.
Everyone thinks the uncanny folk steal children, but they steal adults too, steal their minds and memories, put their own folk where ours used to be. The new folk don’t know their loved ones, don’t know what a toilet is, don’t know how to deposit a check....
Later, when the cameras were off and he was alone with his wife, hands still shaking from the cocktail of adrenaline, fear, shame, guilt, and vodka he’d been partaking of all day, he started to tell her the truth. Even then, he only spoke it in the dark,...
The golem who cares for my mother is patient, as I am not patient. The golem who cares for my mother is kind. It is precise. I took everything I wanted to be as a daughter, and am not, and I put it into the golem. I’m still afraid I am failing her.
illness-and-pandemic
Congratulations on your Magic Sword"! For all inquiries as to its powers and perils, please consult the Virtue Exercises Manual". However, we know new users sometimes get in over their heads. That’s why messages like this may appear on your blade. If you...
Something has happened. It is amazing. It is unheard-of and inconceivable. It is many, many, many things, gathering a plethora of adjectives that indicate its ability to cause astonishment and confusion among those who behold it. It is a mountain-sized...
Jempo took a deep bow on the iron platform. His body flopped forward, limbs like thick braided wire. No obvious weapons in his large and rubbery hands. Little digital eyes and a bright smile that lit the rounded ball he had for a head. More clown than...
I’m only doing maskwork until I find better, but there aren’t many physical jobs to go around in Schrödinger City. Most get done by gleaming machines, by hop-along bots and drone swarms. Luckily, maskwork needs a human touch—and supposedly, village folk...
suicide
Asha is eight pages into the book before the words disappear. There are still hundreds of pages before the end of the book, so they must have had a record of the length of the volume, but lost the text. It’s a common experience in this library, to...
illness-and-pandemic
Ánar’s bootheels echoed on the iron floor. What a groundbreaking honor this ceremony was for a landless tenant like him—joining old house Veivilkas, of the wolf. Such an honor that it made him leaden to think of, made him long for sleep. At the conclusion...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Sui grunted as she straightened her back, digging her shoulder up into Taxue’s belly. The Zheng’s hind legs dragged awkwardly on the sand, trembling as the paws knuckled, the sudden weight on Sui pushing the knee she’d braced into the dirt. Sui braced her...
deathgoreviolence
They didn’t want either of us to live this long. Sucks for them—we’re good at living in spite. We’re good at surviving, at fighting, at never stopping. Today is the last day we exist in spite of Command, but it’s also just another day that ends in y . Most...
body-horrorgoreviolence
If every effort to bring down your child’s fever is unsuccessful and the doctors cannot diagnose anything wrong with her, then you should seek other means to alleviate her health. Before you help her into the house, if you notice that her shadow refuses to...
death-of-a-loved-one
In The Before Days, Tim was a fellow procurer of dreams. He made a good living frequenting rooftop parties amid aging tech bros in fur-clad vests where mangosteen juices were mixed and silent discos reverberated within guests’ inner ears. As the dustbowl...
body-horrorgoreviolence
I wasn’t even two blocks into the Tumbledown when the walker’s nav crystal started fuzzing out. She veered left like a scavver drunk on coolant, and I knew I was in trouble. I tried sweet-talking her back on route, but she wasn’t listening. I was used to...
deathviolence
You’re eighteen. Your fairy godmother just fired you, because after three balls, the prince has grown bored with you. Tonight you stepped on his foot during a gavotte. “If you’d been cleverer,” the fairy godmother says—her words silver chimes girded with...
“God” is not the word I’d use. But it is the only one that suffices. There are all kinds of gods: the old and the new; the useful, the useless; the capricious and the dependable; the wrathful and the meek. They all had one thing in common—whether they were...
sexual-content
“What do you mean the nanobots formed a union??” I asked the lawyer, biting my thumbnail. It’s an old habit, kept up well after I got the “Pro Nano Blitz Package,” as the ad called it. A muscular man in tight clothing explained: a quick, painless...
Lise’s personas have no warning when the XexlCo Construct appears at the gate of her memory garden, smiling cheerfully at each of her personas in turn like a neighborhood milkman making his daily rounds. They watch the newcomer saunter by with open...
violence
This is our struggle. We scuttle on the sand before the softly breathing salt-burdened sea with the lichen on the rocks a bright poison green and great white butterflies screaming under a red sky while we dream of justice and watch the ghost of a...
Rachel sat at the edge of the sparkling pond in the secluded glen that had taken her five years to find. The air smelled of roses and lavender and pine. Tiny white sparks, like fireflies, floated upward, almost as if they were watching her.
He called her Legs. “Legs for days,” he’d say, his voice thick with wonder. When he spoke to her, she was filled with a warm, heady feeling that made her purr and rub against him. She had to be careful when she did, because she was still growing into her...
abuseanimal-harmviolence
The magician raises his wand. Initially, this commission seemed simple. One large country invading a much smaller one, a clear case of aggressor and victim—but nothing is ever so straightforward.
Green Plumed Orbital Line A; viridis metamorphos A Common sighting; Flies along the forty-fifth latitude every 12 minutes Traveler’s addendum: Last functional line along a northern latitude; southern latitudes TBD My crawler runs out of energy as I reach...
abuse
He hates the birds. There are two, a breeding pair. Their eyes are red as devils’. On land they’re stupid, little feet pushed so far back on their bodies that they can’t escape by running. Yet they glide over the water, glossy mottled boats. Their chicks...
animal-harmviolencewar
The airship’s spotlights played off the vast rocky sides of the shaft that plunged deep into the Earth’s core through the lithosphere and eventually to our destination: the Center of the Earth! I yawned. We fell so slowly, the sides of the shaft several...
deathgoreviolence
There’s a wolf where my brother used to be, a beast absolutely hellbent on ruining my life. He plunges his broad snoot into the Wednesday night spaghetti, and neither Mom nor Dad cares when half the bite slides off his nose and onto the table, to later be...
Maria Haddid looked like she was screaming. I’ve heard singers say that’s all singing is deep down, but if you’ve seen enough screams you won’t often get them mixed up. The faithful gathered around her in the picture—the soccer mom, the children, the...
substance-useviolence
Abuelita has been feeding me her memories. Yesterday, it was the time she trudged up the mountain carrying a basketful of offerings for Pachamama (flowers, incense, a llama sculpted out of animal fat and adorned with gold leaf) in hopes the Earth Mother...
deathillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
You know you are fucked when you see fragments of the broken radio on the floor. Your damaged ship lay nose caked into the sand, and coupled with your sprained ankle that hums an excruciating pain, and slight concussion on your head—your chances of...
There once lived a boy who paid for a fortune. Nassim wore carob hair and eyes severe like cardamom. He spent his days scouring the souk for unique trinkets he liked to collect or counting the uneven stones of Jerusalem’s cobbled streets as he passed...
sexual-violenceviolencewar
The creatures who shared your art with us had to explain many things to make it minimally comprehensible. This by itself made sense. You are who and what you are, and we are who and what we are, and the physical differences between us are profound. We...
suicide
Look, it’s bad enough that my wife gets cat-called in the street and flashed on the train. There’s a lot of sickos out there who get their jollies by harassing women, and usually I try to shut them down without escalating it to a fight. But we moved a few...
sexual-violence
We’ll skip ahead. Say eight minutes in, so I’m not wasting your time. You’re in your chair, strapped tight, taking around eight Gs. Like this, they wouldn’t even feel that bad, all the force coming from front to back, pressing you down into your seat. Your...
When you look out from the garage doors of the corrugated steel warehouse where the Fort Springwell Community College soccer team made their heroic stand against the forces of darkness, the view at first seems . . . idyllic. A rocky shoreline, uncommon for...
body-horrorgoreviolence
“They farm starlight.” “Bullshit.” “Okay, they’re going to farm starlight. For now they’re running fusion rigs. But that’s not their long-term plan.” “No one in the sunforsaken Oort has a long-term plan. Other than slow suicide. You know what they told me,...
This was in August of 2019. A day-old newspaper reported civil wars in Somalia and Yemen. A gunman killed twenty-two people in an El Paso Walmart. Jeffrey Epstein had taken a plea deal, promising to name names, promising to name the name .
substance-usesuicideviolence
When we moved Dad to the care facility, his only complaint was the Wi-Fi. “Laggy,” he called it when he was having a good day. “Fucking piece of shit,” he called it the rest of the time. At first I was relieved. I’d been worried that he’d bristle at the...
death-of-a-loved-one
Personality Disorder (Not Otherwise Specified) My patients called me Dr. Holloway. My friends called me Jason. I won’t tell you what my three ex-wives called me but I’m sure you can guess. I was a psychiatrist (and a damn good one seventy percent of the...
mental-illnesssubstance-usesuicide
LOGIN CREATE ACCOUNT username: squirglover46 password: **************** for security reasons your password must contain minimum 1 number, 1 diacritic, 1 universal babelkey and at least 8 distinct phonemes. password cannot contain your username, date of...
body-horrorsexual-content
The first time you killed me, I cried like a baby. Stupid, stupid, to cry over something make-believe—stupid and ugly and pathetic, too, when already the only thing I wanted in the world was for you to find me pretty. I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t expected...
abusegoresexual-content
And all the devils are here. “What’s that from?” Millie asks as she gets her coat. I stand at the back window, looking out. Usually, you can see the downtown skyline from this position. Today, it’s just the hellmouth. A long tube that looks like an...
deathviolence
The only sound Zero heard in their helmet was their own hyperventilating and the gentle pings from their pegasus. > waiting . . . > waiting . . . > communication received > confirmation of countdown initiation: 30 seconds
deathgoreviolence
Everyone knows the Walls around the cities fell. What some people don’t remember is that the first one fell because of a laugh. It sounded like a ringing bell. Not like it came out of a baby at all. That was the first thing I told the scholar boy. He was a...
racismviolence
New Providence sparkled like fool’s gold in the distance, all gleaming spires and whirring clockwork, nothing like the two-bit townships I usually rode through. My Halfie tensed beneath me, his wolf-hackles rising at the stink of machine oil and steam that...
child-abuseracismviolence
The sun was sinking toward the horizon like a brass penny dropped in muddy water by the time I rode back into New Providence. My Halfie’s mechanical shoes struck sparks off the metal road plates, each impact sending little jolts of pain through my spine....
body-horrorgoreviolence
1. I’m sorry, my lord. 2. I miss the sound of your voice, deep enough to shake the mountain fortress’s stones. I miss feeling it rumble in the soles of my feet. I miss the glow of your eyes while you paced the Chamber of Mysteries, lava burning in the...
abusemental-illnessviolence
Jay found himself sitting across from a bearded old man in voluminous maroon robes. “Why are you here?” the robed man asked. “I was sentenced to VSIM rehabilitation by my judge-counselor.” “Yes,” replied the robed man. “You would choose the literal...
The typewriter proved, at first glance, to be a poor investment for a daring aerial escape. Kallista had been drawn to the typewriter from the moment she viewed it languishing in a Museum of Curioddities, a pun that 3% of Pennon City’s citizens might...
She assures them, again and again, that she acted under the best—the very best—of intentions. Oh, yes, she can be a bit dramatic at times—she won’t deny that. And she was hurt—very hurt—by that mess with the invitations. She won’t deny that, either. But...
deathviolencewar
A year of living in the ground had not accustomed Moyer to the smell. He wondered how the French, who’d been at this business so much longer, could stand it. But if the officers who had trained his unit in the intricacies of trench life were any...
deathwar
On a wooded hillside outside Pittsburgh, where the rivers braid together and the bridges flash yellow in the sun, there stands an old private school no one ever remembers enrolling in. Ivy grips its cracked bricks. Moss blurs the leaded windows. To almost...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
The most surprising thing about my journey (well, the first most surprising thing) is that the dream I experienced while traveling lasted a thousand years, a single dream stretching all the way to the Iota star in the Gemini constellation. I dreamt of...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Draw a rectangular shape. Put a cylinder around it. Add a few small rectangles to any lines, such that they straddle them. At least one on the rectangle, and another on the cylinder. These are airlocks. The engine should look like a lighter stacked on top...
body-horrordeath
Jacey Watkins’s fingers were shaking as she stared at the five remaining questions on her Advanced Temporal Disruption Midterm. She was already exhausted from responding to ten “short” essay questions. Now she hit the “long” essay questions and as she read...
In summer, when the ocean ebbs at dusk, when the sand turns to glass and it becomes impossible to discern the difference between reflection and sky, the Tide Folk emerge from their pools. You might think, if you clamber on the cliffs searching for those...
On the morning Gwen woke with the ability to manipulate time, it was already too late. She didn’t immediately realize she could stretch or compress time—that would come later. At first, all she knew was Dianne was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.
Dear Members of the Community, As we begin yet another fall semester in the throes of the rogue timestream unleashed on our campus, I cannot help but take a moment to marvel at just how vibrant our community has become. In addition to our current...
slaveryviolence
I beg you, let me tell you about my daughter. My brilliant daughter will be one of the four people who survive their airplane crashing into a giant. Or, more accurately, a giant swiping their airplane out of the sky. Perhaps it meant to catch, or caress....
death
"Before you hear what I’m about to tell you, I need you to understand two things. Firstly, I do not know how to swim. When you live in the place I do, it’s more or less a useless skill. I mean, the deepest water around is up to my shoulders at best, can...
body-horrordeathgore
Content note (click for details) (non-graphic) depiction of animal death, mention of cancer, references to a mass death event. edited by Amanda Helms They kept telling her how lucky she was to be saved. Almost from the moment they walked her out of her...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Content note (click for details) body horror edited by David Steffen Everyone wants to be a part of Sasha. It’s the greatest thing ever and will basically make you a legend at school and completely change your life. People still talk about Jessica B, who...
body-horrorself-harm
Content note (click for details) Graphic depictions of violence, violence against animals edited by David Steffen We are killers in search of new hunting grounds. We fear only starvation and others of our kind. We are wolfish comrades, strong in our...
animal-harmdeathgore
Content note (click for details) Sexual assault, child abuse, violence, abduction, death, blood, racism, colonization edited by Hal Y. Zhang ***RAW TRANSCRIPT, FIRST PASS EDIT NOTES*** Njiran Folk Beliefs VOLUME II Collected by Ven Nakai, retired Njiran...
racismsexual-violenceviolence
edited by Ziv Wities Content note (click for details) Body horror; extended description of assisted suicide with dubious consent The attractive blonde technician responsible for your death smiles lovingly, and a smooth plastic pen slides into your gnarled...
body-horrordeathsexual-content
edited by Amanda Helms He’s the last independent optician working in my zone. Two or three years ago, there was a second one, but she worked part time and by appointment only. Who could make appointments for the future even then? The last optician doesn’t...
Content note (click for details) Threatened harm to women and children; non-graphic mentions of death by drowning; poverty edited by Ziv Wities The monster came out perfectly. The head of an ass. A human left arm, delicate in comparison to the elephant’s...
death-of-a-loved-one
edited by Amanda Helms The first god on our list wears the skull of a polar bear. The god is shrunk to the width of my little finger and almost transparent. Darkness seeps like squid ink from their eyes. “Sir,” I address the tiny god. “Can you give me an...
Content note (click for details) oppression of marginalized groups, references to self-harm edited by David Steffen The antler people are exceedingly rare, but I’ve made sure my daughter knows about them. Not just as myth or stereotype, but as people like...
self-harm
Content note (click for details) Homophobia, transphobia edited by Hal Y. Zhang On October 19th, 2019, Stonewall Productions released Coming Out to Your Parents on PC and PlayStation 4. While it was the studio’s first major title, it took the gaming...
transphobiaviolence
edited by Ziv Wities Here is Jefferson, talking to himself again. It has happened increasingly of late. The pantograph in the study summarizes his monologue endlessly, and the shelves fill with more and more of less and less. In the great and...
slavery
Content note (click for details) Depictions of illness and vomiting, religious themes edited by Amanda Helms Sara collapsed into the folding chair in the rhomboid of shade by the camper pod, stared out at Terga’s vast red plains and tried to remember the...
deathillness-and-pandemic
Content note (click for details) Implied sexual assault of a teen, death of an animal edited by Hal Y. Zhang I toss the keys on the green Formica counter. I always aim for the same spot: that ugly, little brown ring—bubbled up and cracking—where Bill had...
abuseanimal-harmchild-abuse
Content note (click for details) Drowning (non-graphic); brief use of homophobic language. edited by Ziv Wities The waves crested with foam as thick as fish eggs. Jim Walsh would have paid good money to stay indoors that evening with his feet up, tea in...
Content note (click for details) This story contains references to mass atrocities. edited by Amanda Helms Dourglamis. The largest castle I’d seen in the flesh. Barreling towards me, it was also clearly the fastest. Great granite legs churned beneath its...
body-horrorcannibalism
edited by David Steffen The bay air felt strange on Domenico’s skin. He’d been here every evening for weeks, but this was the first time in a while — years, really — that he’d taken his body with him. He’d forgotten the kiss of breeze on flesh. The rental...
death-of-a-loved-one
Content note (click for details) Animal cruelty. edited by David Steffen Do not scream, my friend. Hold it back. Good—I know it hurts, trust me I do, but this is one of the most important things you will ever do in your life. Hold fast, now. Keep your...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Damn Shackleton and damn Amundsen and damn Hillary. All that attention, just for tramping around in the snow? I will show you how a real surveyor finds his glory. I will show you the stink and the viscera of glory. It is bone dust in the air, from a...
cannibalismgoreviolence
Most people give her a single eye. This is within the rules, so she accepts, with a quiet warning. They nod, not understanding. Others try to be clever, and give her an appendix, or a spleen, or even hair. These she does not bother to warn. They will...
gore
The first child exploded in the parking lot of a nondescript fast food joint in one of the safest, most unassuming parts of our city on a clear summer evening. Beatrix Middleston (five years old, never stopped moving, loved butterflies and Spiderman and...
child-deathdeathgore
When I was eight years old, two things happened to me: I realized I wanted to hurt my cousin, and in that same moment God or the Devil or some other force in the universe kicked my consciousness out of my human body and into a fly that circled and alighted...
deathgoreviolence
Your heart stopped cold when you were walking to school in knee-high snow the morning after your parents separated. Maybe because you didn’t zip that padded snowsuit all the way up and your fur scarf was in the wash and the windchill of -10°F nipped your...
body-horrorcannibalism
There was a door. That’s the best place to start, I guess, given that there’s no good place to start. Luke and I were drinking bourbon and smoking in his attic bedroom. He’d brought me to his family compound in northwest Wyoming right after we were discharged.
body-horrorgoreviolence
There is a place that doesn’t exist. Or rather, the hotel exists only in the moments where existence itself hesitates: between one time zone and the next, between the breath then the decision, between the life left and the one not found yet. It appears at...
abusechild-abuseself-harm
My foot is hidden under a pile of fallen leaves in a ditch near the highway. My hand, a mile or so away, buried under a shallow layer of dirt in what will be someone’s tulip bed next spring. My head—I don’t know where it is. Strange. Surely it’s what I’m...
body-horrordeathviolence
CW: none. My friend and client Hana, before she passed away, used to tease me about my fear of the dark. Hana was DeafBlind, and when I’d come to her home to work with her in figuring out some new appliance, or going through the mail, or whatever errands...
I took the rats with me when Ilona kicked me out because I knew she loved them. She’d hold them, caressing their pink tails as she fed them pierogi, their large front teeth scraping against the pads of her fingers. Anton was her favorite, a big black rat...
body-horrorsubstance-useviolence
The engines echo across the emptiness of the plain like a chorale, individual melodies weaving together to create a tune in the voiceless air. We hear them miles away, aeons in the distance, giving us time to prepare for their arrival. By the...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Your companions drag the coolie girl to her feet. Some two-cent girl with rags for clothes and hair hanging across her face in tangled strings. Her eyelids flutter but do not open, revealing only the white crescents of her sclera. Blood trickles from a...
racismsexual-violenceviolence
The dryer groans to life, then begins thumping ominously. Maddie, already halfway out of her building’s laundry room, swears under her breath. The machine grinds and shakes. She slams the stop button, trying not to think about what the landlord might charge.
body-horrormisogynytransphobia
The videos show people kissing. They press their mouths together and open their lips. Their tongues move, wet and intrusive, less like they are tasting each other than like they want to lay eggs in the protected throats of their lovers.
When I worked at Disneyland in the summer of ’65, it was strange enough even without what I found in the dumpster. This was the sixties, and the Magic Kingdom, no matter how many long-haired hippies it denied admission to, couldn’t escape the decade.
deathgoreviolence
They fell just to splatter on the concrete, some of them small as ice cubes. It was a day without clouds and the man selling fruit from his stand on the corner was nearly concussed as they began to patter against the street with sound like the early...
body-horrorgoreviolence
My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided. I evaded the question. How could...
body-horror
In Sunnyhaven, we were all equally unique—and we’d been that way for years, the morning the New Girl arrived. Now, any of us would’ve admitted it: Sunnyhaven wasn’t perfect. There were no public parks or pools, no families walking their dogs down ash-lined...
ableismchild-abuseviolence
My mom was sixteen when a band of boys took her out to the woods and bound her to a tree and tortured her to death, like in Jennifer’s Body , so you see her womb was kinda already out of commish by the time she got around to wanting to have me. A year ago,...
cannibalismsexual-violenceviolence
They were on their way to El Paso when Yolanda asked Bernard to pull over. He choked the steering wheel until his fingers turned white. “Are you fucking serious?” “It’s okay,” she said shrinking into her seat, her hands rubbing together nervously between...
abuse
No one knows where the doll came from. With its blue glass eyes and ribboned hair, it looks like the ones you see at department stores and wonder who the hell buys them. “It’s gonna kill us in our sleep,” Kathy says, slapping Yuki’s hand away when he tries...
You can know something is a trap and walk right into it anyway. There’s a vicious kind of glee in the snap of steel jaws springing closed, biting through skin and splintering bone. You can think aha, I knew it as you swallow the pain.
goresexual-contentviolence
Nena came to consciousness little by little. She was ever present in the air of apartment 5K in the seventy-unit building in Brooklyn, like the wafting scent of sewer gas coming from old drain pipes: it’s easily ignored but still makes you a little sick....
goresexual-contentviolence
The image flashes only briefly on the television screen, but that’s all it takes. In that millisecond before Libby squeezes her eyes shut, the spiders are already at work in her mind, weaving sticky new synaptic bridges. They twist and shape the unlikely...
deathmental-illnessviolence
The day before the blind missionaries first arrived in our village, we had been raided by one of Jurgen Blanco’s enforcement squads. Blanco’s people were all the same—gaunt, lupine-visaged mockeries of men and women with broken, half-formed grins that...
goreviolencewar
1. There is no better friend than the dermestid . I found them first in the woods, adorning the staring sockets of a coyote skull. So small I could have crushed them, they accomplished more than my child hands could—crawling, chewing, cleaning better than...
animal-harmbody-horrordeath
We pull in the first wrong thing at two a.m., under a choppy wind and reddening moon. It’s not discovered until two fifty-five a.m, after the great nets have been poured through the processing machines and seas of pelagic fish spill over the lip of the...
animal-harmbody-horrorsexual-violence
I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, and each telling grows more teeth. Sometimes thirty-four, thirty-six. Sometimes they multiply faster than your science allows, like every word you made me swallow coming back to bite you.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky as Morris County Animal Control Officer Bailey Butler passes Stantonsville’s last operating gas station and turns off onto Franklin Road. For a merciful half-mile, a run of white ash and pignut...
animal-harmdeathgore
And now I’m home, standing over a recycled Home Depot bucket in my kitchen closet, crumbling bits of old bread into her maw.
He had a second life, one spent in the river in laughter and play.
deathviolence
In time, the entire shift’s 138 Express inbound transfers are processed, and I’m free to service passengers from other lines. These transfers are unremarkable. These passengers aren’t refugees.
I killed four hundred soldier bots all vying for the same thing before I realized there was no such thing as anti-war if our invention was the solution.
deathviolencewar
The fridge asks every morning, without fail, why it is empty, because it cares the most about my consumption.
deathsuicideviolence
iii. There are no protocols for plotting to kill the King, so Alise talks about killing the King, whispers her plan in the Queen’s ear while they lie tangled in the Queen’s marital bed, Alise’s fingers tracing bruises that should not be there.
abusesexual-contentviolence
In the screen glow of the witching hours you see a silhouette flit in and out of the doorway. Your first meme and your first violation.
child-abusesexual-contentsuicide
Building this setlist had been terrifying. Of course we’d debated our Tiny™ Concert set over the years, but never pictured this.
We'd only lived in Arizona four years—it was our retirement place. But I'd died there, and she'd dumped my ashes out in the desert without fanfare, without any poem or prayer, unless you considered, “Jesus, Marty, don't leave me. Why'd you leave me, you...
I had a daughter and then I didn’t. I woke in the cradle of midnight, shivering from a supernatural cold. I thought at first that she was crying, that she had woken me, like so many midnights before. But there was silence all around me. I sat up on one arm...
body-horror
Given Rebecca’s hunger for blood, our hopes being complimentary seemed unlikely, yet Auntie Regina’s blessing poured over us both from head to toe. Never before had I felt closer to my sister. The warmth penetrated deeper into our skin, past the second...
animal-harmbody-horror
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Aimee Ogden's 'Because I Held His Name Like a Key' read by Jenna Hanchey. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
deathhomophobiasuicide
His app was called Promises Promises, and its download page was one of the last things in Ellie’s search history—behind two hundred chapters of Fruits Basket and six clickbait articles with titles all on the pattern of “17 Spectacular Strategies to...
body-horror
When 2008 hit and I got laid off from Circuit City, a friend of mine managed to get me work at the local supermarket deli. It was a shit job, but I was beyond grateful at the time.
Despite the two hundred and fifty-two million years that separate us, I feel close to you tonight, dear trilobites.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
What I’d taken for white beads are actually human teeth, mixed with white crystals I identified (via taste, to Mole’s horror) as salt. Mole looks at the mixture and shudders. I don’t know how to explain why I keep them. As much as I wish to deny the...
body-horrordeathgore
But I am no king, no man. It is a role I assumed in serving, with perfect order, those who scarcely saw fit to name me. Wild and shimmering, I hide from myself no longer. I was born twice from death. It is time to mend what was broken, even if they will not.
child-deathillness-and-pandemic
I am not here to talk about how i got my arm, i am looking for hel p trying to fix it . Apologies for typos the f fingers lag a lot
body-horrorviolence
If only Serthe'P had been able to fit in, maybe she could have protected —. No. This thought was dangerous. Mnth’R had helped her understand that their isolation had more to do with the Raja’s exploitation of their cast’s fears than any shortcomings of...
deathgoreviolence
Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris....
In this episode of the Strange Horizons Fiction podcast, Michael Ireland presents Louis Inglis Hall's 'Cold Comfort' read by Emmie Christie. Subscribe to the Strange Horizons podcast: Spotify
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
A woman about to leave on an overseas business trip, calls home from the airport and discovers that “daddy” isn’t there and her six-year-old son is all alone in the dark…
abuse
"My country may seem strange to you. There are times when it seems strange to me. I wake and work. I work then rest. And in between I say things, and I don’t say things. Because, as you’ll learn, in my country, what you say is important. But what you don’t...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
(Editorial Note: Starting with this month’s story, we will only post ebooks in the EPUB format as Amazon phased out the MOBI format a few years ago. Also, moving forward, we will be tagging our stories. We plan to tag our backlog of stories over the next...
body-horrorgoreviolence
It took Corey Liao seven days to wrench herself free from her body. The skeins of fascia and sinew lashing soul to body had been stubborn. She’d painstakingly scraped herself free, thread by thread, while silt enveloped her limbs and clouded her eyes and...
abusedeathviolence
Gerry and I didn’t have kids though we’d tried. I’d lost those babies in the fourth month, the fifth month, the fourth month again. By then I was so exhausted by hope and disappointment that I didn’t want to do it again. Gerry didn’t push me since we had...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Bring your sister and I will tell you the story of how the waters returned to Apicuya. No, bring all the children. This is important. Don’t splash. If you cannot hear the thrum of the skymill, you are being too loud. Sit in the shallow pool, otherwise your...
child-deathdeath
April It is in the floral heaviness of late-spring that his mother comes home and hands him the present. It fits well in the palms of his hands, neither too heavy nor too light. Perfectly square, perhaps—and later confirmed to be exactly—five inches wide...
self-harmviolence
"The form is one page long. No back. Just a front. It should be longer. There are six copies of the form, all different colors. Like I’m working my way through the rainbow to the end where I’ll finally find peace. Red. A parent or guardian. I meet my...
abuseillness-and-pandemictransphobia
“The rain isn’t working.” Kamal sighed. He traced the dive a hefty droplet as it swelled from a wispy microcloud high above and landed with a loud splash onto the yellow-tipped leaves of a tea bush. Moments later, a second oversized drop fell—missing the...
Ganz didn’t realize he’d died until he found himself looking down at his own body lit by the early morning light which streamed through his bedroom window. Their bedroom window. As he hovered up by the ceiling where he’d found himself suddenly returned to...
death
There exist places where the walls between worlds grow thin. Places like this one, where two villages press together like lips on opposite sides of a glass: Renna-tal and Renna-ba, both perched on the edge of the lake called Mirror. Built in the same...
war
Debut day isn’t easy for anyone, even a god. Newly minted, coin-bright, the god called Hark waits backstage. He’s about to go out to perform his first miracle, and he can hear his fans murmuring in front of the altar. They don’t know they’re the lucky ones...
child-abusesuicide
ragg cleared one nostril, then the other, straightened his back with a satisfying clack, and shoveled another load of books, bullets, toys, and a wedding ring or two into the empty heart of existence. The objects glittered briefly in the blackness like...
Folding rose petals goes like this: one, two, inside, outside, twist. On this side is the world Beatrice knows–houses spaced at cozy intervals, eggs that fry into blobby shapes, water that is made from those two common elements (hydrogen and oxygen). On...
body-horrorviolence
Aunt Jackie had warned me to be careful with Trey, the highest ranked male alpaca in her flock. His magical wool is so soft, we tolerate his posturing bullshit. I took the necessary precautions, sending a well worn shirt a week before I would arrive to...
violence
Long after the final attack on the Automatous Abbey, long after the enemy, repugnant and resplendent in their flesh and blood, had fired their array of weapons at the undefended structure, long after the Abbess had sounded the klaxons and evacuation...
deathwar
I was walking my dog when I saw my wife for the first time, dancing on the grass in the park like it was an ancient meadow. There was no music—just the clink of her dangling moon earrings as she spun. I think I fell in love with her then, when all I knew...
death-of-a-loved-one
“If you’re Amber Barrow, you’re too early,” she told me. She opened the wrought iron gate just enough so that the bars framed us. “My last flight had a tailwind,” I said, but my heart sank. I’d flown across the country, gambled hard-won grant money on this...
They said afterward that the first fishermen who’d gone down to the beach that morning had found her, but when the people from the village hurried to see what the tide had carried in, no one claimed to be the person who’d discovered her. It was as if the...
body-horrorsexual-content
Before you open your eyes, you know you're not home. The weighted blanket gave it away, wrapped around your body like a tortilla, turning you into a breakfast fucking burrito on that cold, cold early morning. The weather — that was the next sign. You know,...
suicide
When people ask me where I’ve been for the last year, I always enjoy seeing the look on their faces when I tell them. “Titan? That’s so far away. There’s nothing out there.” “Wait, did you say they didn’t even pay you? I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.” “Oh,...
slaveryviolence
I drifted over the top of Diver’s Cliff in my spacesuit and considered going for a swim. That’s what we called giving up on Sapphire Alpha: going for a swim.
suicideviolence
It was just past midnight, and the only life present in the sorcerer’s sanctum was the cat who called it home. The real master of the domain, one might believe.
“Careful, mortal.” The voice was disembodied, high and sweet as a nightingale’s call, commandingly stern as a priest’s sermon. “You dare step into the abode of a van-yakshini?”
Oh my gods, calm down. Please—please—don’t hit me with that hurdy gurdy, you’ll damage it. I know how this looks but I’m not here to murder your family or burn your village—not my style. Just stay and listen a moment. I’ve got a tale for you, kid.
The railcar rumbled as it descended into the sewer levels of the fortress city, Aguiyi. The cramped railcar smelled strongly of bleach and grease. Hazard and Safety Commission workers filled the available seats, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, with...
Elara moved through the settlement with a careful quiet that was almost second nature, the worn soles of her boots tracing familiar paths across the rippling surface of the Great Wanderer’s back. Evening light pooled in low hollows, settling into a dusk...
This is the story of you, a man—simple, uncomplicated, perhaps a little stubborn, getting on in years, but still vital. And some of the stupid fucking choices you've made.
A couple living on the mountain near a war zone adopt a herd of displaced sheep. Content warnings: Implied genocide, animal death, body horror, cannibalism Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by Lisobel Tang, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio...
cannibalismgenocide
As famine hits southwestern Nigeria, a family is forced to battle not only hunger and disease, but an insistent curse. Content warnings: Death, non-graphic body horror Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by Jesutomisin Emmanuel Ipinmoye, edited by...
abusecannibalismillness-and-pandemic
A Jakarta creative invited to a Sumatran village is haunted by the colonial and neocolonial violence brought to life by the tale of a white crocodile. Content warnings: Blood, animal death, mention of self-harm Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by...
An astronaut caught in the accretion disk of a black hole sends desperate messages to his lover and children back on Earth. But time is running out to escape — and there are forces in the universe far stronger, and stranger, than love. Content warnings:...
body-horrorhomophobiasuicide
The sorcerer needs an heir. Not of her own flesh and blood, but sired—as she was—by one of the jungle's spirit-walking tigers and imbued with their primal magic. All of paradise is hers to offer, so what is she to do when the tiger refuses her deal?...
abusegoreviolence
When the real world becomes unbearable, what would you sacrifice for the chance to live in a dream? Content warnings: Euthanasia, death and dying, implied eugenics Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by Megan Chee, edited by Danai Christopoulou. Audio...
deathsuicide
When her mother is absorbed into the local flesh monolith, Kayla struggles with her identity and looks for a way in. Content warnings: Violence, nudity, racism/discrimination, body horror Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by Mary Miseon Wu, edited by...
body-horrorracismviolence
Able Seaman Pol has a lot of problems — getting the cats fed, watered, and reporting for duty, keeping tree roots from destroying the wiring, the monkeys out of the pantry and the mines from exploding on deck. Talking octopuses, though? That was new....
deathwar
A woman slowly smokes herself to death to protest an atrocity. When her cigarette supply runs low, a local kid grappling with both the protest and the atrocity brings her a cigar. Content warnings: Self-harm (smoking), references to genocide, a dead body,...
body-horrordeathwar
A man sets out on a voyage accompanied by his fiancée's right arm. Content warnings: Violence (graphic), threat of bodily harm, covert misogyny Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by Natalia Theodoridou, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition...
body-horrormisogyny
A woman returns to burn the last of her mother's body, in the wake of her mother's death — an effort to escape a dark entity that has sealed itself to the bones of three generations of Thai women. Content warnings: Racism, ageism, self-harm, blood,...
body-horrorracismself-harm
A young scribe joins a voyage to hunt sea creatures in waters that once belonged to the feared Northerners, but the truth behind the Northern myths is more complex than they first believed. Content warnings: Animal cruelty and death, use of the r-word...
animal-harmgoreviolence
In a post-apocalyptic world, a mother accidentally becomes a leader and a god. Content warnings: Death of a spouse, natural disasters, references to pre-disaster ableism Copyright © 2026 khōréō magazine. Story by K. Lynn Harrison, edited by Danai...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"At five A.M., Joy got a call from the truck stop off the freeway east of the city. Wasn’t the first time. “Did it get dumped? Did it get loose from a truck?” Joy asked. “I don’t know,” the night manager answered. “But it’s digging around in the garbage...
"When Mark told you he was marrying your clone, you said “congratulations” on autopilot, because that’s what you say when your friend tells you they’re getting married, and you had promised to stay friendly after the divorce. You studied his face, his...
child-abuse
Author : A. E. Lanier Narrator : Peter Adrian Behravesh Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 966: Closing Aperture is a PodCastle original. Content note for grief Rated PG Closing Aperture By A. E. Lanier The shapes and colors in the...
Author : Ferdison Cayetano Narrator : Trey Nakamura Host : Eric Valdes Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published in The Map of Lost Places Anthology, Apex Book Company Rated PG-13 When I Cowboy in Puuwaawaa by Ferdison Cayetano When I cowboy in...
Author : Julian Mortimer Smith Narrator : M.K. Hobson Host : Wilson Fowlie Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously ran as episode 367 and first published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, May 2013 Content notes for elder abuse, kidnapping of a...
Author : KJ Kabza Narrator : Elizabeth Green Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 963: The One I’m Waiting For is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 The One I’m Waiting For by KJ Kabza For an eternity of days, I wait for her in the...
Author : Claire Jia-Wen Narrator : Rebecca Wei Hsieh Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 961: A Thousand Finer Foldings is a PodCastle original. Content note for terminal illness Rated PG A Thousand Finer Foldings By Claire Jia-Wen 1....
illness-and-pandemic
Author : Claire Humphrey Narrator : Samantha Loney Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously published by Pulp Literature, Issue 39, Summer 2023 Rated PG-13 THE DRINK WE SPILL OUT ON THE GROUND by Claire Humphrey The perfect day looks...
sexual-contentsubstance-use
Author : Angela Liu Narrator : Pine Gonzalez Host : Raul Bimenyimana Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously published in khōréō issue 3.2 (August 2023) Content note for references to suicide Rated PG-13 Kwong’s Bath by Angela Liu The visits start a week...
deathsuicide
Author : Effie Seiberg Narrator : Summer Fletcher Host : Devin Martin Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 959: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: The Travel Guide to the Dimension of Lost Things is a PodCastle original. Content note for depression Rated PG-13 The...
Author : Chaitanya Murali Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published by Kaleidotrope, 2024 Contents Notes for colonisation, enslavement, torture, racism, and references to sexual assault Rated R Of...
goreslaveryviolence
Author : Chaitanya Murali Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published by Kaleidotrope, 2024 Contents Notes for colonisation, enslavement, torture, racism, and references to sexual assault Rated R Of...
racismslaveryviolence
Author : Lia Lao Narrator : Curtis C. Chen Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 956: Revolutions, as Told by a Humble Rice Farmer is a PodCastle original. Content notes for famine and sibling death Rated PG Revolutions, as Told by a...
deathwar
Author : Kai Ashante Wilson Narrator : Sofia Quintero Host : Wanini Kimemiah Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously ran as episode 534 and first published by Tor.com Content note for sex, drug use, graphic depictions of violence with blood and gore and...
Author : Erin Keating Narrator : Heather Thomas Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 954: The Grief Eaters is a PodCastle original. Rated PG The Grief Eaters By Erin Keating There was a time when grave dirt could summon grief...
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : P. H. Low Narrator : Jo Moran Host : Eleanor R. Wood Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published in Fantasy Magazine, March 2023 Rated PG-13 The Will of the God of Music by P. H. Low You hear the door open as if in dreaming. Back when you...
body-horror
Author : Emily Munro Narrator : Sandra Espinoza Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 952: Putti Call is a PodCastle original. Rated R Putti Call By Emily Munro Hopefully you’ve never tried to stuff a struggling toddler into a dog...
Author : C. J. Lavigne Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Tarver Nova Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 951: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: ‘Til Death is a PodCastle original. Content note for grief Rated PG-13 ‘Til Death by C. J. Lavigne My dear Clarinda, They...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Authors : Gregory Marlow, RJ Aurand and Jeanna Cammarano Narrators : Karen Menzel (née Bovenmyer), Rosie Sentman and Dani Daly Host : Wilson Fowlie Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 950: FLASH FICTION EXTRAVAGANZA: Reapings is a PodCastle original....
child-deathdeathsuicide
Author : Tony Dunnell Narrator : Devin Martin Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 949: The Troll Road is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 The Troll Road by Tony Dunnell Sir Lederick dismounted in the Humble Woods on the southern flank...
Authors : Bree Wernicke and AnaMaria Curtis Narrators : Kat Kourbeti and C. L. Clark Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 948: DOUBLE EPISODE: How I Did Not Make Friends With Teniel eu Letxie and The Gift of Her Light is a PodCastle...
Author : J. L. Akagi Narrator : Jo Moran Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 947: Why a Spider Needs a Parachute is a PodCastle original. Content notes for domestic violence and spiders. Big — friendly! — spiders Rated R Why a Spider...
abusetransphobiaviolence
Author : Audris Candra Narrator : Zilla Paramita Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 925: The Immortal Rabbit is a PodCastle original. Content notes for homophobia, violence, the death of a spouse, and second-person...
death-of-a-loved-onehomophobiaviolence
Author : Tony Pi Narrator : S. Qiouyi Lu Host : Graeme Dunlop Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously ran as episode 423 and first published in Fantasy Magazine Rated PG-13 The Gold Silkworm by Tony Pi When I first became keeper of the Spirit of Grass, she...
violence
Author : Jay Kang Romanus Narrator : John Chu Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 927: The One Who Carries Abinakhee Has Died is a PodCastle original. Content note for drowning Rated PG The One Who Carries Abinakhee Has Died by Jay...
deathviolence
Authors : Rachel Gutin, Christina Trujillo and Toshiya Kamei Narrators : Jess Lewis, Sandra Espinoza and Amal El-Mohtar “Peppermint Tea” previously published by Baffling Magazine “Ghosts” previously published in Gingerbread House Literary Magazine. This...
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : A. T. Greenblatt Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Devin Martin Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously ran as episode 558 and first published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies Rated PG A Place to Grow By A. T. Greenblatt Lillian was wearing one of her...
Author : Natalie Zutter Narrator : Valerie Valdes Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 930: Parsley Girl, Parsley Girl, Let Down Your Trichobezoar is a PodCastle original. content notes for pregnancy loss, post-natal depression, and...
body-horrormental-illnesspregnancy-loss
Author : Kelsey Hutton Narrator : Christiana Ellis Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Originally published in Zooscape, Issue 23, April 15, 2025 Rated PG Birds of Fortune by Kelsey Hutton Water droplets still glistened on each...
Author : Anna Kahn Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 932: Carina is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 Carina by Anna Kahn “I’ve had a baby. Still feels strange that you don’t know that — I’ve been looking...
Author : Xander M. Odell Narrator : Sean D. Sorrentino Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 933: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – Ink is a PodCastle original. Rated R Ink by Xander M. Odell A woman stood at the tattoo parlor’s door. Small,...
Author : C. T. Muchemwa Narrator : Munashe R. Goromonzi Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously published by FIYAH 33 (February 2025) Content note for gore Rated PG-13 The Inheritance by C. T. Muchemwa Taona did not shed a single tear...
deathgoreviolence
Author : Beth Goder Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published in Strange Horizons, February 2025 Content note: spiders Rated PG Arachnomorphosis by Beth Goder At night, Olivia becomes a...
mental-illness
Author : Mar Vincent Narrator : Rosie Sentman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie PodCastle 936: Ananconfabulation is a PodCastle original. Rated G Ananconfabulation by Mar Vincent Our homes are buried, so we built tunnels. From Tomas’ window...
Author : Victor Forna Narrators : Shingai Njeri Kagunda, Munashe R. Goromonzi, Wanini Kimemiah, Tahnia Barrie, Soila Kenya and Opie Ogundiran Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published by Apex Magazine Rated PG Kɛrozin Lamp Kurfi...
violence
Author : Anne Ivy Narrator : Elizabeth Green Host : Alicia Caporaso Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously ran as episode 292 and first published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Read the full text here! Rated R Read the full text here! The post PodCastle...
goresexual-contentviolence
Author : Amanda Helms Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 939: The Worth of Ashes is a PodCastle original. Content notes for death of family members to illness (off-page), grief Rated PG THE WORTH OF...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Author : André Geleynse Narrator : Rae Lundberg Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #433 Content note for suicide attempts Rated R Last Train from Deadwall PART ONE of Two by André Geleynse...
body-horrorsuicidewar
Author : André Geleynse Narrator : Rae Lundberg Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #433 Content note for suicide attempts Rated R Last Train from Deadwall Part TWO of Two by André Geleynse...
body-horrorsuicidewar
Author : C. L. Clark Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali Host : Wanini Kimemiah Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously ran as episode 519 as a PodCastle Original Rated PG-13 Burning Season By C. L. Clark It was burning season in Rashid. Again. Even in the...
deathviolencewar
Author : T. R. Steele Narrator : Jordan Kurella Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 943: At Death’s Door is a PodCastle original. content notes for suicidal ideation and second-person narration Rated PG-13 At Death’s Door by T. R....
mental-illnesssuicide
Author : Stephanie Burgis Narrator : Tina Connolly Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously published in The Sunday Morning Transport March 2, 2025 Rated G Mail-Order Magic by Stephanie Burgis Shopping online during a bout of brain fog...
illness-and-pandemic
Author : Merc Fenn Wolfmoor Narrator : Sandra Espinoza Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published in Apex Magazine (2021) Rated PG-13 Gray Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor A girl has lost her soul...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Author : Charlotte Ashley Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Ziv Wities Audio Producer : Wilson Fowlie Previously ran as episode 517 and first published in Fantasy & Science Fiction. Rated PG-13 A Fine Balance By Charlotte Ashley My mistress, Shoanna Yildirim,...
deathgoreviolence
Author : Oliver Buckram Narrator : Laura Hobbs Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “A Struggle Between Rivals Ends Surprisingly” was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (August 2014), and in Escape Pod 457...
Author : A. W. Prihandita Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being originally appeared in Clarkesworld 218 (November 2024). Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being...
Author : A. W. Prihandita Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being originally appeared in Clarkesworld 218 (November 2024). Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being...
Author : Marie Vibbert Narrator : Torin Andrus Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1065: Sister Cities is an Escape Pod original. This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase. Sister...
Author : Johnny Caputo Narrator : Christiana Ellis Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1064: The Rewilding of Lot 4987 is an Escape Pod original. Includes several grade-A swears. The Rewilding of Lot 4987 By Johnny Caputo From...
Author : Jeff Soesbe Narrator : Mur Lafferty Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1063: Modern Birdwatching is an Escape Pod original. This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase....
Author : Hans Ege Wenger Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1062: Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable, Lizards Guaranteed is an Escape Pod original. Extrasolar Ghost Tours: Safety Questionable,...
Author : Trae Hawkins Narrator : Pippa Alice Stephens Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1061: Pigeons and Robots and Pensive Worlds is an Escape Pod original. This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get...
Author : Seth Gordon Narrator : Melissa Bugaj Hosts : Valerie Valdes and Mur Lafferty Audio Producers : Adam Pracht and Mat Weller Soft Currency first appeared as an Escape Pod original in Episode 473 on December 24, 2014. Soft Currency By Seth Gordon When...
Author : Kathleen Schaefer Narrator : Heather Thomas Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1059: A Little Freedom Makes Us Rebels is an Escape Pod original. Mild mentions of parental abuse This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones!...
abuse
Author : C. W. Maurer Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025. Includes tight, underground spaces. Riftwork...
Author : C. W. Maurer Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Riftwork originally appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls Who Invent and Imagine anthology in July 2025. Includes tight, underground spaces. Riftwork...
Author : Carrie Vaughn Narrator : Cherrae L. Stuart Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Woolly” was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction (May/June 2025) This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off...
animal-harm
Author : Remy Nakamura Narrator : Roberto Suarez Hosts : Valerie Valdes and Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Impossibility Crow was originally published as Escape Pod episode 557 on January 5, 2017. Includes violence and swears. Impossibility...
Author : Meridel Newton Narrator : Alexandra Rose Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1054: Takahata-fudo is an Escape Pod original. This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get 10% off your purchase....
Author : Ethan Ham Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1053: The Game of Possibilities is an Escape Pod original. Ethan Ham https://www.ethanham.com/index.html?second-edition Elie Hirschman...
Author : Kameron Hurley Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “When We Fall” was originally published on Kameron Hurley’s Patreon, and also featured in Escape Pod 611 in January 2018. Intense, life-threatening...
Author : Jo Miles Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1051: You Have Arrived at Your Destination is an Escape Pod original. You Have Arrived at Your Destination By Jo Miles It starts with an accident. A dreary...
Author : Sylvie Althoff Narrator : Jess Lewis Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1050: Freebooter is an Escape Pod original. Moderate use of harsh language. This episode is sponsored by Sleepphones! Use code ESCAPEPOD and get...
violence
Author : Kiran Kaur Saini Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Amrit originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2023. Kiran Kaur Saini https://kirankaursaini.com/ Kaushik...
Author : Aimee Ogden Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “What Any Dead Thing Wants” originally appeared in Psychopomp (February 2024) Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here. What Any Dead Thing...
violence
Author : Aimee Ogden Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here. Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1026: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1 of 3) What Any Dead Thing...
body-horrordeathgore
Author : Aimee Ogden Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Copious helpings of harsh language descriptors found here. Don’t miss Parts 1 and 2: Escape Pod 1026: What Any Dead Thing Wants (Part 1 of 3), Escape Pod...
death
Author : Myna Chang Narrator : Amanda Ching Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Graduated Justice originally appeared in Translunar Travelers Lounge, February 2025. Graduated Justice: An Amelia Li Mystery By Myna Chang I was leaning against...
death
Author : Rodrigo Culagovski Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1030: The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On is an Escape Pod original. The Smell of the Planet I Was Born On By Rodrigo Culagovski There are two...
deathwar
Author : Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko Narrators : David D. Levine and S.B. Divya Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Tina Connolly Audio Producers : Summer Brooks and Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1031: The Anatomy of Miracles (Flashback Friday) is an Escape Pod original....
Author : Victoria N. Shi Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “milt” first apeared in Fission #5 by the British Science Fiction Association (June 2025) Contains Injury/body horror, climate grief, implied sexual...
body-horrorsexual-contentviolence
Author : G. M. Paniccia Narrator : Christiana Ellis Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1033: The Automatic Grocery Store is an Escape Pod original. The Automatic Grocery Store By G. M. Paniccia It took thirty-six days, four...
Author : Jacob Seinemeier Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1034: “An Honour to be Nominated…” is an Escape Pod original. Mild profanity “An Honour to be Nominated…” by Jacob Seinemeier TRANSGALACTIC...
Author : Kelly Robson Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht We Who Live in the Heart originally appeared in Clarkesworld, May 1, 2017. We Who Live in the Heart By Kelly Robson Ricci slipped in and out of consciousness...
Author : Kelly Robson Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht We Who Live in the Heart originally appeared in Clarkesworld, May 1, 2017. We Who Live in the Heart (Part 2 of 3) By Kelly Robson (…Continued from Part 2)...
Author : Kelly Robson Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Adam Pracht We Who Live in the Heart originally appeared in Clarkesworld, May 1, 2017. Quantum Superposition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_superposition...
deathviolence
Author : ace tilton ratcliff Narrator : Jordan Kurella Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1038: Meet the Mets is an Escape Pod original. Contains brief moments of violence and bigotry towards a transgender character Sponsored by...
transphobiaviolence
Author : Tim Pratt Narrator : Isabel J. Kim Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita” first appeared in 2025 on Tim’s Patreon Sponsored by Mixtape Stories The Many Rebirths of Karina Morita by Tim Pratt My...
Author : Rio Lombana Narrator : Hugo Jackson Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1040: Gods and Spirits Our Witnesses is an Escape Pod original. Loss of an infant Sponsored by Mixtape Stories Gods and Spirits Our Witnesses by...
child-death
Author : Sharon Joss Narrator : Torin Andrus Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Love in the Time of Dust and Venom originally appeared in 2013 Fiction River – Time Travelers. Includes a form of assisted suicide. Sponsored by Mixtape Stories...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Author : Premee Mohamed Narrator : Dani Daly Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “More Tomorrow” was first published in Automata Review, March 2018, and previously published as Escape Pod 713, in January 2020. A few grade-A curses. More...
body-horrorviolence
Author : Sierra Bibi Narrator : Laurice White Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1043: The Smokejumpers is an Escape Pod original. Includes wildfires and peril. The Smokejumpers By Sierra Bibi When Fern jumps from the plane into...
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : S. L. Myers Narrator : Dani Daly Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1044: Rhona’s Tavern and Spacetime Portal is an Escape Pod original. Occasional use of harsh language Escape Pod is proud to say that we have...
deathviolence
Author : Frank Baird Hughes Narrator : Jairus Durnett Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Escape Pod 1045: The Graduates of Formost 891c is an Escape Pod original. Contains examples of animal surgical modification. The Graduates of Formost...
animal-harmdeath
Author : James Dick Narrator : Abra Staffin-Wiebe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “EDIE” was previously published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023) EDIE (Part 1) by James Dick High above Europa, a lonely traveller...
Author : James Dick Narrator : Abra Staffin-Wiebe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “EDIE” was first published in Analog Science Fiction & Fact (January/February 2023) Don’t miss Part 1: Escape Pod 1046: EDIE (Part 1 of 2) EDIE (Part 2)...
Author : Rati Mehrotra Narrator : Joe Moran Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Adam Pracht The Library of the Apocalypse was first published in Clarkesworld, May 2025, Issue 224. Includes death and cursing. The Library of the Apocalypse By Rati Mehrotra...
deathviolencewar
PseudoPod 1053: Put Your Metal Blade to the Earth is a PseudoPod original. C/W Mass graves, plague There is an inherent danger in digging. Not metaphorically, rifling through the lives or possessions or hidden minds of others. Though that, too, poses a...
“The Wishing Angel of Suffolk County” is a PseudoPod original “John Must Die” was first published in Flash Fiction Magazine on 9th February 2025 “Bird Bone” was originally published by Bag of Bones Press in 2022 “Woodsong” was first published in Flash...
child-abusegoreviolence
PseudoPod 1051: The Ghost of a Flea is a PseudoPod original. C/W: explicit sexual content ‘Courtyard’ by Tol, taken using a 2002 Sony DSC-F717 bridge camera. “Of course, I haven’t exactly conducted a survey,” Robert was saying, “but I get the impression...
death-of-a-loved-onesexual-content
PseudoPod 1050: This House of Hopes, This House of Bones is a PseudoPod original. C/W: domestic violence, murder My husband is home again. I cannot hear him well, not with the ringing in my ears and the throbbing headache making every movement agony, but...
abusedeathviolence
“An Inordinate Amount of Interest” was originally published in the Wilted Pages anthology in 2023 and reprinted in The Skull & Laurel in 2025 C/W: exploitation, violence, reference to misgendering, 2nd person PoV Green flows from your imagination onto the...
violence
PseudoPod 1048: The Work of Smith House is a PseudoPod original. C/W: Spoiler Warning cultural appropriation, reference to suicide, male on female violence [collapse] “The Work of Smith House” is a PseudoPod original The photos hardly did Smith House...
goresuicideviolence
PseudoPod 1047: Growing Life is a PseudoPod original. C/W: strong body horror, death of a parent Lucy didn’t immediately notice her dead Mama in the middle of the playground. She had been busy having fun for the first time since Mama’s funeral. Sprinting...
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-onegore
Annie's Heart is a Haunted House was first published in THE HIDEOUS BOOK OF HIDDEN HORRORS, edited by Doug Murano, and was later published in Todd Keisling’s Stoker-nominated collection, COLD, BLACK & INFINITE
deathgoreviolence
“Turquoise Waters” was first published in Women of the Weird West, edited by KC Grifant, in 2026 C/W: guns, misogyny, strong violence Author’s note: “I lived in New Mexico for six years where I taught Navajo, Zuni, and Hobi students in the Four Corners...
goremisogynyviolence
“The Yellow Wall Paper” was first published in January 1892 in The New England Magazine. C/W:emotional abuse/control, medical gaslighting It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial...
abusemental-illness
PseudoPod 1043: Jerry Got Bit – Part 2 is a PseudoPod original. C/W: implied child abuse, guns From the author: “One of the questions I’d always left for myself in previous stories in this setting was where Jerry the werewolf had come from. It was clear...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 1042: Jerry Got Bit – Part 1 is a PseudoPod original. C/W: implied child abuse, guns From the author: “One of the questions I’d always left for myself in previous stories in this setting was where Jerry the werewolf had come from. It was clear...
deathviolence
PseudoPod 1041: Graves Basin is a PseudoPod original. From the author: “I’ve heard many times, from people wiser than me, that a horror writer fares best when they don’t waste their time trying to figure out what scares other people, but instead write...
body-horrorgoreillness-and-pandemic
PseudoPod 1040: Flash on the Borderlands LXXIX (79): Ubi amor, ibi dolor is a PseudoPod original. For CWs, please see show notes below Content warnings with timings: 03:56–16:40 ‘A Table Set And Waiting’: graphic sexual content, body horror, homophobia...
body-horrorhomophobiasexual-content
“The Song of the Living” was originally published in 2025 in an anthology Tonja edited titled, “If Fists Could Speak: A Black Speculative Fiction Anthology” CW: harm to animals Please see the host commentary below for notes from the author. When the trees...
animal-harmbody-horrordeath
PseudoPod 1038: Red Ripper is a PseudoPod original. C/W reference to alcohol and drug abuse Listen, I could still stretch half you pups if I felt like it. Sit down and learn something about the business. Did I ever tell you about the Red Ripper? I got a...
body-horrordeathsubstance-use
“Playing Tricks” was first published in It Was All A Dream: An Anthology Of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right, edited by Brandon Applegate, and later in Angela Sylvaine’s collection, The Dead Spot: Stories of Lost Girls C/W: mental illness, gaslighting, child...
abusechild-abusemental-illness
PseudoPod 1036: A Greater Dark is a PseudoPod original. C/W: Xenophobia, gun violence, harm to animals Gray sheets of rain as the door bangs in, Willard and his men materializing in that opaque haze and shaking the wet from their long coats. They assess...
animal-harmgoreviolence
“Interstate Mohinis” was originally published in Diabolical Plots (June 2023) C/W: sexual violence, cannibalism, reference to drug abuse In the way of Death runs the Vaitarani river. We are flayed open to its woe. We are always aware of its currents in...
cannibalismsexual-violenceviolence
PseudoPod 1034: Only In The Dark is a PseudoPod original. The crackling sound of static fills the room as the screen lights up. We see a simple landscape with some rocks and trees. The outline of a bird appears, its wings flapping softly. The bird takes...
body-horror
“Devil Is Fine” was first published in Cosmic Horror Monthly, in January 2025 C/W: strong body horror, gun violence, animal harm Author notes: “I was still pretty drunk on the experience of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 when I wrote this story and wanted...
animal-harmbody-horrorviolence
“A Rose For Emily” was first published in The Forum, April 30, 1930 C/W for racial slurs [n-word], mental illness, misogyny, homophobia and Spoiler poisoning [collapse] I When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a...
mental-illnessmisogynyracism
“Tailpiece” first appeared in More Ruthless Rhymes, 1930, and “The Second Awakening of a Magician” first appeared in The London Mercury, November 1930 C/W: fire My son Augustus, in the street, one day, Was feeling quite exceptionally merry. A stranger...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
“The Book” was first published in 1930 in The London Mercury and later collected in The Weird (Tor Books, 2012) CW: harm to child/animal, reference to suicide On a foggy night in November, Mr. Corbett, having guessed the murderer by the third chapter of...
animal-harmchild-abusesuicide
“The End Of The Story” was originally published in Weird Tales, vol. 15, no. 5 (May 1930). Link: Weird Tales original text Original layout from Weird Tales The Emperor of Dreams documentary Best collection of Smith’s poetry The following narrative was...
‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ was first published in Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan, April 1930. C/W strong violence, racist language Here’s a link to the Archive.org of the original text:...
deathracismviolence
PseudoPod 1015: What Haunts the Newbuild? is a PseudoPod original. When the Night Comes Out If the dead who loved her haunt an old home’s bones, what haunts the newbuild? What makes her creak and moan? Every house is a violence—and a weathered house knows...
animal-harmdeathpregnancy-loss
“Left by the Tide” first appeared in Weird Tales, March 1929 “Sirens Chasing Sirens” first appeared in The Gateway Review back in 2018 “Dread and Faith” was originally published in February 2025 in Blood Lust from Black Hare Press Far from the frenzy Of...
goresexual-contentviolence
PseudoPod 1017: In the Hands of a Different God is a PseudoPod original. C/W for body horror, child abuse/neglect, implied homophobia Jim Kristofic novels Coyote Stranger The Sundown Killers Why Miitaries Must Destroy Cities To Save Them (Add your own air...
body-horrorchild-abusehomophobia
‘The Polyamorous Heart of Death’ first appeared in the anthology And One Day We Will Die: Strange Stories Inspired by the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel CW: 2nd person PoV, transphobia, implied necrophilia The Neutral Milk Hotel The music track that inspired...
body-horrorsexual-contenttransphobia
‘Superstition’ was first published in the anthology 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era Remote Viewing Clerks 1 Donnie Darko The Destructors Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand by Primitive Radio Gods The...
deathviolence
PseudoPod 1020: Walking Tour of Scarborough in Nuclear Winter is a PseudoPod original. Rogue One final scene 30 Days Of Night trailer From the author: “All of the landmarks in this story are real places in Scarborough, where my mother grew up and where I...
deathviolence
‘Bad Doors’ was originally published in Uncanny Magazine in 2023, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. C/W: pandemic, family and animal disappearance/death The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
‘All the Good You Did Not Do’ originally appeared in Apex magazine in November of 2023 C/W: reference to PTSD, depression When the doors slide open, the screams escape. Saul is summoned from his security podium by the researchers’ howls, and he slides in...
goremental-illnessviolence
PseudoPod 1023: Grandifolia is a PseudoPod original. C/W: Emotional control, intimate partner abuse The first time I do everything the way I’m supposed to. I wait for the new moon and walk into the woods at midnight. I carry a jar of pig’s blood and wear a...
abusebody-horrorsexual-content
“Witchcraft” was first printed in Ornaments in Jade, 1924 “How I Turned My Little Brother Human” was first published in Shaky Pictures of Vanished Faces, edited by Eric Raglin, in September 2025 “Visit Seahaven” was first published in Factor Four magazine...
child-deathpregnancy-losssubstance-use
PseudoPod 1025: Impostor Syndrome is a PseudoPod original. The Mighty Boosh-Back to the Crunch Looking back, the first red flag was during the job interview, when Chad said their target demographic was males, ages thirteen to seventeen. “That’s pretty...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 1026: Thoughts and Prayers is a PseudoPod original. C/W: Gun violence, school shooting https://www.npr.org/2025/09/08/nx-s1-5317647/school-shooting-industry https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 1027: This Thing of Darkness is a PseudoPod original. C/W: grief, approaching death Nissa Harlow: nissaharlow.com Tina Connolly: tinaconnolly.com ‘Don’t Put a Rug on a Polished Floor’ public information film Scarred for Life on Bluesky:...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
“All The Eyes That See” was originally published in Cosmic Horror Monthly issue #42 (ed. Charles Tyra, December 2023); it also won the 2023 Australian Shadows Award for Short Fiction. C/W: child abuse, domestic abuse From the author: “This story is me once...
abusebody-horrorchild-abuse
PseudoPod 1029: Feeding the Choke-Tree is a PseudoPod original. Okja “Straws,” I said. “Why straws?” “Because they’re cute, obviously,” said Foreman. “Don’t you think?” I squinted at them. Nearly a dozen were inching around his feet. As I watched, one...
body-horrordeathgore
PseudoPod 1030: Keeping Up With the Conan Doyles is a PseudoPod original. C/W: disordered eating, fat-shaming May 22nd is Conan Doyle’s birthday and Sherlock Holmes Day Jess Whitecroft’s Patreon Cautionary Tales: Photographing Fairies From the Journals of...
body-horrordeathmisogyny
“Her Skin” first appeared in the anthology, They Walk Among Us: A Collection of Utah Horror (42 Books, April 2020). C/W: intimate partner abuse/control Notes contain possible spoilers: see Host Commentary below He found her in Hells Canyon. After that, my...
abusebody-horrordeath
PseudoPod 1032: Flash on the Borderlands LXXVIII (78): Terraeque urbesque recedant is a PseudoPod original. C/W: racism, xenophobia, road death From the author: “Othertongue” began as a pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space,” provoked by...
body-horrordeathracism
All submissions to Beneath Ceaseless Skies sent on or before September 24, 2026 have now been replied to. If you sent a submission on or before Sept. 24 and you have not received a response, please first check your spam filter (especially if your email...
"I met a woman whose job is to help you forget. Erasing your memories seems like something no one would trust a stranger with, I know. But then—therapy, right? We trust strangers with that. Maybe we think strangers have no reason to hurt us. No personal...
To celebrate her grandmother, all the captain of the Sopinha de Feijão wanted was to build a street market on a distant moon. But now the captain is dead and…
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"There is a future in which a hellgate opens off the coast of California. It happens at midnight on the first day of the new year, which is sooner than anyone expected. The waters rise and we are forced to abandon our home, but one of the neighbors has a...
deathillness-and-pandemicmental-illnessviolence
"You used to be in a band. Now you cut hair. The Institute hired you because you’re the daughter of the Floating City’s Founder’s fourth mistress, the one who always cooks up trouble when she gets too hungry. You don’t like the work, but you like all the...
abusesexual-violence
"Your mom loves you,” Cassie’s father says. They’re in an elevator. They only ever talk about Cassie’s mom in elevators, or when they go hiking and Cassie’s father leaves his watch at home. Cassie doesn’t know if her mom actually doesn’t listen, then, or...
abusesexual-violencesubstance-usesuicide
"November 1938 “What we are looking for,” said the doctor, “are photographs to help us document the treatment’s effect upon the patient. We need a picture before the treatment and afterward. Those are for the hospital files. But we also want photos taken...
homophobiamental-illnessviolence
As a young scholar sets out on a research project to find the stones where the settlers of Iceland made human sacrifices, a long dormant volcano rouses…and other, long-sleeping horrors might also be stirring.
"Notebooks, Conchas, y Un Café con Leche Those are the items that make up your world the day the girl with the side buzz and brown bomber jacket says to you, in the back of a crowded cafetería, “Explícame pues—¿Qué sabes acerca del concepto de la...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrormental-illness
"The side of the box says “FRANCHISE KIT.” Inside is an engraved knife, a pamphlet, and the skin of el chupacabra. I take out the pamphlet. Bold, blocky letters scream “CONGRATULATIONS!” Below that, in a more sensible font: “Welcome to the Cryptids, LLC...
"The door loomed over the robed assembly like the constellations at night: vast, alien, uncaring, and immeasurably ancient. At the back of the spiral, Yehin kept his head pitched to the right, his neck straining to hold his head back, so that he could try...
"It should have just been another stray. If the ship would have woken me from cryo a few days earlier—and weeks would have been preferable—I might have been able to do things differently. Maybe. Later, I’d wonder if any additional time would have made a...
Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.
body-horrorgoreviolence
Mel relishes running the “Enchanted Jungle,” a roadside attraction in the Everglades filled with live parrots, concrete dinosaurs, and other unexpected wonders.
death-of-a-loved-one
The spirit of a recently deceased young boy helps a group of ghosts seek revenge on a corrupt and abusive town minister.
child-deathdeathviolence
"Hey cuz! It’s been too long. Love to come out and see your digs. The message hung in the air, glimmering in her Heads Up Display overlaid across the moss garden she was tending. The chill that swept over Euryale made the hair on her arms stand on end and...
deathsexual-violence
"So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different...
child-abusechild-deathgoreviolence
"The apartment is dark when I return, the blackout curtains doing their job of keeping the late afternoon sun out. It doesn’t matter, though. The air is stifling hot, thick and oppressive. Sweat gathers on my skin, sticking clothes to flesh. But I welcome...
death-of-a-loved-one
"I know Jome Hill-Moses is in the crevasse before I look in it—and as soon as I do, I don’t need to reach the bottom to know he’s dead. In a way, that’s actually good for me. It’s infinitely easier to rescue a dead person than an injured one. Injured ones...
"I request a poison pill, in case I decide to kill myself today.” “It is your right to do so,” says the interrogator, “Here is your pill.” This is the scripted question and the standard answer. Both the interrogator and the captive scientist have recited...
violence
A two-man team must risk a spacewalk when meteoroids threaten crucial portal-spanning telecommunications cables that hang a hundred meters beneath the ocean…and forty-five billion light years away.
"Hunter’s Moon rises fat and golden over the burned-out husk of the CN Tower. Excitement ripples through us, making us forget, for the moment, the hunger that gnaws our insides. The sign for the Library appears only on clear, full moon nights, and it’s...
deathviolence
"1. To kill a language, you must first rip it from living throats. Don't look so askance; you knew it already. The dead can't speak unless called and the only way to prevent our enemies calling upon their own hordes of dead ancestors is to strip their...
sexual-violenceviolence
"Salty swell over my head, tugging me back, the raw and tender creases of my elbows against the forearms they're linked with. Brine up my nose, in my mouth. The anchor of my feet in the sand holds me fast with the rest. The water recedes and we breathe, a...
body-horrordeathsuicide
"1.8 billion miles from the sun, my roots dig deep into the soil of a small garden. I am a curious thing—an aspiration. Everything else on Miranda is ruthlessly utilitarian, but I am ornament. I am beauty. This garden nominally exists to facilitate some...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusesexual-violenceviolence
"The wind sings in the petal wires. Alma hangs by one arm from the hull of the lily. With the other she works furiously at the tether brake. Each time the lily is lifted by a wave the tether zips down into the big dark. The third time the water breaks over...
"Licensed psychologists follow a set of ethical standards enforceable by law. Don’t fuck your patients, commit no felonies, refer out if you don’t know what to do, stuff like that. Then there are aspirational principles. More like ideals, inspiring better...
"The plaque on the living room wall was dark cherry with a brass-plated steel rectangle at its center, lacquered. The engraving stated IN APPRECIATION OF HAROLD MOSS. On another line: 45 YEARS OF DEDICATED SERVICE. Then at the bottom: WILSON TECHNOLOGIES,...
"When I was little, I drew dragons and leviathans in my room, stomach down on my bed or tipping my chair back and staring at the ceiling like the lines would rearrange into inspiration. Now I swipe my fingerprint through three levels of security and...
death
"It’s cruel of the soldiers to come when Mama is so sick and so pregnant. I tell this to Dijkstra, and she agrees. Then she goes to Mama and clambers into her lap, which is now too small to hold me and almost too small to hold Dijkstra, and says it in a...
body-horrorchild-deathviolence
"He told me his mother was a spacecraft. We had just made love, and our bodies were spent and sweat-slicked, the scent of our seed mingling in the stables with the sweet musk of the drowsing horses. Our lids were heavy, but his muscles grew tense in my...
death
"The kids like Luzhanqi because it’s a non-perfect strategy game: a bridge as they make their way onto bigger, more serious things, like chess and Go. It’s something that even the most incompetent of them could hope to win. Sometimes you just get lucky....
"They cut off Auréle’s head and they put it on a pike above the city’s third best bridge. To me, that seemed a shame. I had only just got his nose right. It had a crook in it, Auréle’s nose. A sporting accident, from his days at the Academy. He’d been...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"Even after Uncle Sulim died, he remained occasionally intolerable. “Did you check the pollen count inside the base?” “Yes, it’s at the higher limit of the acceptable range. Within two basis points.” Nika’s response was almost devoid of irritation. “I’ll...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"The moon was full that night in the summer of Meiji 29 when three hundred and sixty new stars appeared in the sky. Glowing even brighter than the capital’s newly installed electric lamps, they formed a nineteen-by-nineteen grid. My wife, Tsuru, and I were...
illness-and-pandemic
"You ever love a place more than people? Mama Patch’s house held me and all my running and snooping without ever forcing me to slow down or stay put. I could run from the rafters down the bang-bang spiral case, then sideways through the six rooms of...
homophobiasexual-violenceviolence
"The first time through this cycle, Devaki does not believe he will go through with it. Kasma is her brother, after all, and for all his fears, he didn’t kill her when he had the chance. So as her baby grows inside her, the first fruit of her marriage to...
child-deathpregnancy-losssuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Tonight, Rhoda would tell Sev she loved him. She was sitting in her dream kitchen, at a small, square table built exactly to her specifications, with a dark reddish cherry-wood finish. Everything in her kitchen was compact, but beautiful, with cookware...
"This is a story of children, and the adults those children will or will not grow up to be. Since the dawn of time, everyone who has ever existed has been either an adult they are or an adult they are not, even the living. This is how the real world works:...
"It was late—too late for a grown-ass adult to be doing homework and too late for caffeine—when perpetual grad student Grayson George dropped his mug and splattered four million droplets of coffee across the computer lab. Cursing, Grayson left his stupid...
"Vera was eight hours into her experiment before hunger drove her to raid the locker of her lab mate Ashok. It contained a box of extra-large Band-Aids, a Cornell T-shirt, two empty AirPod cases, the locked pouch where he stored his cannabis edibles,...
"Clean, bright, and well lit, the Palisades Mall was just like Bill remembered it when he was younger. Except, now, there were no crowds. And most of the stores were gone. Across the long hallway, Bill could see a man sitting in a folding chair with a card...
"Beauty grants a thing its own significance. Daybreak here has none. No pastel herald of the approaching Sun, like the horizons of far lost Earth. No splendid bloom from black sky to blue. Just a sudden harsh frill behind the mountains, and then the...
"Grace had just tucked herself next to John on the wooden bench with her morning tea when she noticed a puff of dust rising from the access road. She stood and placed a hand on her husband’s arm. “John—someone is coming. Down by the bottom of the road.”...
illness-and-pandemic
"Racer dead at 24, read the news reports, which wasn’t an uncommon headline. The only thing eye-catching was the method of death—brain aneurysm— and how it swept the front page of the papers rather than being relegated to the sports section. But CJ was a...
"Oscar’s Digital Double comes two hours, thirty-eight minutes, and eleven seconds late. Maxine snatches the package from the delivery drone and doesn’t tip. She rearranged her day—went to HMart right when it opened, skipped the gym, cooked Grandma a quick...
child-deathdeathsuicide
"Seven months since the war and two since winter should’ve ended, and Lake Erie is still frozen thick enough for me to walk out and gather care packages dropped from orbit. Soon enough, those metal husks will spill out harvests from Luna, Titan, Mirabilis;...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
"Itsy bitsy,” whispers the girl in the glass tank beside mine. Not a girl anymore, not really, but it’s better for my sanity to pretend she’s still human. That we both are. We had names once—and skin, soft to the touch. In the sterile, blinding white...
body-horrorgoreviolence
"Hey there—comrade—are you also part of the—Space Industry—Development Program—First Cohort? I’m Zhang Haoyu—second lieutenant—pleased to meet you.” The man in front of me spoke in choppy fragments. He extended his hand, heedless of the puzzled looks...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illness
"Hi Lisle. Hope you’ve had some coffee. The topside comms array is still glitching, and engineering hasn’t lifted a finger to run diagnostics. They say the work order has to come from your end. Shouldn’t take long once they get it. Happy simulated morning to you!"
"Ambassador Shǐ Guì Sūn Yán and Prime Minister Xiang Hu Li Yáng floated in the crystalline water tank at one side of the courtroom. Beyond the anchoring shelves for the judges, the bulbous organic diamond window looked out onto a swollen, orange, solar...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathviolence
"When I met the young Mr. Turing, I had not yet ascended as Autumn’s King. Nowadays it has become fashionable for the sons and daughters of the lesser fey gentry to improve their position in the shifting hierarchy of the Courts by virtue of intrigue,...
deathsexual-contentsexual-violence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Steve, over here! Turn to your right. Can we get a smile?” He falls back on his training easily enough, turns to the cameras, gives them his famous crooked smile, tilts his head just so as the flashes go off so they can capture the smoulder that...
"I heard you’re returning to our world again. What do you want here exactly, Orhija? The Earth is dying slowly. It’s losing its sheen and glow. The blackness of the soil that you used to say was as beautiful as mine has changed since you left. It’s redder...
"We put my body double together in June Lee’s basement. Her mom was one of those chill Asian moms who liked having an artsy-fartsy daughter she could brag about at Bible study. She was already pushing the whole portfolio-for-college-apps deal, so she...
"Dear Dr. Erzsébet Krajcsik-Nagy, I am contacting you as a member of the general public, and not as a fellow scholar, though I must say my chosen field of art history does have certain similarities to yours. I read the interview with you in the online...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
substance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Sparrow retired from the battlefield at the height of her powers and couldn’t be persuaded to change her mind. She was done with fighting, armies, blood, death, and taking orders. Now, she ran a salon at the edge of Florelia, Tira City’s entertainment district."
war
"Dekar Druid lives in an infinite library. Besides Ebizenum, who is in a special category of their own, he is the only living person in the library’s single tower. Outside, a forest surrounds the tower. There’s a lake a short walk to the north and a peak...
"Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes."
"The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the...
goresexual-violenceviolence
"Attention, please,” the Manager says over the office intercom. “The Auditor’s shuttle is scheduled to dock in one hour. I repeat, one hour. Warehouse staff, please ensure that all inventory is in place.”
"The city of Nan Rhok stands on the ridge of a great mountain, where a gullet of steaming water flows from volcanic hot springs. The ridge is narrow and the mountain chill, so the city hews close to the spring, building high its granite towers. The name of...
child-deathdeath
"The buffet was infinite. It existed in a pocket dimension, via some sort of technological jiggering of the sort that you have heard about before and, unless you are totally anal, don’t want to hear about now. You could probably summon an explanation that...
cannibalismgoreviolence
"Gardener ladled dark-purple porridge into her primary digestion sac, staring absently out the viewport at black space and the distant smudge of the planet they had come to study. The simple meal and the gesture it represented soothed her after a long,...
death
"Night to day. In Diyu, the Earth Prison, Chun Wei opened her eyes. “Day” in the realm of the dead registered only as a less pervasive chill to the stagnant air. Not that Chun Wei needed to breathe any longer. She unfolded from the lotus position she’d...
death
"At 5:43 a.m. this morning, residents of Grackle Pointe Apartments awoke to a malfunction in their complex’s multi-spatial engine due to an unprecedented derecho that swept through the Montrose area of Houston. This resulted in tenants being mentally and...
body-horrordeathgore
"I learned from Bernadette that there are two ways a star can go supernova. The first is in a double star where one partner dies first, turning into a white dwarf, and the surviving partner swells in grief and dumps mass onto the compact star. But the...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"The Starsinger, the Starsinger, the Starsinger, he sings. His histories have long been recorded—in every pit stop he has visited. In every station he has stayed. It may be just a minute of the traffickers slapping the Bini out of his mouth, or them...
child-abuseslaverysuicide
"In the pre-dawn light she lies in bed, gazing through the window at graceful trees silhouetted against a turquoise sky. The air is still, the pretty room orderly and calm. She lies motionless except for her eyes, the soft blue quilt rising and falling...
death
"The woman’s name was lost in The Fall, as was so much else we once thought vital—seasons, rivers, uncharred air—but her image persists, has become indelible. The giant wall of white upon which her travesties are projected once yearly has become a mecca...
goresexual-contentviolence
"Tyler Moore’s spells strive to exist in and of themselves. They make no excuse or justification for their existence: no promise to speak to the dead, predict next year’s grain or gold prices, or read the mind of lawyers during a hostile takeover. They are...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
gorehomophobiaviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"USER: this is a message for Milwaukee Elementary’s curator Jude Towers, I hope this is the right address. anyway thanks for the story you had RIGHTR generate for my 10th graders’ Empathy Week. it was really great! can you tell me more about it? CURATOR: I...
mental-illnessracismtransphobia
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
The vampires aren’t even the worst part about being a teenage trans girl on tumblr.
abusechild-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onegoremisogynysexual-violencesubstance-usetransphobiaviolence
"DIRECTIONS: Fill in the correct letter with a #2 pencil on the answer sheet. Do not use ink or ballpoint pens. Questions left blank will be marked incorrect. Completely fill in each circle."
"This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration. The first time you get our message, you only / find one thread. It mimics your language in / its simplest form, a single strand of words / laid end to end. You will have to...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"I ended up on Pluto on the night of my nineteenth birthday, after breaking my own stupid heart. It wasn’t even over anything important. All I did was jump in a pool, and then the chlorine got in my nose and I came up coughing on the side of the tiles, and...
sexual-violence
"The Alamgir Dynasty has been guiding the Kingdom of Hindustan through centuries of peace, prosperity, and stability. Yet, credit does not rest solely on the wisdom of our modern kings; from the earliest days of what was then called the Alamgiri Empire,...
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Carlo checked his rearview mirror, gravel flying as he tore over the road. He didn’t know why the Cappelli Verdi were after the woman in the back of his van, clutching a hemp blanket around her shoulders. All he knew was that he needed to get out of town,...
"A garden is a joy, but also a labor. It is no small thing to call forth life from the desert; do not imagine any but a witch could do it so well. Every day I draw flowers from sand, shrubs from sand; I turn sand to grass as rich as cream. The garden is...
slavery
"The Henrietta, passenger, cargo, and slave ship, was routinely used to transport goods from the Florida Keys up as far north as Rhode Island, and is also said to have made at least six voyages transporting enslaved African peoples from the Gold Coast of...
racismslavery
"Bloodsoaked and grinning, the Soldier climbs to the summit of the ruins. The wind is mountain-top fast. It grabs the strands of her hair that have escaped her ponytail and sticks them to her ecstatic mouth: the slick surface of teeth, the gloss-wet of...
violence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
goretransphobiaviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrormental-illnessself-harm
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Michael sips his coffee, watching the screen automatically cycle through vidfeeds coming in from across the country, lingering just long enough to hit the relevant button. He knows the dominionist rhetoric, had heard it in the media, read it when he...
deathgoreviolence
"The formula for how to end the world got published the same day I married the girl who used to bully me in middle school. We found out about it the morning after, on the first day of our honeymoon in Cozumel. I got out of the shower in our small bungalow...
mental-illnessracism
"Valentini doesn’t flinch when the purple-bellied storm shakes the house, heedless of the film being shot within its derelict husk. Scene fifteen, take three. The Hollow Places crew rushes to stop the windows’ skeletal rattling before the atmospheric...
child-deathgoreself-harm
"Margery crouched in front of the fireplace, skirts tucked back to avoid the flames, and raked coals out onto the hearth. She’d pushed the shutters open this morning to let a breeze but even at this hour sweat beaded on her brow and stuck her chemise to...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
violence
Author : E. M. Linden Narrator : Louise Hewitt Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 879: The Tawlish Island Songbook of the Dead is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for grief, infant death, and a reference...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Magical Girl Antifa War Machine By Esther Alter XYLIA We were at the bottom of a hole, a new construction site that went deep into the bedrock. I was the first to touch the artifact, a thing that didn’t quite have shape or color. I grabbed it. My new...
deathgoresexual-contentviolencewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"At night, Olivia becomes a spider. She scurries down San Francisco streets, floats gently between cotton-candy-colored houses, and hides behind signs for trendy restaurants, like Trough and Instance. By day, she works as a software engineer for a company...
mental-illness
"My stitches laddered their way up the split seam, in and out one side, across, and then in and out the other. When you pulled the thread through, if you had done the job right, it closed the seam like it had never been torn at all. The salesman kept...
death-of-a-loved-oneracismviolence
In the last blush of autumn, the King of the Forest requested an audience with the King. The King was so delighted that he agreed at once. The audience was held in the King’s hall, the burnished tile laid in gold and green, the fire stoked high with ash...
A professional caregiver’s commute takes an unsettling detour when car trouble forces her to pull over on the highway, where she begins receiving distressing phone calls from strangers…
death
Author : Eden Royce Narrator : Laurice White Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 914: The Magnolia Returns is a PodCastle original. Rated PG The Magnolia Returns By Eden Royce The Magnolia blooms out of nowhere at any time of year it...
abusebody-horror
PseudoPod 963: Mavka is a PseudoPod original. CW: cannibalism, suicide, starvation, use of second person perspective You pray to forget this. You pray to forget the cold. Even under two wool blankets you’re always cold now. Skin and bones, you. A February...
cannibalismchild-deathsuicide
A traumatized time traveler keeps traveling back to his past to punish his younger self. Over multiple loops, he learns to forgive himself. Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Samir Sirk Morató, edited by Danai Christopoulou. Audio edition read by...
child-abuseself-harmviolence
A transnational adoptee is haunted by the ghost of his birth mother. Content warnings: Self-harm, suicidal ideation Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Woody Dismukes, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition read by Sam Cavalcanti, with...
body-horrorgoreself-harm
Evan is suddenly coughing up bones, like, A LOT of bones, but that’s not even in the top ten strangest things that have happened to him since he moved into his new (possibly haunted) duplex...
Author : Ruth Joffre Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Dean Kidd Discuss on Forums PodCastle 916: Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush is a PodCastle original. Rated G Woodpecker, Warbler, Mussel, Thrush by Ruth Joffre Yesterday, I...
An alien-human symbiote tries to sort out complicated feelings at his former friends' wedding. Content warnings: Brief mention of suicide Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Sharang Biswas, edited by Danai Christopoulou. Audio edition read by Eli...
sexual-contentsubstance-usewar
35 / F / Lane's Creek, Oklahoma By Hans Ege Wenger Sandra loaded. Boxes and pallets, mostly. Full of avocados, computer chips, plastic toys, etc. All carefully placed by her rubber-faced grippers into the trucks that darted in and out of the warehouse...
Aliens who share distant human ancestors with Earthlings arrive on Earth seeking refuge, and their African lineage run into issues with the US government. Content warnings: Racism, genocide Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Chris Campbell, edited by...
racism
Deb is dead set on getting a pedicure, now, damn anyone else's time! But the Universe has its own plans, and she's not the only VIP to walk through the doors of SALON LA BELLE, eager to have her wish granted. Content warnings: Blood, violence, death,...
In New Hope City, an indentured clone comes out as trans. People have opinions about it. Content warnings: Transphobia (including misgendering), abuse, implied forced servitude, implied climate disaster Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Leon Tomova,...
transphobia
In an RPG game, a Black avatar repeatedly attempts to survive an encounter with the police. Content warnings: Violence, death, racism, hateful language, xenophobia Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by KÁNYIN Olorunnisola, edited by Isabella Kestermann....
deathracismviolence
A boy walks into an art exhibit and steals a sex doll on display. It doesn't go anywhere the doll expects. Content warnings: Body horror described in detail Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Kawai Shen, edited by Kanika Agrawal. Audio edition read...
deathsexual-contentsexual-violence
In 2102, Michi goes undercover as a maid for a hacking job, while in 2030, Ryo sells his appearance to a tech company. Their lives intersect to expose the dirty laundry of neo-feudal futuristic Japanese elite society. Content warnings: Classism, injustice...
A storyteller in the distant future shows the reader different vantage points, in hopes they might "see" the web of connections between past and future, reader and story, responsibility and joy. Content warnings: Acknowledgement of genocide, animal harm...
Hollywood actor Hendrick lives through a curated trauma experience to become Greek enough for a role. But how much will it cost him? Content warnings: Suicide, torture simulation, cultural appropriation Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Christos...
deathsuicideviolence
An imprisoned god is bound to the trees of an ancient swamp, until one day someone comes looking. Content warnings: Violence, body horror Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Natasha King, edited by Zhui Ning Chang. Audio edition read by Suzie Rai and...
deathviolence
Dr. Sun, the solo practitioner of an extraordinary medical specialty, is asked to save one last patient by the protege who abandoned her. Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Shiwei Zhou, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition read by Ishani...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
A father bumbles his way through family domesticities as he makes his way to the airport. His children do not know he is not their father at all, but a stranger with a gruesome past, hard-earned advice, and a primal longing for a stolen life. Copyright...
violencewar
A young paramedic defies a military summons by heading into the forest, where she gradually builds a new home and becomes something more than human. Copyright khōréō magazine 2025. Story by Evgenia Nekrasova, translated from Russian by Marianna Suleymanova...
body-horrorwar
In Japanese-occupied Malaya, an older Chinese immigrant reflects on his arrival to this land in his youth and embarks on a daring rescue. Content warnings: Blood Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Joshua Lim, edited by Zhui Ning Chang. Audio...
deathviolencewar
When a lonely mountain is visited by a wonderbird, she learns about the far-away White City, and sets out on an unlikely journey. Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Diana Dima, edited by Danai Christopoulou. Audio edition read by Kat Kourbeti, with...
"Wax and Full Circles" is the quiet story of a couple navigating life where one of them is a werewolf. Content warnings: Death, animal death, grief Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by Stefani Cox, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition read by...
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-onegore
It's about the things that become a part of you when you aren't paying attention, without your even realizing they're there. Copyright © 2025 khōréō magazine. Story by T. Chiu-Chu, edited by Kanika Agrawal. Audio edition read by D Casellian, with...
body-horror
The survivor of an apocalypse event in an alternate universe tries to rebuild and avoid being dragged back into the past when a visitor crosses the in-between and asks for help.
Misunderstanding threatens a commune whose survival is dependent on precise communication with another species…
death-of-a-loved-one
When their rental truck breaks down, two friends moving cross-country kill time by telling stories about the strange carving in front of the motel where they’re awaiting a mechanic…
deathviolence
"Once a decade, a titanium-nosed shuttle plows through the rings of the planet Tartarus with a new batch of prisoners destined for the Orpheus Factory. The debris that makes up the rings is so thick that it thunders like a hailstorm, deafening the...
body-horrordeathviolence
Author : Cécile Cristofari Narrator : Wilson Fowlie Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Interzone Content warning for dementia Rated PG The Third Time I Saw a Fox by Cécile Cristofari “You know what I...
mental-illness
Author : P.C. Verrone Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 874: The Husband is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for sex, violence, and references to the death of a spouse Rated R The...
goresexual-contentviolence
Author : Osahon Ize-Iyamu Narrator : Takudzwa Sharon Kirimi Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Lightspeed Magazine Content warnings for grief and the death of a spouse Rated PG-13 Last Ritual of the...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
Author : Hilary Moon Murphy Narrator : Chistopher Reynaga Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 876: TALES FROM THE VAULTS: Nine-Fingered Maria is a PodCastle original. Rated PG Nine-Fingered Maria by Hilary Moon Murphy...
Author : Louis Inglis Hall Narrator : Pippa Alice Stephens Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by The Colored Lens Content warning for the death of a child Rated PG-13 The Hand That Feeds by Louis Inglis...
body-horrorchild-deathgore
Author : Somto Ihezue Narrator : Mofiyinfoluwa Okupe Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Tor – Africa Risen anthology Content warnings for violent murder and the death of an animal Rated R The Carving...
animal-harmdeathviolence
Author : Samantha Mills Narrator : Sandra Espinoza Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Translunar Travelers Lounge and as PodCastle #639. Rated PG-13 Kiki Hernández Beats the Devil By Samantha Mills...
animal-harmgoreviolence
Author : Luke Wildman Narrator : Hollis Monroe Host : Matt Dovey Artist : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 37 Rated PG How to Steal the Plot Armor – PART ONE by Luke Wildman The day before...
Author : Luke Wildman Narrator : Hollis Monroe Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future, Vol. 37 Rated PG How to Steal the Plot Armor by Luke Wildman PART TWO of TWO...
Author : Brigitte Winter Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention Content warnings for violence and coercive control Rated R...
abusegoreviolence
Author : J.J. Roth Narrators : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, Jen R. Albert, Dagny Paul, Graeme Dunlop, Summer Fletcher, Matt Dovey, Alasdair Stuart, Marguerite Kenner, Eleanor R. Wood and Steven Capps Host : Emmalia Harrington Audio Producers : Eric Valdes and...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Author : Si Wang Narrator : Shingai Njeri Kagunda Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 885: Prisoners is a PodCastle original. Rated PG Prisoners by Si Wang The fortress was as large as a city and empty as a dried-up...
cannibalismdeathwar
Author : Cynthia Zhang Narrator : Curtis C. Chen Host : Shingai Njeri Kagunda Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 886: Houyi the Archer Fights the Sun is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 Houyi the Archer Fights the Sun by Cynthia...
Author : Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko Narrator : Yaroslav Barsukov Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies Rated PG-13 The Cuckoo of Vrežna Mountain by Filip Hajdar Drnovšek...
Author : Mimi Mondal Narrator : Elizabeth Green Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Originally published as PodCastle 349 Content warnings for violence and disturbing imagery Rated R This Sullied Earth, Our Home by...
deathviolence
Author : L. S. Johnson Narrators : Nicola Chapman, Matt Dovey and Peter Seaton-Clark Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by G Is for Ghosts, Poise and Pen Publishing Content warning for era-specific...
deathhomophobiasuicide
Author : L. S. Johnson Narrators : Nicola Chapman, Matt Dovey and Peter Seaton-Clark Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by G Is for Ghosts, Poise and Pen Publishing Content warning for era-specific...
deathhomophobiawar
Author : Mitchell Shanklin Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 891: Trending Now! Help With Legal Fees for Reluctant Swordsman is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for child...
body-horrorself-harmviolence
Author : Daniel Abraham Narrator : Wilson Fowlie Host : Wilson Fowlie Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published as PodCastle 051 Rated PG The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics by Daniel Abraham For as many years as...
sexual-contentviolence
Author : Victoria Dixon Narrator : Eleiece Krawiec Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 893: Counting Fairies is a PodCastle original. Content warning for injury to an animal Rated PG-13 Counting Fairies By Victoria...
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Author : M. T. Lee Narrator : AJ Fitzwater Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 894: The Summer of Lugubriosity is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 The Summer of Lugubriosity by M. T. Lee We did the ritual on a...
child-deathgoreviolence
Author : Jennifer Hudak Narrator : Pippa Alice Stephens Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Rated PG-13 The Day of the Sea by Jennifer Hudak When the Sea came...
Author : Jason Fischer Narrator : Wilson Fowlie Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously run as episode 438, and first published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies (#180) Content warning for frequent and bloody violence. Rated R...
goreslaveryviolence
Author : Jessie Roy Narrator : Kyle Akers Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 897: Oops! All Swords is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for repeated violent death and strong language throughout. Rated PG-13...
deathgoreviolence
Authors : J. R. Dawson and John Wiswell Narrator : John Bell Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Haven Spec Rated PG This Mentor Lives by J.R. Dawson & John Wiswell Abraham was rushing through his...
Author : Cat Rambo Narrator : Cat Rambo Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by UNLOCKING THE MAGIC, edited by Vivian Caethe Content warning for PTSD, suicidal ideation, and body horror Rated PG Broken All...
body-horrormental-illnesssuicide
Author : Gillian Knox Narrator : Karen Menzel (née Bovenmyer) Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 900: Sour Fruit is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for domestic abuse and the death of a parent Rated PG-13...
abusechild-abusedeath-of-a-loved-one
Author : Christine Lucas Narrator : Kat Kourbeti Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Abyss & Apex Content warnings for ableist slurs and attitudes, violence, and misogyny Rated PG-13 Moths in a...
misogynyviolencewar
Author : E. M. Faulds Narrator : Eliza Chan Host : Devin Martin Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 902: Godzilla as a Young Man Named Mike is a PodCastle original. Content warning for ableist attitudes Rated PG-13 Godzilla as a Young...
ableismillness-and-pandemic
Author : Charles Chin Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 903: On the Shoulders of Giants is a PodCastle original. content warning for suicidal ideation Rated PG On the Shoulders of Giants by Charles Chin I was...
suicide
Author : Sarah Prineas Narrator : Steve Anderson Host : Wilson Fowlie Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously ran as episode 18 and first published by Strange Horizons Rated G The Illuminated Dragon by Sarah Prineas Rafe Greatorex thought...
animal-harmgoreviolence
Author : Jeanna Mason Stay Narrator : Valerie Valdes Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 905: The Next Dead Wife is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for coercive control, domestic violence, and murder Rated...
abusedeathviolence
Authors : Amanda Helms and Anne Leonard Narrators : Cherrae L. Stuart and Christiana Ellis Host : Eric Valdes Artist : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums “The House, The Witch, and Sugarcane Stalks” Previously published by Lightspeed, “To Pluck a Twisted...
slavery
Author : A. D. Ellicott Narrator : Emma Osborne Host : Wilson Fowlie Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously Published by Body of Work, ed. C.Z. Tacks, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild (2023) Content warnings for fatphobia and eating...
fatphobiamental-illnessself-harm
Author : Dani Atkinson Narrators : Andrew K. Hoe, Kitty Sarkozy and Katherine Inskip Host : Eleanor R. Wood Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously ran as episode 722 and first published by Daily Science Fiction Rated PG-13 Said the...
Author : Stephanie Malia Morris Narrator : Dominick Rabrun Host : Wilson Fowlie Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 909: Resurrection Rum is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for death, gun violence, and racism Rated PG-13 Resurrection Rum by...
deathracismviolence
Author : Lalini Shanela Ranaraja Narrator : Shweta Adhyam Host : Eric Valdes Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously Published in Strange Horizons, 15 August 2022 Issue. Content warnings for animal cruelty, blood, and suicide Rated PG-13...
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Author : Beth Goder Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Rated PG Mycelium by Beth Goder I only travel to the golden head when the dragonflies are in...
Author : Eugie Foster Narrator : Tina Connolly Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously ran as episode 28 and first published by Cricket Magazine Rated G The Tanuki-Kettle by Eugie Foster When Hisa was a baby, her mother...
Author : Adriana Kantcheva Narrator : Kat Kourbeti Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Trollbreath Magazine CW for drowning Rated PG Vedritsa of the River by Adriana Kantcheva The Kamchia river had grown...
deathsexual-content
Author : Leah Ning Narrator : Amanda Ching Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published in Monster Lairs (Dark Matter INK, October 2023) Rated PG-13 The Hunter, the Monster, and the Things That Could Have Been by...
death-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
Author : Amal El-Mohtar Narrator : Marguerite Croft Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously ran as episode 139 and originally published in Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Rated R We unfortunately do not have the rights to...
Author : Diana Dima Narrator : Matt Dovey Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 918: Waterways is a PodCastle original. Content warning for self-harm and coercive control Rated PG Waterways by Diana Dima When his father...
abuseself-harm
Authors : B. Morris Allen, David McGuire and Courtney Floyd Narrators : Hugo Jackson, Steve Anderson and Kaitlyn Zivanovich Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 919: FLASH FICTION EXTRAVAGANZA: Possibilities is a PodCastle original. The...
Author : Jennifer R. Donohue Narrator : Heather Thomas Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published in issue #3 of Gamut, on March 1, 2024 Content warnings for gore and traumatic birth Rated R Auguries By Jennifer R. Donohue She...
body-horrorgoreviolence
Authors : Cat Rambo and Jeff VanderMeer Narrator : Graeme Dunlop Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously ran as episode 146 and first published by Subterranean Press. Read the text here! Graphic Surgical Detail Rated R Read the full text...
Author : Anita Harris Satkunananthan Narrator : Chang Yiun Yee Host : Eric Valdes Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Previously published by GiGaNotosaurus Rated PG A Long Tango Across A Canopy of Whispering Leaves By Anita Harris Satkunananthan The return of...
Authors : Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw Narrator : Tina Connolly Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 923: The Sun Globe is a PodCastle original. Rated G The Sun Globe Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt Grace Morley was singing “Silver Bells”...
Author : Leah Ning Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes PodCastle 924: Reverent is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 Reverent by Leah Ning It’s the smell of gravity that tells me Father’s been to my rooms: empty and...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Author : Matt Wallace Narrator : Mur Lafferty Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1000: A Thousand Names for God and Infinite Mustard is an Escape Pod original. Contains some harsh language A Thousand Names for God and Infinite...
Death by Pink in the Lollipop Apocalypse By Ryan Cole In the dark of her bed, curled up in her sheets, Susie tried to hide from the next few days and the reckoning they’d bring: of prom and graduation and the dozens of goodbyes she’d have to force herself...
body-horrorhomophobia
Author : Risa Wolf Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Tigers for Sale was first published in Clarkesworld Magazine in July 2023 Content warnings: colonialism, implied genocide, psychological manipulation Tigers for...
abusedeathgenocide
Billionaire's Tears By Vanessa Ricci-Thode I wake up to the sound of screaming, and know I’m going to die. I shoot out of bed, calling for my mother. First thing I’ve spoken clearly in two days. “Maria!” My mother bursts into my room. “Baby, what’s wrong?”...
deathillness-and-pandemictransphobia
The Girl Who Came Before By David von Allmen When me and my family pulled into our driveway, my five best friends were waiting in our front yard, waving glittery poster-board signs that read “Welcome Home Sam!!!” and jumping around with full-on 13 year-old...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Author : Albert Chu Narrator : Hugo Jackson Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “When the Oracle Speaks” was first published in Metaphororsis, July 2023 When the Oracle Speaks (Part 1) by Albert Chu One year after the war’s end, the royal...
war
Author : Albert Chu Narrator : Hugo Jackson Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “When the Oracle Speaks” was first published in Metaphororsis, July 2023 When the Oracle Speaks (Part 2) by Albert Chu Outside the warehouse, the rain fell in...
war
Author : Tim Pratt Narrator : A Kovacs Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Observer Effects” originally appeared in Diet Soap (2007), and was originally presented in Escape Pod 350 Contains harsh language Escape Pod is proud to say that...
suicide
The Combat Pilot's Dictionary By Arden Baker Boot Rookie pilot. See also - nugget. You called us ‘boots’ when we turned up to the flight deck that first morning I laid eyes on you. The halogen lighting shone down onto the makeshift parade ground with a...
deathviolencewar
Author : Cooper C. Wilms Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1010: Grifting the Zaxonite is an Escape Pod original. Grifting the Zaxonite by Cooper C. Wilms Of all the cons in his little black book, Trevor...
Once Upon a Planet By Kelsey Hutton Once upon a time, there were three boring, totally normal planets lazily circling their sun. One was too hot. It spewed out venomous flames like a firebreather with something pokey stuck in her teeth—dangerously...
Author : J. R. Dewitt Narrator : Rebecca Wei Hsieh Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 1012: Hot Bot Summer is an Escape Pod original. Contains depictions of war violence. Hot Bot Summer by J. R. Dewitt “God, these bots are...
goreviolencewar
Here Instead of There By Elizabeth Bear Waking up sick in a punk house shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody so I don’t know why it always came as a surprise to me. My head throbbed so bad I couldn’t tell the difference between the hangover, my sinus...
substance-use
Here Instead of There (Part 2 of 2) By Elizabeth Bear (... Continued from Part 1) With the launch gone, there was just one rubber dinghy with an outboard motor stowed under the floor of the hangar, along with two kayaks, a sailboard, and a jet ski in an...
Author : Elly Bangs Narrator : Christiana Ellis Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Space Pirate Queen of the Ten Billion Utopias” was first published in Lightspeed Magazine in November 2021 Copious amounts of casual strong language. This...
Author : N.K. Jemisin Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Valedictorian” was originally published in After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia. It then appeared in Escape Pod 450, and in a...
abuseviolence
The Love Pyramid: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy By Andrew Dana Hudson “What do you mean you aren’t fucking?” Rocky Cornelius demanded. “That’s terrible! This is going to throw your whole value prop out of whack!” The trio of button-cute narrative design...
Author : Marie Vibbert Narrator : Isabel J. Kim Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Knit Three, Save Four” first appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction (November 2019) Knit Three, Save Four by Marie Vibbert The ship was two days overdue for...
Baron Quits The Payloaders By Renan Bernardo This story starts with a gig. Half a million people from all corners of the galaxy, hands in the air, heads banging to our vibrant noise. You probably saw the venue on some feed already. It’s the Amplitude, our...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onepregnancy-loss
Author : Natalia Theodoridou Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks When They Come Back was originally published in Crossed Genres (Issue 22), in October 2014, and in Escape Pod Episode 550 Frank though not explicit...
body-horrorsexual-contentviolence
Author : Kal M Narrators : Valerie Valdes, Eric Valdes, Dominick Rabrun and Alasdair Stuart Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Butter Side Down originally appeared in Writers of the Future (volume 40) – May 2024. Butter Side Down (Part 1 of...
violence
Author : Kal M Narrators : Valerie Valdes, Eric Valdes, Dominick Rabrun and Alasdair Stuart Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Adam Pracht Butter Side Down originally appeared in Writers of the Future (volume 40) – May 2024. Butter Side Down (Part 2 of...
violence
Author : David DeGraff Narrator : Brian Lieberman Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Mackson’s Mardi Gras Moon Race” originally appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Mackson’s Mardi Gras Moon...
death
Author : Laura Pearlman Narrator : Laura Pearlman Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Summer Fletcher Audio Producer : Summer Brooks This story was originally published in Mothership Zeta, May 2016, and republished in Escape Pod 650: Some Things I Probably Should...
cannibalismdeathviolence
Author : Diana Wynne Jones Narrator : Emma Newman Hosts : Mur Lafferty and Alasdair Stuart Audio Producers : Adam Pracht and Mat Weller Samantha’s Diary originally appeared in Stories: All-New Tales Edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio and on Escape...
Once Abandoned By A.P. Hawkins Sappel whistled as he walked to the construction site, the sound echoing off nearby buildings in a muffled way. It was early spring, and the city was bursting with the vibrant green of new growth. Wild edibles sprouted from...
Don Ysidro (Excerpt) By Bruce Holland Rogers On that last morning, anyone who came to visit me could see that I was dying. I knew it myself. As if I had cotton in my ears, I heard the voice of don Leandro saying to my wife, “Dona Susana, I think it is time...
Author : Deborah L. Davitt Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Reflected in Mirrored Skies” was published by Compelling Science Fiction (Special Kickstarter Companion issue Nov. 6, 2018) Reflected in Mirrored Skies...
death
Author : Deborah L. Davitt Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Reflected in Mirrored Skies” was published by Compelling Science Fiction (Special Kickstarter Companion issue Nov. 6, 2018) Mentions of sexual assault...
deathsexual-violenceviolence
Oak Hill Lane By Alasdair Stuart The day the world ended, Scotch picked a fight. Not that there was much choice. Two fellow Canary Detailers, heads full of redtop bigotry and guts full of Tesco beer, had jumped Scotch’s work partner Billy the previous week...
homophobiaviolence
Author : Merc Fenn Wolfmoor Narrator : Joe Moran Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Steadyboi After the Apocalypse” first appeared in the collection Friends For Robots: Stories by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (Robot Dinosaur Press, 2022) Steadyboi...
illness-and-pandemic
Peace by Piece By Erin Cairns Frank thought all the battle-drones had been deactivated. Certainly, none of them had ever looked around with curious little twitches of their front-facing cameras before. This one whirred and clicked like an anxious bird,...
Author : Dale Smith Narrator : Louise Ratcliffe Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Joy” was previously published in Interzone Digital (June 2023) Joy by Dale Smith Joy knelt on the promenade, shifting the rifle into her shoulder to get a...
Twilight By Lilly Harper Like the tide going out, the dream slipped between her toes and carried with it the smell of petrichor and the sound of birdsong. Even without knowing she was dreaming, she had known she was waking up; the subliminal chatter of her...
Author : Holly Schofield Narrator : Kae Mills Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “The Robot Whisperer” first appeared in Fighting for the Future cyberpunk-solarpunk anthology in 2023 The Robot Whisperer by Holly Schofield Emilia heard the...
Imperial By Jonathon Sullivan (Excerpt) Dennis blinked through his dripping eyelashes at the irresistible abomination seated on the blue-green grass two meters in front of him. The Pig smiled her bio-engineered leopard-smile at him and kept her right hand...
Author : Ryan Cole Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 985: The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace is an Escape Pod original. The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo...
death-of-a-loved-onehomophobia
Author : Hiron Ennes Narrator : Tatiana Grey Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 986: Lyra, From Many Angles is an Escape Pod original. Lyra, From Many Angles by Hiron Ennes When they came, it was in a craft the size of a golf...
In the Palace of Science (Part 1 of 2) By Chris Campbell Track One– If you’ve found this recording, two things can be said for certain. The first is that I have passed my greatest test as a man and, in doing so, have passed from this world. The second is...
racismwar
In the Palace of Science (Part 2 of 2) By Chris Campbell (...Continued from Part 1) B-Side Track Five– The automaton was unfinished, but even in a transitory state, it was a thing of marvel. In form, it was like a man. With two legs meant for bipedal...
deathsubstance-useviolence
Holding Patterns By Jennifer Hudak I dream about the trees sometimes. I think we all do, even though none of my generation were alive when the forest was actually growing. We don’t dream about them the way they are now—stunted and dormant—but the way they...
Author : Serah Eley Narrator : Paul S. Jenkins Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “The Malcontent” was originally published in Escape Pod 50 (April 2006) The Malcontent by Serah Eley Finally Nicholas summoned his overseers and all other...
Author : P. A. Cornell Narrator : Isabel J. Kim Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 991: After the Rain is an Escape Pod original. After the Rain by P. A. Cornell I love a heavy summer storm. I love it when the rain falls so...
Nerves Into Circuits By Lyra Meurer Metal arms descend to press skin-soft conductor strips over my shoulders. The Neurasuit has been in warming mode for a few minutes–my overwrought senses accept the lines of heat like a gift. Despite my anxiety for the...
body-horrorsuicideviolence
Author : T. Kingfisher Narrator : Kevin M. Hayes Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 993: That Thing With Bob and the Crop Circles is an Escape Pod original. That Thing With Bob and the Crop Circles by T. Kingfisher So last...
This, My Body By Jeremiah Tolbert I am the lover. I am the chef. I am the preterite priest. I am the secret, unknowable ingredient. You may taste me a thousand times, but never hold my essence on your tongue or capture it in your memory. I am the flavor of...
Author : Alexis Ames Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Sanctuary” first appeared in Kyanite Press, Winter 2020 Sanctuary (Part 1) by Alexis Ames 1. The king of the galaxy died the day before the biggest holiday of...
violence
Author : Alexis Ames Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Sanctuary” first appeared in Kyanite Press, Winter 2020 Don’t miss “Sanctuary, Part 1” Sanctuary (Part 2) by Alexis Ames 3. Eilan slept for thirteen...
The Carina Nebula By Kelsey Hutton I heard the soft shit shit shit just when I’d almost floated past the blue hatch door that led into some kind of storage room. I had to laugh. I mean, how many times have I said that? Plus the voice sounded older, a...
Eros, Philia, Agape (Excerpt) By Rachel Swirsky The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. “Take whatever you want,” she said, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad...
child-abuse
“Novel of the White Powder” first appeared in The Three Impostors in 1895. C/W: drug abuse, delusions The Angels of Mons: The Bowmen and Other Legends of the War by Arthur Machen The Angel of Mons Jess Nevins on The Novel of The White Powder White Lines by...
body-horrordeathsubstance-use
PseudoPod 1001: A Coven of Cats Under the Light of the Moon and The Halloween Parade is a PseudoPod original. C/W: implied animal harm (Coven) On this night, we escaped from our homes—we darted through the open doors, we leaped over the privacy fences, we...
animal-harmgoreviolence
“The Squatters” originally appeared in the 2025 Anthology, Silk and Sinew C/W for mass graves, genocide The government begins excavating the bones in late February to coincide with the events planned to commemorate the massacre. It is meant to gesture that...
child-deathgenocidewar
“House Traveler” originally appeared in Bourbon Penn #34, Dec. 2024 and is reprinted in Thomas Ha’s debut collection, “Uncertain Sons and Other Stories” C/W: alludes to alcoholism The five of us were gathered on the floor of one of the last houses, trying...
body-horrordeathviolence
“Madame Painte: For Sale” was first published in Behold! Oddities, Curiosities and Undefinable Wonders, edited by Doug Murano (Crystal Lake 2017), and then in the Word Horde collection ‘Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions’, in August 2025. C/W: 2nd...
body-horrordeath
“Do It” was first published in the anthology ‘120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era’ C/W: gun violence, knife violence Note from author: The pizza joint in the story is based on a locally (local to me) famous spot in Boston’s South...
deathsuicideviolence
PseudoPod 1006: Give A Dog A Bone is a PseudoPod original. From author: “Give A Dog A Bone” is the third story in the series of tales following the exploits of a married couple of werewolves whose relationship is under some unusual stresses. Both of the...
goreviolence
“The Children of the Event” was first published in the collection ‘Portraits of Decay’ by Carson Winter, published by Salt Heart Press in June 2025. To support us during our year-end campaign, go to escapeartists.net/support-ea Notes from the author: As...
deathgoreviolence
“Cyanide Constellations” was published in the collection Cyanide Constellations and Other Stories by Sara Tantlinger in October 2025. C/W: Suicide, 2nd person PoV To support us during our year-end campaign, go to https://escapeartists.net/support-ea...
body-horrorchild-deathsuicide
‘Christmas Eve at Beach House’ was first published in Routledge’s Christmas Annual, 1870. C/W murder, intimate partner violence To support us during our year-end campaign, go to https://escapeartists.net/support-ea The Oldhammer Fiction Podcast Eliza Lynn...
abusedeathviolence
“The Old Lady” first appeared in the 1929 collection of ghost stories, Randall’s Round Penda’s Fen Void Merch Hot Singles In Your Area Adela Young must have come up to Oxford at the same time as myself; but no one, in a way, knew that she had. She was one...
child-deathdeathviolence
“Dead Mabelle” first appeared in the 1929 collection Joining Charles and Other Stories CW: Allusions to suicide The sudden and horrible end of Mabelle Pacey gave her a publicity with the European press worth millions to J. and Z. Gohigh of Gohigh Films...
deathmental-illnesssuicide
“The Shout” was first published in a limited edition chapbook, The Woburn Books #16, 1929. Jamie Oliver’s controversial children’s book has shone a spotlight on the importance of sensitivity readers Jamie Oliver pulls ‘offensive’ children’s book from sale...
deathmental-illnessracism
“Powers Of Darkness” was first published in Collier’s, March 30, 1929. CW: Use of racial slurs as well as sexism and misogyny Beau Geste, Russel’s best known work was adapting this for the screen. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness Nickerson, R.M., failed in...
misogynyracismviolence
“Mummy” first appeared in Weird Tales, November 1929 The Old Lady The Shout Power of Darkness Them Jones Boys Nathan Drake Lara Croft I have always prided myself on being a practical man; prosaic, if you will. In the old days the boys used to call me the...
PseudoPod 961: Body Heat is a PseudoPod original. C/W: death of a family member, cancer From the author: ‘Body Heat’ was inspired by a reoccurring dream during a 3-week solo expedition in the mountains. Void Merch Hot Singles In Your Area The river is...
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
“Hemorrhage” was originally published in the Book of Queer Saints Volume 2 CW: self-harm, drug abuse, addiction, physical abuse and coercive control It’s a dumb fight to pick, but I only learn that later. By the time they drag me out the back door of the...
abuseself-harmsubstance-use
“The Darkness Carried by the Beasts” was originally published in The Sunday Morning Transport in 2023. CW: cancer, death of a family member From the author: This story came to me, at first, with the image of a man and his dog in the woods, somewhere in...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
PseudoPod 965: The Ecstasy of the Saints is a PseudoPod original. CW: body horror; self-harm From the author: I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school through the seventh grade. That meant I spent three days a week in church, plus Sunday mass with...
body-horrorself-harmsexual-content
“Fat Betty” originally appeared in Shock Totem Issue 8 in 2014 From the author: “The story is meant to be set in a slightly dystopian near-future.” Fat Betty Listed Monuments The Watchers Ghost Stories The Woman in Black They say it’s God’s own country,...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 967: Two’s Company, Three Might Be A Sign of Demonic Possession is a PseudoPod original. CW: Intimate partner death; Second person point of view Also narrated by Pine Gonzalez: A Relationship in Four Haircuts, by Ai Jiang Tales from the Fringes...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
PseudoPod 968: The Vibrations, Louder is a PseudoPod original. Insanity? Sure, why not. My lawyer advised me to plead insanity, and maybe it will help me. At least I’ll be able to talk to somebody qualified. The state of mental health care is deplorable in...
deathgoreviolence
First published in Opportunity in 1925. When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its zenith, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston’s short story “Spunk” was...
deathviolence
PseudoPod 970: At the God Show is a PseudoPod original. 6:15 A.M. “It’ll be Pternoch the Fisher,” Sheila overheard one pilgrim say to another. “Why did we bother coming?” “May the Green Damsel stitch your mouth shut until your blasphemies cease,” said the...
cannibalismdeathviolence
“Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight” originally appeared in Sleeping Under the Tree of Life and was reprinted in Sycorax’s Daughters Hounds of Tindalos Strange Things Happen at the 1-2 Point Sarah Conner Chronicles Sarah Conner...
body-horrordeath
This story originally appeared in Splatterlands in 2013 under the title “The Artist” ART: The quality or expression or performance of that which is pleasing to the senses; that which is raised to more than ordinary importance. ARTIST: One who produces art....
cannibalismgoremisogyny
PseudoPod 973: Flash on the Borderlands LXXIII: Perpetuation is a PseudoPod original. Shallow Fangs: C/W for second-person PoV “The First Mrs. Edward Rochester Would Like a Word”- From the author: “Many readers want better for the attic wife from Jane...
abuseanimal-harmviolence
“The Half-Pint Flask” was first published in The Bookman, May 1927 Racism https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/what-is-gullah-geechee-food-and-how-do-you-make-it...
racism
PseudoPod 975: James Courtney Goes Home is a PseudoPod original. Get Out The personal effects of the late Mr. James Courtney found their way to me some months after his passing, once the stipulations of his will had been addressed and the remainder of his...
racism
PseudoPod 976: Every Last Gossamer Strand is a PseudoPod original. CW: narcissism, family abuse and especially spiders. C.J. Dotson’s upcoming novel, The Cut Jess Lewis’s website Brene Brown: When Narcissists Get Older Fleetwood Mac, The Chain The high...
abusebody-horrorcannibalism
“The Fruits Of” originally appeared in the online Spring 2024 edition of Club Chicxulub CW: dementia, death of a family member and suicidal ideation. They’d long since passed the point where road gave way to trail gave way to forest. Bright green ferns now...
death-of-a-loved-onemental-illnesssuicide
PseudoPod 978: Where the Brass Band Plays is a PseudoPod original. CW: environmental horror, parent loss; grief, reality vs. illusion, nostalgia, willful blindness From the author: “This story grew out of the feeling that we live in an increasingly...
death-of-a-loved-one
“Old Things are Meant to Be Found and Shared” first appeared as “Of Lovecraft and ‘He’” in The Book of Starry Wisdom. “The Secret in the Tomb” originally appeared in the May 1935 issue of Weird Tales. From Leanna Renee Hieber: “Much like the introduction...
body-horrordeathgore
“Jesus Christ in Georgia” was printed in The Crisis in the 1911 Christmas issue. It later appeared as “Jesus Christ in Texas” in Darkwater: Voices from the Veil. Use of the n-word 2010 interview with author Edward J. Blum about his 2008 book, W. E. B....
deathracismviolence
“Nesters” originally appeared in the anthology Lovecraft’s Children CW: Animal death They killed the last calf that morning. Ma wanted to hold off, give the poor thing a chance, but Pa said it were cruel to let a body live like that. He cracked the hammer...
animal-harmbody-horrordeath
“The Shambler from the Stars” first appeared in Weird Tales, September 1935 I have nobody but myself to blame for the whole affair. It was my own blundering that precipitated that unforeseen horror upon us both; my own stupidity that caused our downfall....
deathgoreviolence
“The Haunter of the Dark” first appeared in Weird Tales, December 1936 CW: xenophobia H.P. Lovecraft The Horror of the Heights Federal Hill, Providence Voluminous: The Letters of HP Lovecraft Episode 82 Lovecraftian horror — and the racism at its core —...
body-horrordeathracism
“Grave Worms” originally appeared in Cassilda’s Song: Tales Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos an anthology edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. The grey flannel suit might have looked masculine on the rack, or on another woman, but the close...
mental-illnesssexual-content
“Think of Me” was first published in the anthology DARK RAINBOW: QUEER EROTIC HORROR (Riverdale Ave., 2018) CW: explicit sex, self-harm, transphobia, body horror, S&M kink Strange Darling Sasha and Taylor are fucking and Sasha is thinking about me. She...
self-harmsexual-contenttransphobia
“The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs” originally appeared in Bourbon Penn, and will appear in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best Horror #16 C/W: death by drowning In the predawn dark, Annie found herself in a bed, holding onto another hand beneath the cool...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 987: Reflections on Bloody Mary is a PseudoPod original. CW: domestic abuse, coercive control, alcoholism The Pixel Project, https://www.thepixelproject.net, has a list of shelters worldwide “Maaa-reee,” my husband taunts. “Oh, Maaa-reee. Come...
abusesubstance-useviolence
PseudoPod 988: Anthropology 201 is a PseudoPod original. C/W: references to mental illness, second-person PoV College is a crucible. You go in a dumb kid, and with luck, you leave a less dumb adult, ready to take your place in the world. It took me a...
goremental-illnessviolence
“Dimorphism” first appeared in SEASONS OF SEVERANCE, an anthology-collection hybrid published by Cemetery Gates Media in 2023. “Dimorphism” was later mentioned as a standout in the Summation section of The Best Horror of the Year Vol. 16. The short story...
animal-harmbody-horrormental-illness
PseudoPod 990: Hearts and Half-Measures is a PseudoPod original. C/W: · Transphobia · Body horror · Murder · Gore · Grief · Death of a parent · Cannibalism From the author: The Manananggal (“self-segmenter” – the creature in this story) is a Filipino...
body-horrorgoretransphobia
PseudoPod 991: The Hermit Crab God is a PseudoPod original. C/W: harm to animals, mental illness Notes from the author: I recently spoke with a nature photographer who was very passionate about hermit crabs, and he made me want to not give up. I suppose...
animal-harmbody-horrormental-illness
PseudoPod 992: Chattering Spines is a PseudoPod original. C/W immolation, guns, animal harm From the author: Oh Spines. I wrote this while at a writing conference called Superstars Writing Seminars back in February of 2022 after attending a session run by...
animal-harmgoreviolence
“Home, Laced in Web” was previously published by The Dodge on July 15, 2024 C/W: mutation, body horror, spiders I follow behind Butcher. A lot of nights spent imagining what I’d say to him. But there’s not been much talk on the road. Pretty used to silence...
body-horrorgoreviolence
“The Bride” was originally published in Black Static in 2020 C/W necrophilia, sexual assault, physical assault, control As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared. A wet, eager heat,...
abusesexual-contentsexual-violence
“Data Ghost” originally appeared in Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology When the station stats popped up on the screen, the Interface said, Anomalous. Deni batted at their ear and muttered, “No, no, quit it.” In the second cockpit seat, Winnie...
body-horrordeathgore
“The Suitable Surroundings” was first published in the San Francisco Examiner, July 14, 1889 “The Resurrection of Chilton Hills” first appeared in Harper’s Monthly Magazine in October 1929. C/W: suicide (The Suitable Surroundings) Ben Phillips’s music ?...
suicide
“The Wind Beneath” originally appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly “They Still Haven’t Found Stevie” has previously been featured on the No Sleep Podcast “Precious Darlings” originally appeared in Bag of Bones: This is Too Tense C/W: pandemic, mass death;...
child-abusechild-deathgore
PseudoPod 998: The Story-Stealer’s Night is a PseudoPod original. C/Ws from author: Body horror, creature horror, brief suicidal ideation, cancer, child abuse, child death and parent death Story-teller, Story-screamer Tell your tales into this night. The...
body-horrorchild-deathgore
‘Barghest’ was first published Modern Folklore: A Comma Press Course Anthology, in August 2025 C/W: bullying From the author: “The idea for Barghest came from reading legends surrounding the existence of mythical ‘black dogs.’ These were supernatural,...
abuseanimal-harmviolence
PseudoPod 984: Flash on the Borderlands LXXIV: Thy Shields Between Them and the Light is a PseudoPod original. “My Heart in a Snow Globe” – C/W: child death “Exposed, Every Inch Visible” – C/W: body horror “We Told You of the One Who Lives in the Mound” –...
body-horrorchild-deathdeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
mental-illnesssubstance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"You are born not long after the disaster. The city center has lain evacuated for two days by the time your mother makes her nest. She builds a small burrow from packing blankets, rags, her own sinewy body behind a row of waste containment units, and you...
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-one
"We used to cage them in the tide pools, when they were still small enough to capture in our little hands. Pull them out and snap photos that we could pretend to sell to magazines just like Papa. Them, gasping for breath, unable to see, fins fluttering. We...
abusebody-horrordeathviolence
"Now that I’ve failed as a woman, my punishment is to become a garden. I receive the verdict on a Sunday evening. They’re supposed to give you advance notice so you can put your affairs in order, but the letter is postmarked from more than a month ago—I’ve...
body-horrorpregnancy-loss
"The campsite looks like it wants to eat them. A fire pit yawns in the middle, an ashy-grey mouth ringed by rocks like rotting teeth. The trees crowd in, sizing them up, knifing the daylight. One gulp of that smoke-and-pine air, and Henry shudders head to...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"I was kinda worried about being the new kid, but apparently new kids are cool here. This guy named Scott Marsh who seems pretty popular and has a good jump shot was really nice to me, so the other guys were nice to me, too. I think maybe because me and...
abusechild-abuseviolence
"The first night it was a kitchen chair set neatly on top of the polished walnut table, which the father had ordered from a luxury furniture dealer around the same time the nanny came to live with the family in the new gated tract home development, where...
abuse
"Pusetso’s research assistant lay in pieces on the floor with his head between his chest, back open, cracked solar panels splayed on the office table. A mess of tangled multicolored wires dangled from the bottom of his torso—rainbow innards. His legs, the...
violence
An engineer who frequently travels for her job, suddenly finds herself in airports other than the one she arrived in…
A comatose patient undergoes an experimental procedure that uses favorite childhood stories to pull the patient back into consciousness—but the experiment doesn’t go quite as planned…
deathviolence
"No signs protect the backyards in this part of town from the Marl Pits Forest. There’s no treeline either. Of course there isn’t. But even in the dark, you can’t really miss where the forest starts—not if you’ve lived a childhood in the wilderness here...
child-abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"Not all the ghosts of Chornobyl died in 1986. Some died years—decades—later, bodies ravaged by mutated cells. They were a hundred kilometers away, not realizing their favorite mug was doused with irradiated atoms from the destroyed reactor. I died in...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
"I met my grandfather today. He wore his usual white cotton garb: kurta buttoned up to his neck, dhoti loosely twined about his legs. The clothes were a tad frayed at the edges, and the occasional hint of brown skin when he moved betrayed a hole here and...
In celebration of the 50th World Fantasy Convention’s Toastmaster, Michael Swanwick, Reactor presents a new Mongolian Wizard story about a battle to save Paris from an unexpected new enemy.
goreviolencewar
In the small city of Mehranpur, the Nawab suspects there may be a connection between the slow wasting of a beloved tree and the fate of the city itself.
"It slips, now—I know it slips. There are men in my parlor, in uniforms, crisp navy, badged. Police. Beyond them Eveline wavers in a yellow nightgown, hands clasped to her chest, eyes wide and worried—no, no, she doesn’t, she’s not here, I’m dreaming her,...
deathmental-illnesssuicide
"If it was the first time I saw a house mourning? No, my dear. Not at all. Yet, it broke my heart to enter House and hear her parquet floor moaning, see the toilet sink weeping, feel her foundations shuddering ever so slightly. I put the plastic bags on...
death-of-a-loved-one
"The women of Dejima Island could never pinpoint when their dreams began to change, but they knew it had something to do with the tradesmen’s tales. The foreigners who arrived at the docks were hard men, chiseled by salt and wind and all the horrors of two...
"I express greetings and most joyful salutations! I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your...
"I think of you most when the sun sets on Atlas. The skies are so bright there you can feel the colors on your skin. I find myself repeating this to my granddaughter, Lila. The night she was born, I took her onto the terrace to watch the daylight roll back...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Don’t start with the birth certificate. No, take an obituary-out approach. Pick an age, a date, what to do in lieu of flowers. Yes, she must die. I know how hard it is to kill her, but the spell won’t work without it, for every story ends in death. We set...
"Well, at least we’ll finally be able to get some hours.” “Ruthless.” “I’m serious. Maybe they’ll finally be forced to make one of us full time.” “It’ll never happen. They’ll just hire another part-timer.” The two workers were in the break room. In the...
"Lately I’ve been losing track of which voice belongs to me and which voice belongs to the implant. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Groaning, I blink rapidly three times to snooze the voice—my voice?—and reach my arm over to see if the boy I met last...
"Half the girls in my grade probably fantasized about Jake Grenor suddenly taking an interest in them. But I was in the other half: the girls who knew it was too impossible to bother thinking about. It took some effort not to daydream about Jake,...
"Even with my Airpods in, I heard the kids yelling as they ran up from the dock. I bumped up the volume on my laptop and kept updating Arjun about my meeting with the FloriHealth team. I was happy my kids were feeling rambunctious on our Florida trip, but...
"Joey curled up tightly in her favorite chair to reread the message from the auditor, Peck cooing in her lap. The prismatic wings of the Pocket Model gleamed, tin peeking out from where aging feathers had fallen. “Peck, we’re in for it, aren’t we?” Her...
"She left her heart in Paris, a kidney in Berlin. In Barcelona, blinking in the sunlight, she felt tiny new ears grow down one side of her face. The sound multiplied. Vale vale vale! Rapid-fire Spanish, Catalan, Asteroid Pidgin, a robotnik beggar shaking...
body-horror
"Phil and Dierdre met on the street in that part of town known as The Crumble. They hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Her hair was bleached, her lipstick too red, and her youth hidden behind crow’s feet and wrinkles. Still, he recognized her...
"Children don’t generally assume their father will abandon them to die in the snow. But under certain circumstances, they might get an inkling. If their mother had died the year before, and their father brought home a woman with a sweet voice and cruel...
cannibalismchild-deathsexual-content
"My son can’t think of the word “spoon.” It’s there, at the tip of his tongue. The waitress looks at him with a patient smile. She can see he’s fidgeting and getting hot. A boy his age would typically know how to ask. “Could I please have another... ” But...
"Alice wants to hold a funeral for me, which is disconcerting because I’m not dead. But humans, like all aliens—and certainly all single-forms—have their own idiosyncrasies. I’m used to the idiosyncrasies, of course: I’ve lived on Earth—in my tertiary...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusegenocideviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"AT NIGHT NIOBE CAN HEAR them singing, the ghostly kinfolk inhabiting the sea. Their voices rise from the deep and swell like a chorus of baby whales threading the tremulous wind. Their eerie song makes her tremble. Her heart flutters. Her skin tingles....
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Loire Valley, 1520 Estienne’s shadow fell over me, and I could not, of a sudden, recall the stitch I was making. He had invited himself onto the ladies’ porch without announcement. Odette’s voice faltered. “Take—” She was reading from the Queen of...
misogynysexual-violence
"There are seven hundred aliens hidden in Miko’s backpack, and the Galactic Security Agent currently studying her passport (hopefully) has no clue. The agent is an alien themselves, some tentacular species with assistive devices hooked into its uniform to...
"It is two days since our original projected mission end date. We are running out of oxygen and we are trapped in the throat of a god. Technology and a prudent safety review panel have kept casualties on deep dives low, but abyssal layer dives have always...
death
"# Unit COFFEE_VENDOR.06 # Notification of new update 09:00 A.M. [Installing update_Exp.42] Process: 100% complete Self-execute (update_Exp.42); # Time of new interaction: 10:24 A.M. input: options = cappuccino; sugar = 3; if (input == (options =...
"They even took the violins. Every last one of them: Amadeus, Josephine, Mulberry, Nestor. They came into the house through the front door, guests without a host, a peculiar band of invited thieves. Plugged into my power station as a seemingly...
death-of-a-loved-one
"The sun sets again over Chang’an. The remaining light of dusk shines through thick clouds like melted gold, flowing down over the glazed tiles of the palace roofs. The first drumbeat of the evening rings out from the Cheng Tian Gate, followed by a series...
death
"Six hours left. “What do you want to eat sweetheart?” She looks at me expectantly, holding out her phone to show me the menu. “It is your special day. I’ll get you anything you want.” I smile, shake my hands. “Eomma, it’s fine. You don’t have to do this.”...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
"After we kill our father but before we leave the island, we argue. Cal doesn’t want to go; he’s afraid of the water. Even after the rest of us outvote him two to one, he refuses to move, crouching on the ground, pressing the ruined side of his face into...
abusedeathviolence
"Your payment first. The Badchen Yankel is too aged, too well-traveled, and too experienced to extend credit to an audience. Now pinch your lips and listen. It was the year of their lord 1618, and we’re two days outside Grodne when we run into the demons....
"We were waiting for the sunset, sitting on the porch of the bleak stone house that was filled up with our longing. The sky was empty. The air, when I sniffed, was cold and bleak. There were no clouds, and we knew it might be a night when we’d see what we...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicidewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathsuicideviolence
"THE HARPY HAD GIVEN HIM its egg, and so he cracked it, expecting nothing but goodness: the spilling of sunrise-gold yolk and crystalline white into the mealtime broth to help his fathers. He, Anaximander, was a good son, sixteen years old, on the...
"Have a seat, kiddo.” I’ve known Captain Mallory since I joined the force—twelve years and counting—and any time he used that nickname nothing easy followed. He closed his office door and angled his laptop toward me. “It’s about that ... incident ... with...
"Tyson sat on the dock’s end, toes dangling in the water. A bluegill or perch swam up from the bottom to inspect him, then wiggled back out of sight. His toes must have looked like fat pink worms. The dock reached thirty feet into Sun Cove Lake, but he...
"2090 It’s true, my young friends. I was there as, one by one, the first stars began winking out. And again, the horrible night when one of the brightest of them all blazed brighter still—before disappearing forever. Serious? Yes, I’m serious. Moreover, if...
"You’re asleep in dreams of your father holding your head underwater, so the call from Magnolia Assisted Living goes to voicemail. “I didn’t raise a son of mine to count on his fingers,” your father says in the dream—because ah, yes, it’s all of your worst...
abusechild-abuse
"Flyer 247-3 hasn’t flown in five days. In these five days, she has become accustomed to the hum and whine of the air filtration system cranked to its highest setting. She has become accustomed to her cell, four paces long, four paces wide. Its lack of...
"For anyone who’s used the Skip system to travel more than once or twice, delays are simply part of the process. The one following my transit to Olympus lasts longer than most. I pass the time by looking for a way to bend the causative incident behind the...
"It wasn’t a glamorous entrée into the world of the rich. Ernestine jimmied a service door and climbed forty flights of dingy, bare metal stairs to avoid the sensors in the hotel elevators. Maids and mechanics locked eyes, disapprovingly, then decided she...
"I was no friend to the god of high places, of peaks and spires and rope bridges over narrow canyons, and I had no reason to expect that he was a friend of mine. But my mother kept asking, what could it hurt to ask for his favor. What could it hurt to try....
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathgoreviolence
"ADAMANTIA DAWN SEALED the last airlock behind her and sprayed the squeeze-bulb of piss on the old security station. It washed off dust and grit and frosted-over fingerprints of monsters in uniform. Seeing as how Shining City’s final resting place would be...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Suze tried to tell herself that the busted valve was not a critical piece of equipment. Lying in the narrow space, she stared up at the complex array of pipes and conduits. The stink of oil and stagnant water surrounded her. Lay in her nostrils. She...
"He left a note. Otherwise, we would simply have paid out, and I would never have heard of Jack Thompson. Dear Gladys, Today was as perfect as it’s going to get, and this moment capped it. I’m sorry you weren’t here to see it—but today’s sunset is one of...
"Maestro Sezan Mistro was sweating, despite the temperature in the hall, as he stepped onto the podium for the sound check. There was a lot riding on this concert. Armandi Tylo, in uneasy partnership with the Federated Governments of Earth, had spent a...
"Susan Rose stands alone, save for me and a photographer, on the currently sun-facing side of Mars. She has a paintbrush in her right hand and a heated, vacuum-sealed bag of water in her left. The 60x90cm canvas in front of her is tied down to an aluminum...
"Lovey’s tried almost everything for the panic attacks. Everything but getting Bestie’s memory implanted, and she’s not sure she can deal. Even looking at the framed photo is ordinarily too much. Lovey brings it out for five minutes on Bestie’s death...
"Can someone get the doors? Thanks. Please remember we’re on an honor system for chairs—if you’ve eaten today, please leave them for someone who hasn’t. We don’t need another fainting incident. First of all, if you’re looking for a technical look at...
"Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a...
deathracismviolence
"A syringe with a magnetite needle that would frighten even the boldest of souls. A torture device. But for my sister Kata, it would be a piece of the divine that shouldn’t be on the Aldarish Society Museum for Byrnyan Culture. That pretty much sums up how...
"Driver, gharivala, beta, bhai-jaan, baba. All the words used to address me; so rarely do I remember being addressed by my name. Not to complain. I don’t think people ever meant to be disrespectful. But having someone to respectfully, lovingly,...
"Elodie finds a pair of old opera glasses in the empty husk of an abandoned silo. The gleam of the metal catches her flashlight beam and throws it back, and Elodie squats and fishes out the glasses with tentative fingers. The silo is huge and dark around...
"Joy catches my eye, shuffles my direction. Her face lights the dining room. Her curly gray hair is the sun’s corona, and she seems to float above her walker, needless of her stiff little legs. In seeming slow motion she arrives at the seat across from me....
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"You’re not meant to fix what happens in the time loops. Doctor’s orders, and that comes even before they give you the survey and the spiel and the confidentiality speech. The psych fiddles with his tablet in his cozy, yellow-couch office, and talks to you...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"The man in the navy Cosmo Corp suit calls it Self-Reconciliation Therapy, this place they’ve dumped you, where the walls are made of mirrors. But they aren’t mirrors, are they? Sure, you raise a hand, and the woman in the not-mirror waves. God, her...
child-abuseself-harmsexual-content
"Deng Baolin is my paternal aunt, my father’s little sister. Dad says Auntie was beautiful when she was young, with a bright-eyed gaze, pure yet alluring, and a slender, curving waist. When happy, her face was like springtime. When sorrowful, she was like...
"In the belly of the ship, the Machinist toiled. Beyond the walls of her workshop, ships of dark metal pursued her across the Atlantic, their hulls unaffected by the gnashing teeth of thunderstorms. Lightning flashed horizontally across the bay. Those dark...
deathviolence
"He is King Lear in the window’s sunshine. There is pastina boiling on the stove in a kitchen as familiar as his soul. Mad monologues push against his fogged oxygen mask, vibrating with his tremoring lips, his ragged breathing, the impossible weight of the...
body-horror
"The sketch showed a young woman, her face a perfect oval, holding our base in her cupped hands. Behind her head, Saturn hung golden within its halo of rings. That was the first sign that religion had come with us to Enceladus. I had risen early in the...
death
"Morag took her walking stick and set out on the Portmeirion Road. Portmeirion was behind her and she was walking back towards Pen-y-Groes, so she supposed she should call it the Pen-y-Groes Road. But Portmeirion, with all its beautiful, seductive,...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
racism
"I watch the King sleep beside me and worry over the rapid movements behind her eyelids. The air in the bedroom smells faintly of something burning. My mouth is dry—I wet my lips and hold my breath so as not to disturb my King’s sleep. I can hardly see the...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"This is the eighth floor of the Al-Ahli Memorial Library, my favorite place in the building. When the elevator door opens, it’s like walking into a quiet circle of glass. So, as we walk, I’m going to whisper. People are reading, writing, drawing—it’s such...
child-deathdeathwar
"Here at 123aiLOVEu, we take all the guesswork out of dating. With personalized chatbots trained on social media and chat histories, we put you in conversation with hundreds of potential matches... and you never have to say a thing! Sandra was watching the...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it. Samantha Finnes was a minor...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"On the high plains of Kansas in a tiny town worn down by drought, I stop at a roadside diner. When I ask for water, the waitress pours me a glass of ice water, presenting it with obvious pride. “We have our own well,” she says. “And the wind turbine on...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Scarlett’s eyes had to be perfect. Jon was the artist who’d made her, so it bothered him to think that so much of Scarlett would be crafted by other people. Scarlett’s limbs were carved from silicon polymer and coated in a soft synthetic skin from the...
body-horrorsexual-contentviolence
"Nate doesn’t often receive wedding invitations. This year, he gets seven. To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of...
death
"If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a...
abuse
"So, hear nah. This is how it happen. Was years after Malcolm pass through and wash away a lot ah we little islands coasts, and mash up so much ah Florida and Texas and them places, and people say they ain’t waiting for no next storm like that one, and...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Kharatet moistens his sightless eyes with his tongue as he draws his finger across the limestone tablet glyphs. His audience today is a clutch of toddling nymphs, motionless save for their short tails rippling the shallow water impatiently. It’s a good...
cannibalismdeathgore
"Posit a man. He could be any man. She could be a woman. They could be any human being anywhere on the spectrum. The story would play out the same. This is, however, entirely the creation of a writer who has written plenty of formidable women, and so he...
"Finneus Lark finds the man nestled inside of the abdominal cavity of a doe, his skin so pale that his veins are like spiderwebs. Slick with visceral fluid, leaves and petals cling to the man’s bird-boned wrists. His face, haloed by damp curls and crowned...
"The last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next to her holding her waist in the space between his...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Deep in the abyss of the Unholy Bazaar, in a shop that reeked of death and god-blood, Sparrow lay screaming in a web of rope and unbreakable silk. Around her, the Aunties bustled: sawing and rinsing and hammering; cursing, grunting, and muttering; welding...
body-horrorgoreviolence
"I am running out of Words. I stumble down the temple steps, clutching my wounded side. I had been too slow to use my fourth Word and the prison guard’s spear had drawn blood before he choked to death under the weight of my suffocation spell."
abusedeathviolence
"It’s my twelfth birthday and we’re all waiting for Wormwood and everyone is here and I mean everyone. Me and Mom and Dad and Big Pa which is my grandpa who was the strong man at one of the last traveling carnivals in America, and Bigfoot of course, and a...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"One hundred and eighty days. Today was it—the longest Annie had ever managed to stay at one job. The last time she had texted Charlie, it was to tell her “Charlie” was the name of a bomb and “Annie” was the name of another—this hadn’t gone as well as she...
illness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
"She should go back inside the watchpod. Maree and Blaise didn’t have to be dead. The air hadn’t been gone that long. And even if their current bodies were hopeless, damaged beyond repair, probably the back-up system was uncorrupted. Probably its uploads...
body-horrorgoresexual-content
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horror
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusebody-horrordeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Dead gods,” says Aunte Gull as she heaves the shimmering nets, “are almost as useless as live ones.” We work together, numb to the sea cold. We haul our catch back to shore, and I save my breath for work, knowing my aunte’s way of speaking. She is...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathracismviolence
"Half-painted in the angled mirror, I ignore my mother’s calls and sweep blush onto my temples. The face of Luz Divinity takes shape beneath my brush. My mother tries again as I tug a wig onto my shaved head, the unit sleek and long, and again as I zip a...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
A photographer’s obsession with an unsettled subject exposes two friends to a darkness that won’t be contained by frames…
child-deathsuicideviolence
An AI car is caught between its ruthless employer and the people she hurt…
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-deathdeathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathillness-and-pandemic
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Black Quadrangle, Mesolithic era Unknown Charcoal on sandstone This work, created c. 15,000 BC (17,000 AS), precedes earliest surviving written texts. It was rediscovered alongside human remains and burnt carbon deposits, suggesting a role in a burial,...
"When I leave home at seventeen, my mother tells me three things. Not to care too much. To keep my gift a secret. And to get used to being alone. “You’ll see what it’s like,” she says. “Out there in the real world.” None of this is good advice."
"I spent my first summer as an orphan watching cicadas fuck, scream, and molt. Wasn’t long before I plucked one of the cicada skins from the dry village soil. I brushed it clean against my secondhand clothes I was already beginning to outgrow. Dappled by...
body-horrorgoresexual-content
"The alert comes screaming in on Jana’s implant, bright light lancing through the fog of REM sleep: [New glyph. Intersection of 148th and Cliffton.] When her eyes snap open, it’s there, the only thing fully in focus. A blurry image of the yet-untitled...
"You don’t go gettin’ police robots to chase you through the Westside because you want to have fun. But the excitement that Tariq felt at the thought of this challenge … He’d outrun actual cops. He’d outrun the wheeled robots they called “The Chris Browns”...
"The Lightning Road cuts far across the Cosmos, a streak of dazzling gold amidst the star-studded void. Paved in otherworldly stone, the road climbs over sleeping giants, past ringed planets and frozen worlds, connecting one unknown to the next. Xiaofei...
war
"A whale soars over Brooklyn. Clouds spread in streaks over the pale blue sky like cold butter. And the whale cleaves right through. Dar spots it from his perch on the rooftop, smoking a contraband cigarette. At first, it looks like the whale is just...
body-horrorgore
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-deathdeath
A post-human civilization of synthetic beings, fixated on the concept of children, grapples with the meaning of life…after life ceases to exist.
body-horrordeath
There is a woman, and she is a man’s wife. Please give her name. Call her whatever you’d like.
abusebody-horrorviolence
"Thuận Lộc stared at the cup. It was dark, and mottled with the characteristic patterning of silver-eye fungus. The tea inside was trembling—the faint vibrations from the Mausoleum, the dead ships’ atrophied motors that would never again allow them to...
child-abuseviolence
"The tenth time Jakey broke the rules, he put a sandwich in the mailbox where the window boy could get it. Mom had taken her sleep-quick pills and gone to bed after dinner, on account of her headaches. And Dad was dozing in front of the TV, chin on his...
abusebody-horrorchild-abusedeathviolence
Commander Niaja vrau Erezeng is up against an enemy that doesn’t just destroy all the beings, ships, and planets in its path, but also consumes their greatest arts, scratching them from existence everywhere…
deathwar
A man is offered the opportunity to partake in an exclusive, subscription-based eating club for those who wish to dine on human flesh. But he may have bitten off a little more than he can chew.
cannibalismgoreviolence
There are worse things than a local gangster’s cronies lurking in New Jersey’s wetlands…
deathsubstance-useviolence
A weary resilience worker should know better than anyone: no one is safe when the world is always ending…
death
When the waters rose, the people who stayed on the River learned they weathered the storms best together, but what happens when one of their own becomes curious about the Land?
A Russian émigré poet living in Paris is visited by a mysterious bear with an agenda…
Prosperity City’s corrupt mayor never guessed his greatest opponent would be a fire-breathing dragon and her unconventional platform…
violence
A deluxe riverboat welcomes the galaxy's wealthiest tourists to the drought-ridden Amazon — but no one's seen her mysterious captain. "The Maiden Voyage of the Piranha Belle" is a flash exploration of colonization and survival. Content warnings:...
deathgoreviolence
"June was the first of my friends to get into it. This isn’t surprising—she was playing Wordle for weeks before Margo or I discovered it. When we met up for our weekly lunch, she kept checking her phone and I assumed it was some new game. Then she put it...
substance-use
While all her friends’ fish are changing into mermaids, is 12-year-old Anissa’s fish becoming something else?
death-of-a-loved-one
"On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont."
war
"The following documents have been uncovered by the Bromley Independent with regards to recent events at the local cemetery: the unofficial statements of Mr. Cyril Harris, city councilman; the recently discovered journals of Miss Celia Smith; letters from...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Darius sells three pocket robots on the first Tuesday of October, and another three on Wednesday. At this rate he’ll be able to pay for his legs by Christmas. He does lose one robot to theft: someone figures out how to jimmy open the door of the display...
Feng, once indentured to the university in return for her studies, accompanies the Professor who bought her debt to the mountains. There, they expect to find a rare and tragic treasure: a dead dragon. This is Part 2 of "Dragonsworn" by L. Chan, the first...
deathviolencewar
In the near future, the corpse inside the abandoned deep-sea submersible Blue Cube becomes another landmark of the Challenger Deep. Content warning: Mentions of death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Prema Arasu, edited by Kanika Agrawal. Audio...
body-horrordeath
A ghost of the dead daughter visits the musician every night. Together, they compose their masterpiece of grief. Content warning: Death of a child Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Sofia Ezdina, edited by Kanika Agrawal. Audio edition read by Olga...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
An unnamed narrator takes an unusual journey home. "Homeland in Verse" by Naomi Day explores loss both, individual and diasporic, and what it means to arrive home when home is a concept you've forgotten. Content warning: Intensive body modification...
death
Countryboy T loses their home after the deaths of their parents. Luckily, the cats have been in charge all along. Content warnings: Institutionalization, sanism, ableism, family death, animal death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by [sarah] Cavar,...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onemental-illness
The unsettling arrival of war and how hope in tales pass from generation to generation. Content warnings: War, orphans, implied trauma due to armed conflict, death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Tania Chen, edited by Aleksandra Hill. Audio...
deathwar
Come one, come all! Witness the fall of a despot alongside the glorious rebirth of one heavenly beast in "RAIN FIRE CLOUD" by Caroline Hung. Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Caroline Hung , edited by Zhui Ning Chang. Audio edition read by Sam Yeow,...
deathgoreviolence
The defiant notes of a bass guitar ignite a city's fight against tyrants through the raw magic of music. Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Rodrigo Culagovski, edited by Zhui Ning Chang. Audio edition read by Sam Cavalcanti and produced by Lian Xia...
slaveryviolence
A daughter living overseas visits her mother. Their time is counted in recipes, familiar yet growing ever stranger. Content warning: Death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Diana Dima, edited by Aleksandra Hill. Audio edition read by Rebecca Jensen...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Years after the terrifying dictator of a small island nation has been deposed, a native bartender tells his side of history to an unsuspecting tourist. Content warning: Mentions of death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Desiree Winns, edited by...
deathslaveryviolence
In Armenian folklore, all werewolves are women. Cursed, punished, feared, shunned. But that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, does it, dear? Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Jolie Toomajan, edited by Aleksandra Hill. Audio edition read by...
body-horrorviolence
"Trees Can Have My Soul; In Return, Let Me Have My Grief" asks what a mother tongue is when survival requires assimilation. Content warnings: Mild body horror, grief, death of a parental figure, racism Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Rukman Ragas,...
death-of-a-loved-one
"When We Make it to Bet-Zelem" is a profound meditation on hope and what it means to seek something that may no longer exist. Content warnings: War, violence, starvation, mass killing, animal death, displaced persons Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story...
deathviolencewar
After learning the true history of her land, a young woman returns to her isolated hometown to dispel the propaganda they were told. "Child's Tongue" interrogates our silences and complicity in colonial narratives. Content warnings: Sexual harassment,...
misogynyracism
An endless beam of light arrives and splits the sky. In the turmoil following the resulting global EMP, aging immigrant Demetri's family collapses and he must grapple for a place in a shattered world. Content warnings: References to the death of a child...
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
The Wolf is Piroska's sister, and they play with bombs in the backyard of their new home. Is Piroska wolf enough to survive? Content warnings: Threat of violence, imagined bodily injury Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Varju Izzy, edited by Kanika...
war
A family living under oppression hides their magic in a song passed down the generations. Take Up Thy Mother's Song is a story about when to choose survival and when to fight back, and when these are one and the same. Content warnings: Graphic violence,...
deathviolencewar
What happens when you come home and home is in pieces, and everyone is gone? Here, unruly spirits and old memories are dredged up in this act of reclaiming and healing. Content warnings: Depictions of the aftermath of war, indirect mentions of death...
death-of-a-loved-onewar
Someone has to be the best at something, and when a new technology begets a new sport, it may as well be her. Content warnings: Knife violence, blood, death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by E. A. Xiong, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition...
deathgoreviolence
Peace (Filipino, Scorpio, middle child) encounters Leon, a shapeshifter. Leon's inability to commit to one form challenges Peace's concept of identity during a time when her professional reputation and cultural authenticity have come into question. Content...
mental-illnessracism
A young scientist struggles to find purpose in life after being left behind by those fleeing a post-apocalyptic Earth. Content warnings: Suicide and suicidal ideation, death, and animal death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Madeleine Vigneron,...
deathgoreviolence
A Croat refugee comes to terms with his trauma through studying metaphorical maps to his own lostness. Content warnings: Graphic wartime violence and implied torture, death of friends and strangers, hateful language directed at ethnic groups, mental...
deathgenocidewar
A family vacation in the mountains takes a weird turn when they are forced to choose what to bring and what to leave behind. Content warnings: Violence, war, animal cruelty, death, intergenerational trauma Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Leslie...
child-deathdeathgenocide
"A Little Like Sap, a Bit Like a Tree" by Natalia Theodoridou is a story about a transmasc nursing birds, based on true events. Content warnings: Blood, breastfeeding, loss of a child (not shown) Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Natalia...
child-deathmental-illnesssexual-content
Nuran struggles with her mental health and an abusive household. Is escape possible with a voice down the well? Content warnings: Mental Illness, death Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Esra Kahya, translated from Turkish by Aysel K. Basci, edited...
abusechild-abusesexual-violence
"In the Age of Fire" by Ana Rüsche follows the journey of a boy from Panama to the United States, through the immigration crisis and the climate crisis, to meet creatures from future generations in the caldera of a volcano. Content warnings: Discrimination...
deathillness-and-pandemicracism
Rival figure skaters use dangerous body modification technology to outperform each other in the rink. Content warnings: Racism Copyright khōréō magazine 2024. Story by Claire Jia-Wen, edited by Zhui Ning Chang. Audio edition read by Lauren Choo and...
My entry into her apartments teeters entirely on this precarious pair of facts; one, I am small; and two, I am armed with Mother’s message.
animal-harmbody-horrorchild-abuse
He craned his neck, trying to see above their spiked shoulder pads and fitted caps. At the door, security gods brandished assault rifles.
deathviolence
We drive iron nails through my sister's feet and into the dusty floorboards below to keep her from flying away.
abusebody-horrorchild-abuse
That’s the question Damon (Earth-X) and Marissa (Earth-Y) were tasked with answering, but they were busy eye-fucking each other.
I’ll always wonder: did the Timeless come here for the Bog? Or did the Bog come here for them?
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
"There’s nothing quieter than the sound of dreams not coming true. The moment when reality sinks in and Gwen realizes she’s never going to have the one thing she’s been yearning for since high school—the thing she made so much space in her life to...
"I was finishing the last of my nightly coffee when the nineteen-seventies twins approached my table and asked me to bear witness to their disappearance. This was not an unusual request at Cafe Liminalité, being the locale of patrons that dreamed too much...
death
"Episode 60 Transcription by @jbutler22 0:01 Murray: Hey there, I’m Dean Murray and this is a special episode of Homewrecker. We’re on the road this week, heading up to historic [garbled] where we’ll venture [garbled] outside the city to see the colonial...
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Authors : Sarah Pinsker, Katie McIvor and Andy Oldfield Narrators : Eliza Chan, Devin Martin and Eleanor R. Wood Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums “A Strange and Terrible Wonder” Previously published by Zooscape “The Dog Who...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Authors : Jane Brown, Chuck Rothman and Joshua Jones Lofflin Narrators : Tina Connolly, Eric Valdes and Rick Vicens Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 820: Flash Fiction Extravaganza! – Comedy is a PodCastle...
Author : Stephen V. Ramey Narrator : Bill Ruhsam Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Strange Horizons Previously published as PodCastle #024 Rated PG It Takes a Town by Stephen V. Ramey “They ain’t...
Author : Kelsey Hutton Narrator : Samantha Loney Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies Content warning for racism and racial slurs Rated PG-13 Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea...
racism
Author : Kelsey Hutton Narrator : Samantha Loney Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies Content warning for racism and racial slurs Rated PG-13 Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea...
racism
Author : Lavie Tidhar Narrator : Eleanor R. Wood Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Uncanny Rated PG The Portal Keeper By Lavie Tidhar October 1st The rabbit was back this morning. It stopped outside...
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)...
Author : Genevieve Valentine Narrator : Laurice White Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producers : Eric Valdes and Pria Wood Discuss on Forums Previously published by Fantasy Magazine Originally PodCastle 233 Rated PG Study, For Solo Piano by Genevieve Valentine...
Author : Sherwood Smith Narrator : Kaitlyn Zivanovich Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums 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...
Author : Ryan Cole Narrator : Hugo Jackson Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums 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...
Authors : Derrick Boden and Kevin Sandefur Narrators : J.S. Arquin and Dani Daly Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums When the Giants Came Through the Valley – Previously published by Lightspeed Floaters – Previously published...
deathsuicide
Author : Farah Naz Rishi Narrator : Nadia Niaz Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published as PodCastle 526 Rated PG-13 When Shadow Confronts Sun By Farah Naz Rishi [Allah] will say, “Enter among nations which had...
racismviolence
Author : Rebecca Buchanan Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives 1 (Belanger Press) Rated PG The Adventure of the Faerie Coffin: Being...
Author : Rebecca Buchanan Narrator : Nicola Chapman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives 1 (Belanger Press) Rated PG ~ Five ~ Dinner was not silent. While we sat...
violence
Author : Eleanna Castroianni Narrator : Kat Kourbeti Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 833: This Wooden Heart is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for death and references to war and genocide. Rated PG-13 This...
deathracismwar
Author : Marisca Pichette Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Kiran Kaur Saini Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 834: All the Better to Taste You is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for end of life and misgendering. Rated PG-13 All...
deathtransphobia
Author : Lavie Tidhar Narrator : Ian Stuart Host : Eleanor R. Wood Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Apex Magazine and as PodCastle episode 304 Content warning for violence Rated PG-13 Titanic! by Lavie Tidhar 10 April...
Author : Charlie Sorrenson Narrator : Rebecca Wei Hsieh Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Tor.com Content warnings for violence, assault, misogyny, and PTSD. Rated PG-13 Flight by Charlie Sorrenson...
misogynysexual-violenceviolence
Author : Alexia Tolas Narrator : Omega Francis Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 837: Good Fortune For a Beloved Child is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for the death of a child, racism, and allusions to...
child-deathracismsexual-violence
Author : Sara S. Messenger Narrator : Cherrae L. Stuart Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Fantasy Magazine (Reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy, Vol. 2, 2023, Pyr Books) Rated PG-13 Potemora in the...
violence
Authors : C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez Narrators : C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Clockwork Phoenix and as PodCastle episode 669 Content warnings for illness...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Author : Rachael K. Jones Narrator : Heather Thomas Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Previously published by Nightmare Magazine Content warnings for gun violence, school shootings, child endangerment, references to child...
child-deathgoreviolence
Author : E. F. Benson Narrator : Devin Martin Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Originally published by Hutchinson’s Magazine, October 1928 Content warning for references to grief Rated PG Pirates by E.F. Benson For many...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Author : Chris Kuriata Narrator : Summer Fletcher Host : Eric Valdes Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Diabolical Plots Rated R The Aunties Return the Ocean By Chris Kuriata Auntie Roberta landed badly on the roof of...
child-abusechild-deathgore
Author : Nick Douglas Narrator : Wilson Fowlie Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 843: The Mountain and the Vulture is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 The Mountain and the Vulture by Nick Douglas “High in the...
Author : Chip Houser Narrator : Leigh Wallace Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Bourbon Penn Content warning for bodily fluids Rated R On Snowflake-veined Wings by Chip Houser Amalia runs her finger...
body-horror
Author : Rati Mehrotra Narrator : Shweta Adhyam Host : Kaitlyn Zivanovich Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by The Deadlands Content warnings for death and injury Rated PG-13 Amma’s Kitchen by Rati Mehrotra I can always...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Authors : Anna Mikhalevskaya and Elvira Rizaeva Narrator : Yaroslav Barsukov Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 846: Against All Odds is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for war, death, injury, and child...
deathviolencewar
Author : J.H. Siegal Narrator : Rebecca Fraimow Host : Eleanor R. Wood Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 847: The Golem Lover is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for the death of a spouse and for sexually explicit themes and...
death-of-a-loved-onesexual-contentviolence
Author : Ken Liu Narrators : Curtis C. Chen, Dagny Paul, Eleanor R. Wood, Stefani Cox, Wilson Fowlie, Matt Dovey, Jen R. Albert, Peter Adrian Behravesh, Summer Fletcher and Craig Jackson Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Author : Peter M. Floyd Narrator : Graeme Dunlop Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 849: The Third Wish is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 The Third Wish by Peter M. Floyd I was in the middle of a pleasant little...
goreviolence
Author : Julia LaFond Narrator : Diane Severson Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 850: Publish or Perish is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for murder, violence, and abuse of power Rated PG-13 Publish or...
abusedeathviolence
Author : Peter S. Beagle Narrator : Barry Deutsch Host : Matt Dovey Artist : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by The Raven, and as PodCastle 037 Rated G Gordon, the Self-Made Cat by Peter Beagle Once upon a time, to a family of house mice...
Author : Renan Bernardo Narrator : Diogo Ramos Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Samovar Magazine Content warning for off-screen parental death Rated PG A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair by Renan...
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : Renan Bernardo Narrator : Diogo Ramos Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Samovar Magazine Content warning for off-screen parental death Rated PG – 4 – “There’s been a fire over at the Bosque...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Authors : Diana Dima and Sara Omer Narrators : Tanja Milojevic and Kitty Sarkozy Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 854: DOUBLE FEATURE: City Grown From Seed and Harvest House is a PodCastle original. City Grown...
abuseanimal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-one
Author : Seoung Kim Narrator : Yoon Ha Lee Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 855: Shim Hyeon and the Ocean God is a PodCastle original. Rated PG Shim Hyeon and the Ocean God by Seoung Min Kim “They usually send...
Author : Matt Dovey Narrator : Matthew James Hamblin Host : Eleanor R. Wood Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 856: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – Clouds in a Clear Blue Sky is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 Clouds in a Clear Blue Sky By...
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : Samir Sirk Morató Narrator : Amanda Ching Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 857: Ecdysis is a PodCastle original. Content warning for ableism (including ableist language) and scenes of a sexual nature...
ableismbody-horrorsexual-content
Author : Joshua Lim Narrator : Marcus Chen Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums PodCastle 858: Roti Time Travel is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for grief, addiction, and the deaths of a spouse and child Rated PG-13...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
Author : Oliver Onions Narrator : Matt Dovey Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums Originally published in The London Magazine, August 1928. Content warnings for the off-screen deaths of a spouse and sons Rated PG John Gladwin...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
Author : Vylar Kaftan Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Shimmer and as PodCastle 128 Rated PG Something Wicked This Way Plumbs by Vylar Kaftan Oh, the watercooler jug? Yeah, I...
Author : Albert Chu Narrator : Curtis C. Chen Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin PodCastle 861: A Most Lovely Song is a PodCastle original. Content warnings for war, parental death, assault, a racial slur, and references to torture, genocide,...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolencewar
Author : H. K. Payne Narrator : Eric Valdes Hosts : Matt Dovey and Katherine Inskip Audio Producer : Eric Valdes The Illusionist’s Tent By H. K. Payne I was told we had the night off, but I guess no one told you kids that. Tell me, whose idea was it to...
Author : Beesan Odeh Narrator : Zeina Sleiman Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Artist : Iasmin Omar Ata Discuss on Forums Previously published by Lightspeed Magazine Content warning for the death of a child Rated PG-13 Al-Kahf الكهف By Beesan...
child-deathdeath
Author : Sonia Sulaiman Narrator : Peter Adrian Behravesh Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Artist : Iasmin Omar Ata Discuss on Forums Previously published in the collection Muneera and the Moon: Stories Inspired by Palestinian Folklore,...
Authors : Maya Abu-Alhayyat and Yasmine Seale Narrator : Mahtab Chenevix-Trench Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Artist : Iasmin Omar Ata Discuss on Forums Previously published by The Book of Ramallah Content warnings for death, cultural...
deathmisogynypregnancy-loss
Author : Karim Kattan Narrator : Amal Singh Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Artist : Iasmin Omar Ata Discuss on Forums Previously published by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Rated PG-13 The Witch OF Endor by Karim Kattan There...
deathracismviolence
Author : S.B. Divya Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Uncanny Content warnings for fire, violence (including domestic violence), references to rape, and parental deaths....
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Author : S.B. Divya Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Uncanny Content warnings for fire, violence (including domestic violence), references to rape, and parental deaths....
abusedeathviolence
Author : S.B. Divya Narrator : Kaushik Narasimhan Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Eric Valdes Discuss on Forums Previously published by Uncanny Content warnings for fire, violence (including domestic violence), references to rape, and parental deaths....
abusesexual-violenceviolence
Authors : Heather Shaw and Tim Pratt Narrator : Alasdair Stuart Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 871: Homes for the Holidays is a PodCastle original. Rated PG-13 This episode is dedicated in loving memory of Orion...
death
Authors : Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw Narrator : Ian Stuart Host : Matt Dovey Audio Producer : Devin Martin Discuss on Forums PodCastle 872: TALES FROM THE VAULTS – The Ghost of Christmas Possible is a PodCastle original. Rated PG The Ghost of Christmas...
Author : C. H. Irons Narrator : Elie Hirschman Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 922: The Last Oracle of Atlantic City is an Escape Pod original. This episode is sponsored by The Theater of the Midnight Sun podcast:...
The T-4200 (Part 1 of 2) By J. R. Johnson Carleton T. Lowengren, low-level civil servant, single twenty-something and refugee from the war-torn Outer Rim, woke to the remnants of a gaming binge and a killer headache courtesy of his interface. The implant...
The T-4200 (Part 2 of 2) By J. R. Johnson (...Continued from Part 1) Carl scrambled to follow Mango past the loading dock to the parking corral. Her T was an early model with a lot of light-years on it, but its shell still shone and its maxillae were...
Author : David Marino Narrator : Ibba Armancas Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 925: The Ballad of Starburst Smith is an Escape Pod original. Contains harsh language. The Ballad of Starburst Smith by David Marino “Did you read...
Author : David Hankins Narrator : Eric Valdes Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Felix and the Flamingo” was originally published in the anthology Murderbirds (January 2023). To learn more about Bruiser the Rat, check out “Milo Piper’s...
animal-harm
“How to Pass as Human”: a Quantum-Encrypted Listicle on the Synthetic Consciousness Subnet By Raiff Taranday QUERY: Locate file 8548.213 (“How to Pass as Human”) WARNING: File 8548.213 (“How to Pass as Human”) has been flagged by the Synthetic Regulatory...
sexual-content
Author : Merrie Haskell Narrator : Amanda Ching Hosts : Valerie Valdes and Norm Sherman Audio Producers : Summer Brooks and Eric Valdes Originally published in Apex Magazine, February 2013, and was previously published in Escape Pod 404 (July 2013)....
The Library By N. B. Andersen Every morning at ten to ten, Dot powered on. Its hands lay flat against the thick glass of the reading room window, which let the photoreceptors on its palms feast on the sun. The window overlooked a modest lot where cars had...
Author : Jack Windeyer Narrator : Matt Dovey Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 930: Fulfillment in Purpose is an Escape Pod original. Zima Blue Zima Blue episode of Love, Death & Robots Get Excited and Make Things! Ezekiel’s...
The Rhythms of the World By Johnny Caputo As always, we’re starving to death. From our place inside the leather pouch tied to Aamsaa’s belt, our two remaining stalks ache with hunger, barely able to hold our withered green-spotted spore caps upright. We...
death
Author : Renan Bernardo Narrator : Julia Rios Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks This story was originally published at Apex Magazine #134 in December 2022. The Walking Mirror of the Soul by Renan Bernardo My desire was written all over...
Summitting the Moon By Pragathi Bala T-7 days The moon Landed, the Rut appeared, home equity plummeted, jobs disappeared, and Ghis liked riding the moon. It was the last item on this tragic list that her wife couldn’t accept. It was the leaf that broke the...
pregnancy-loss
Author : Tony Dunnell Narrator : Bryce Dahle Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 934: The Alien in My Bathtub is an Escape Pod original. If you aren’t familiar with Locus Magazine, they’re a respected website, magazine, award,...
Old People's Folly (Part 1 of 2) By Nora Schinnerl Setti knew the woman for a ghost the moment she appeared. It was the pink hair that gave her away, short and spiky. Real people didn't have hair like that. Also, you couldn't see the scratchmarks on...
child-abusehomophobia
By Nora Schinnerl (...Continued from Part 1) Kite was still curled into a bundle of blankets in front of the stove when Setti woke. The old woman sniffed, torn between surprise and annoyance. She'd have figured him for a quitter, sneaking out before dawn...
child-abusehomophobia
Author : Shaenon K. Garrity Narrator : Nathaniel Lee Hosts : Valerie Valdes and Norm Sherman Audio Producers : Summer Brooks and Mat Weller Escape Pod 937: Punk Voyager (Flashback Friday) is an Escape Pod original. A copious amount of harsh language. Punk...
Author : Tim Chawaga Narrator : James Kaku Pierson Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 938: Chug the Tea Leaves, Chuck the Ads is an Escape Pod original. Chug the Tea Leaves, Chuck the Ads by Tim Chawaga I wake up to a message and...
deathsuicide
Alternate Cover: Pantone Sunset By Marie Vibbert Stacey reads a comic book. It’s about a robot lady, but not like her. This robot lady has exposed gears and metal rods in her arms and wears a metallic bikini as she solves crimes. The colors are...
Author : Grace Chan Narrator : Isabel J. Kim Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” originally appeared in Lightspeed Magazine (May 2022). Contains some harsh language. Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu by...
deathgoreviolence
The Concept Shoppe: A Rocky Cornelius Consultancy By Andrew Dana Hudson “This place is trash, garbágio, blechalicious,” Rocky Cornelius said appreciatively. “All we gotta do is, as they say, sublevel the vibe.” “Really? You think so?” The greengrocer,...
violence
Author : E J Delaney Narrator : Eliza Chan Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 942: The Eye of Applethorpe is an Escape Pod original. The Eye of Applethorpe by E J Delaney Úna’s dad once said to her: “You never know what you’ve...
How to Keep Your Cool If You're a Mech First Day on the Job (Part 1 of 2) By Vera Brook Damn, the exoskeleton was hot. Two minutes strapped into the smart harness with its thick exospine and the oversized, carbon-fiber limbs that grew from it, and sweat...
How to Keep Your Cool If You're a Mech First Day on the Job (Part 2 of 2) By Vera Brook (...Continued from Part 1) Jenna gave herself a few moments to seethe in silence before she spoke, to make sure her voice was calm. “I can’t move.” “Did you hear that?”...
Author : Stetson Bostic Narrator : Samuel Poots Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 945: Walking with Thorny is an Escape Pod original. Walking with Thorny by Stetson Bostic Hitchhikers clung to Tasi’s pants as he neared the...
Author : Eugie Foster Narrator : Mur Lafferty Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks This story was first published in Escape Pod 388 (March 21, 2013) Contains harsh language and graphic gory violence Trixie and the Pandas of Dread by Eugie...
goreracismviolence
Rupert Weard and the Case of the Adamant Annihilist By Rob Gillham Rupert Weard leapt into the drawing room, escaping a hallway dense with impossibly angled, tentacular horrors trying to sell him insurance. "Ye gods, it's bedlam out there," he said. "Just...
Author : Rachel Meresman Narrator : Isaac Harwood Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 948: Thank You for Doing Business with the Xyb’lor Principality is an Escape Pod original. Thank You for Doing Business with the Xyb’lor...
A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls By Brian Hugenbruch “Hey Marty,” Mom asks, “got a moment?” I cringe whenever Mom's voice has that tone to it. I don’t know what she’s going to say; but if I’ve learned anything in my thirteen years on this...
Author : James Patrick Kelly Narrators : A Kovacs, John Cmar and Pamela Quevillon Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Appropriate for older teens and up due to erotic imagery and war criminal comeuppance Bad Dogs Escape By James Patrick...
deathsexual-contentviolence
The Scientist Does Not Look Back By Kristen Koopman Feb. 17, 3:40 AM. Audio notebook for new project: revival of a clinically dead patient, 36 year old male, died of hypothermia and shock. The technician at the morgue hesitated when releasing him to me....
body-horrordeath
Author : Erin Brown Narrator : Cherrae L. Stuart Host : Tina Connolly Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Skyscrapers That Twist to the Sun” appeared in Fantasy Magazine Issue 87 (January 2023) Skyscrapers That Twist to the Sun by Erin Brown Shaundra took the...
Sturdy Ladders and Lanterns By Malka Older As a freelance marine behavioral researcher most of Natalia’s jobs went something like this: She swam around in some large but controllable environment with a cephalopod, paying attention to its body language and...
Author : Samantha Henderson Narrator : Mur Lafferty Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Chandra’s Game” originally appeared in Lone Star Stories (2009), and in Escape Pod 373. Chandra’s Game by Samantha Henderson Joey Straphos, Papa Joe,...
body-horrordeathviolence
Author : Sylvie Althoff Narrator : Serah Eley Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 955: Endymion is an Escape Pod original. Contains transphobic slur, adult language, and brief but graphic violence Endymion by Sylvie Althoff It’s...
goretransphobiaviolence
Vault (Part 1 of 2) By D.A. Xiaolin Spires Chenguang hikes up her sleeves before vaulting over the pile of fuzzy moss and greets Lukas with a nod. The chloropolyurethane fabric flaps in the slight breeze and the double suns beat down onto her arms. Lukas...
body-horror
Vault (Part 2 of 2) By D.A. Xiaolin Spires (...Continued from Part 1) “Lukas?” Chenguang’s voice echoes in this expanse of dark. A vortex of light opens to her right and she sees a warped head and legs emerge from a point in the dark. It’s Lukas. As he...
Author : Marissa Lingen Narrator : The Word Whore Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Originally appeared in Analog (2011), and in Escape Pod 366 (Oct 2012) Some of Them Closer by Marissa Lingen Coming back to Earth was not the immediate...
This Little War of Ours By Arden Baker SECURE PRIORITY COMMUNIQUE distribution SOLITAIRE, keyword MASQUERADE, source PENTACLE FROM: TRIPLE INTENT TO: ASPHODEL BEGIN CONTENT Even if you’re my enemy, I’m glad to hear from you.
suicidewar
Author : Benjamin C. Kinney Narrator : Heather Thomas Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks This story originally appeared in the anthology “The Internet Is Where The Robots Live Now” (Paper Dog Press, November 2018). Elegy of Carbon by...
violence
Mathball By Larry Hodges You are a baseball fan, sitting in the centerfield seats eating an overpriced hot dog. You are wearing a baseball cap, but not a batting helmet, of course. (Why would that be an issue? Hmm…)You smile brightly, but all will not end...
Author : Julia Rios Narrators : Abra Staffin-Wiebe and Tatiana Grey Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “To Catch a Flieff” was originally written as a bonus for backers of the Bridge to Elsewhere Kickstarter (an anthology of stories set...
Author : Julia Rios Narrators : Abra Staffin-Wiebe and Tatiana Grey Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “To Catch a Flieff” was originally written as a bonus for backers of the Bridge to Elsewhere Kickstarter (an anthology of stories set...
Show and Tell By Greg van Eekhout Teacher is an old-fashioned bug with a blue carapace and eyes like two domes of gold beads. She is very pretty and smells like follow, but when she flutters her wings you better look smart or you'll get her stinger in your...
violence
Authors : Sarina Dorie and Addison Smith Narrators : Tina Connolly and Andrew K. Hoe Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Kat Day Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 965: T-Rex Tex Mex / Mother Death Learns a Trick is an Escape Pod original. T-Rex Tex Mex by...
Code Switching By Malon Edwards [JEAN-MICHEL] INTRO: ALL I'M EVER GON' DO IS STAY BLACK AND DIE JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. KINSLEY CHASE Kinsley Chase sits on manman mwen plastic-covered couch. The InTell HumbleBrag subprogram Stanford Sutton Industries chipped me...
racism
Code Switching (Part 2 of 4) By Malon Edwards (...Continued from Part 1) [JEAN-MICHEL] ONE HUNDRED PERCENT PERFORMANCE OUTPUT JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. KINSLEY CHASE Lòske jounalis sa yo gade m— Hold up. Let me say that again. I'll wait. Y'all go grab y'alls paper...
racismwar
Code Switching (Part 3 of 4) By Malon Edwards (...Continued from Part 2) [JEAN-MICHEL] A SWEET-ASS HELICOPTER AND TEN STATER STRANGERS? JEAN-MICHEL FEAT. THE NAUGHTY NINETY-DAY FANDANGO I'm feelin' this Bell 525 Relentless like Ellen Gilchrist playin' bid...
racismviolencewar
Code Switching (Part 4 of 4) By Malon Edwards (...continued from Part 3) 12. THIS IS THE TRUTELL MICHAËLLE-ANNABELLE FEAT. JEAN-MICHEL I strap into my rig, take a really big swig from my hydration dispenser tube I call The Ultra Black Vig, and settle back...
racismviolencewar
Author : Cat Rambo Narrator : Tina Connolly Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Red in Tooth and Cog” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, 2016, and was previously published in Escape Pod 607 Red in Tooth and...
Author : Greg van Eekhout Narrator : Serah Eley Host : Mur Lafferty Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “In the Late December” appeared in Strange Horizons, December 2003. This story was also a Nebula Award Nominee! Contains some dark Santa-related imagery, and...
Author : Craig Church Narrator : Rosie Sentman Host : Alasdair Stuart Audio Producer : Summer Brooks Escape Pod 972: The Bargain of Death and Saint Nicholas is an Escape Pod original. The Bargain of Death and Saint Nicholas by Craig Church “What’s your...
deathviolence
Author : Simone Heller Narrator : Hugo Jackson Host : Valerie Valdes Audio Producer : Summer Brooks “Forever the Forest” was first published in “Life Beyond Us: An Original Anthology of SF Stories and Science Essays” (April 2023) Forever the Forest by...
death
“The Red Lodge” originally published in the 1928 collection They Return at Evening. I am writing this from an imperative sense of duty, for I consider The Red Lodge is a foul death-trap and utterly unfit to be a human habitation — it has its own proper...
child-deathdeath
“The Shadowy Escort” was first published in The London Magazine, May 1928 Seigfried Sassoon Base Details by Siegfried Sassoon Almost everybody has at one time or another wanted to write a detective story, but, for the greater well-being of publishers and...
deathviolencewar
“The Ghost” was first published in The Windsor Magazine, May 1928. “Half-Past Two” was first published in the August 15, 1928 edition of The Daily Mail. She was a girl of fourteen, and she sat propped up with pillows in an old four-poster bed, coughing a...
deathgoreviolence
“Skule Skerry” was originally published in the 1928 collection The Runagates Club The Excavation of Hobs Barrow The Stone Tape The Woman in Black It happened a good many years ago, when I was quite a young man. I wasn’t the cold scientist then that I fancy...
PseudoPod 904: Jinx is a PseudoPod original. CW: domestic violence/intimate partner violence. Your first date with Jake is perfect. So. That’s fucking weird. Not a complaint, obviously. Actually, it’s a relief: you’ve been on far too many first dates with...
abusedeathviolence
“Phoenix Claws” was originally published in Black Cranes A block from the Jade Garden restaurant, I reached out and grasped Fin’s arm. “Hang on.” So many boyfriends had failed; I wasn’t going to let it happen again. I made a fuss of straightening his...
body-horrorgoreracism
“The Cask of Amontillado” originally appeared in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, November 1846 The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul,...
body-horrordeathviolence
“Rare Providers” originally appeared in Fusion Fragment in November 2022 I like to hunt in the campground that sprouted from the outskirts of our town before we lived here. It’s hard to tell just where the town ends now that the world has grown wild, but...
cannibalismdeathviolence
“Bring Them All Into the Light” originally appeared in the Great British Horror 7: Major Arcana representing the card The High Priestess. Heathen They’re on holiday when he sees the cottage. Julie and Nico are bickering in the back seat, Maggie searching...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 909: The Witch in the Whale Bone Hut is a PseudoPod original. Four massive ribs held the hut together, two forming a thick arch near the front door. The bones were pockmarked and yellow, no doubt leftovers from the town’s glory days during the...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
“Lidless Eyes That See” was first released by PS Publishing in From the Waste Land, an anthology inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land.” The story was a finalist for the 2022 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Short Story [note: The Waste Land was...
body-horrorcannibalismgore
“Masks” originally appeared in Forbidden Futures and was reprinted in the 2022 collection How to See Ghosts & Other Figments “The Machete at the End of the World” appeared in the collection Nightfall & Other Danger “The Tale of Belette” previously appeared...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 912: The Eidolonpterist is a PseudoPod original. I was climbing through the window of a ruined castle the only time the police ever caught me. I turned out my bag to show them everything I carried: a torch, pencils, notebooks. I flipped through...
racismsexual-violenceviolence
“The Vengeance Of Nitocris” was first published in Weird Tales, August 1928 Hushed were the streets of many-peopled Thebes. Those few who passed through them moved with the shadowy fleetness of bats near dawn, and bent their faces from the sky as if...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 914: Spirit Husband is a PseudoPod original. The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Don’t collect gifts from strangers. Don’t pick up money on the streets. Don’t take food in your dream. The spicy fried exterior of the akara melts over my...
deathpregnancy-losssexual-violence
“Heavy Rain” originally appeared in the 2023 anthology Howls from the Wreckage CW: Suicide, bloody body parts Samaritans 988 Lifeline List of suicide crisis lines on Wikipedia I’m standing in the doorway where you last stood before you got up on a chair,...
body-horrorgoresuicide
PseudoPod 916: Flash on the Borderlands LXX: Through a Glass Darkly is a PseudoPod original. “Three Awakenings: Hello, World” is a PseudoPod original “Mirrors at Night” is a PseudoPod original “A Persistent Woman” was originally published in the 1927...
abuse
“Henry” was originally published in the collection Strange Fruit in 1928 For four hours every morning and for twenty minutes before a large audience at night Fletcher was locked up with murder. It glared at him from twelve pairs of amber eyes ; it clawed...
animal-harmdeathviolence
“The Dreadful and Specific Monster of Starosibirsk” originally appeared in Weird Horror in May 2021 Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher I know what you will say. You will say to me, Arseny, there are enough real monsters in this world—why do you make your...
animal-harmgoreviolence
PseudoPod 919: Grinning on the Way to See Mom Die is a PseudoPod original. Aunt Sara doesn’t like phone calls, so I get a text that Mom’s dying, hospital address included. I sigh a long one. A weird mix of emotions wrestle in my gut. I reply: Ok thx. I...
death-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
“Just Another Apocalypse” originally appeared in Two Thousand Word Terrors released by Rooster Republic Press in 2023. Highway Song by Iggy Pop We cruise up the 5, zombies staggering on either side of the highway, their cerulean balloons straining in the...
cannibalismgoreviolence
This special return to the vault episode is in support of Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute now live on Kickstarter. Listen to editors Julie C. Day & Carina Bissett as they discuss the inspiration behind the Storyteller anthology. Tanith Lee wrote stories...
‘Chickamauga’ first published in the San Francisco Examiner, January 20, 1889 One sunny autumn afternoon a child strayed away from its rude home in a small field and entered a forest unobserved. It was happy in a new sense of freedom from control, happy in...
deathgorewar
PseudoPod 922: Something Stirring Underneath is a PseudoPod original. From the author: “At the far northwestern corner of Georgia down an unmarked path off a logging road lies the crumbling ruins of a manor that was host to murder and fire. It is only one...
body-horror
‘Too Little, Too Little, Too Much’ originally appeared in Cossmass Infinites in March of 2022 Fans of the urban legend of the Russian Sleep Experiment may be excited to see a recent movie release “The Soviet Sleep Experiment” is available online now with...
abusechild-abuseviolence
PseudoPod 924: The Things That Wash Up on Marble Beach is a PseudoPod original. From the author: “Following the enthusiastic and repeated recommendations of a good friend of mine (looking at you BDM), I read Dan Simmons’ Hyperion a couple of years back....
body-horrorgoreillness-and-pandemic
“Black Bargain” was originally published in Weird Tales, May 1942 “What Every Young Ghoul Should Know” was originally published in Amateur Correspondent, September-October 1937 What Every Young Ghoul Should Know” is a little piece of ephemera from an...
deathviolence
“Beach Head” was published in On Spec (longtime Canadian sci-fi/horror magazine) – 2008 & The Best Horror of the Year Volume 1 – 2009 CW: Drug use, problematic language “Are you still alive over there?” Alvy’s voice sounded weak, but it retained the...
goresubstance-useviolence
“Three Nights With the Angel of Death” was originally published in the anthology ALONG HARROWED TRAILS from Timber Ghost Press in July 2023 The Quick and the Dead Arizona, 1884—Day One The people of Vulture City are calling him the Angel of Death. But that...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 928: Mr. Harmon’s Girls is a PseudoPod original. CW: child sexual abuse, grooming https://www.elliottgishwrites.com https://www.facebook.com/elliottgishwrites The first day of school. Bright, cold, the sky that special autumn blue. All of us in...
body-horrorchild-abuse
“Bonesoup” originally published in Strange Horizons, July 2022 From the author: “My initial idea was a Hansel and Gretel retelling where the Evil Witch actually has children of her own. It became a story about Greece’s intergenerational trauma, called...
body-horrorchild-deathdeath
“The Dabblers” appeared in the 1928 collection The Beast with Five Fingers It was a wet July evening. The three friends sat around the peat fire in Harborough’s den, pleasantly weary after their long tramp across the moors. Scott, the ironmaster, had been...
animal-harm
PseudoPod 931: What He Woke is a PseudoPod original. From the author: “This story was written before the 2024 British General Election. The MP whose voting record inspired these events has since been fired by his constituents. We didn’t feed him to a sea...
body-horrordeath
“The Man With a Serpent in his System” originally appeared in London Mystery Magazine Selection (No. 99) November 1973. Jane reached out to us in 2023. She told us that, back in the 1970s when she was in her twenties, she wrote and had ‘The Man With a...
body-horrordeathviolence
“The Hollow Temple” was first published in Black Mask, December 1928. This is the second of four novelettes that were fixed up into the novel The Dain Curse. I Eric Collison came into my office. There was too much pink in his eyes and not any in his skin....
“The Hollow Temple” was first published in Black Mask, December 1928. This is the second of four novelettes that were fixed up into the novel The Dain Curse. IV I spent most of the day fidgeting in and out of my room. The general vagueness of my job in...
deathgoreviolence
“The Hollow Temple” was first published in Black Mask, December 1928. This is the second of four novelettes that were fixed up into the novel The Dain Curse. The Thin Man (Novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thin_Man The Thin Man (Movie)...
deathgoreviolence
PseudoPod 936: Flash on the Borderlands LXXI: A Gibbet of Flesh is a PseudoPod original. “Every Part of You”: CW terminal illness, body horror, insects “Every Part of You” was first published in OOZE: Little Bursts of Body Horror, edited by Ruth Anna...
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-onegore
PseudoPod 937: The Yearning of the All-Devouring Earth is a PseudoPod original. It’s always when we find a moment of peace that the universe remembers we exist—or maybe it’s less that the universe remembers, and more that it feels bored in our general...
body-horrordeathsubstance-use
“Sea Curse” was originally published in Weird Tales, May 1928 The Soul Cages And some return by the failing light And some in the waking dream. For she hears the heels of the dripping ghosts That ride the rough roofbeam. —Kipling THEY were the brawlers and...
deathmisogynyviolence
CW: Ableist slur This material originally appeared in The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt & Henry L. Herz published by Blackstone Publishing (©2023) I didn’t join in as my surviving family members conversed over...
animal-harmgoreviolence
PseudoPod 940: Controlling Your Weeds is a PseudoPod original. NIMBY https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/not-in-my-back-yard#:~:text=’Not%20in%20My%20Back%20Yard,development%20in%20their%20local%20area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY...
body-horrorracismviolence
“In Haskins” originally appeared in Apex, issue 127 Everyone, both the young and the old, went about their lives as usual on the day of the Mask Festival. The downtown streets were covered with colored leaves and Mr. Burkett still waved at children and...
abusechild-deathviolence
PseudoPod 942: The Sound of a Jackknife is a PseudoPod original. The Dead Room Pontypool I only took the Tremaine gig because of Shepherd’s recommendation. “This one won’t pay much,” Shepherd admitted over the phone. People chattered in the background...
body-horrordeathviolence
“Oneirophobia” originally appeared in NEVER WAKE: A DREAM HORROR ANTHOLOGY, edited by Kenneth W. Cain and Tim Meyer, and published by Crystal Lake Publishing on 9/8/23 From the author: “I’ve experienced sleep paralysis a few times in my life, but the first...
deathmental-illnessviolence
PseudoPod 944: The House That Stands Over Your Grave is a PseudoPod original. From the author: “For as universal as it is, I find it weirdly difficult to explain grief in a way that feels satisfying. It’s a slippery, nebulous thing. It can hide from you or...
body-horrorchild-deathdeath
PseudoPod 945: The Gobstomper is a PseudoPod original. A lot changes as you get older, thought Wilkie Saunders. For example, he’d been sure older boys like Tom Dunn—who was either in 10th or 11th grade depending on if you counted the year he was...
body-horrorchild-abuse
PseudoPod 946: Toby and The Halloween Parade is a PseudoPod original. Andrew Garfield and Elmo Alasdair Stuart Previous Halloween Parades It’s a long walk from Founders Cemetery, but I am old, dying, and don’t mind the wait. The trick-or-treaters are out...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
‘Will They Disappear’ originally appeared in the 2024 collection The Nightmare Box from Cursed Morsels Press From the author: “This piece is based on the horrendous real-life story of Jennifer and Sarah Hart, two white women who adopted six Black children...
child-abusedeathracism
‘A Relationship in Four Haircuts’ was originally published in the 2024 anthology Welcome to Your Body: Lessons in Evisceration C/W for emotional abuse Iris, by the Goo Goo Dolls You met him on Etsy. That’s right. Not a dating app, but an online marketplace...
abusebody-horrorself-harm
“Less Exalted Tastes” originally appeared in the 2024 collection All Who Wander Are Lost Gemma Amor https://gemmaamorauthor.com/ Total Immersion https://gemmaamorauthor.com/books-gemma-amor/full-immersion-by-gemma-amor/ Hot Singles In Your Area by Jordan...
body-horrorgoresexual-content
“The Slow Music of Drums” was originally published in the 2024 Anthology Northern Nights edited by Michael Kelly TW: features grief, an implied apocalypse, sinister music, a family curse, cosmic horror and bees Astute readers and listeners may be aware, or...
child-deathdeathsuicide
PseudoPod 951: Last Supper is a PseudoPod original. CW: Thanksgiving dinner drama “Last Supper” is a follow-up to “Licking Roadkill”, which previously appeared at PseudoPod (ep 786, Nov 2021) and in the collection A Meeting In the Devil’s House. From the...
deathsubstance-useviolence
“Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite” was originally published in the 2024 anthology, Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors Onitsha Main. It started with the garri sellers. Basin by basin, their grains went gray with...
body-horrorgoreviolence
“If You Don’t Want a Cat, Don’t Get a Kitten” originally appeared in the 2024 collection Recreational Panic From the author: “I dedicated one of my stories, ‘If You Don’t Want a Cat, Don’t Get a Kitten’, to Brian Keene. His adventures with stray kittens...
body-horrorgoreviolence
“Be Not Afraid” originally appeared in the 2024 anthology We Mostly Come Out at Night edited by Rob Costello The Mothman The Mothman Prophecies (Book) The Mothman Prophecies (Film) Krampus Krampus (2015 movie) “Take out all the yellow ones,” Mamaw says....
homophobiasubstance-useviolence
“Summer Night” was first published in the 2024 anthology Bury Your Gays: An Anthology of Tragic Queer Horror “Chosen” was first published in the 2024 anthology Howls from the Scene of the Crime “The Encausting” was first published in Seaside Gothic and...
deathhomophobiaviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"You ever love the pretty right off someone? When I was a kid, had me a BMX, bright red like a candy apple. I rode it all summer long, cresting hills trying to catch the perfect gleam in the sunlight."
"The lancet liver fluke is a parasitic worm that needs a vector to carry it from its snail host to its mammalian host, so the larval parasite is excreted by the snail to be eaten by an ant. Once inside the ant, the parasite moves to the brain and changes...
"The first thing she knew was that smells didn’t have the same shapes or colors anymore. Not wrong, exactly, but different. Even her own scents—rawhide and dirty paws and bits of grass that had brushed her belly—were changed, not just undercut with the...
animal-harmsuicide
"The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office."
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"The little girl was blonde and had very blue eyes. She stood on the steps to the house and stared at Mara without expression. “It lives in the closet,” the little girl said. “Klara…” her father said. He looked apologetically at Mara. “Please,” he said....
"Their power is how they can turn you into one of them. That’s the trick of it, see. You can go in with your swords and sacrifice, you can go in with your red heart and good intentions, and they will grin with their white teeth and say, “Welcome to Grey &...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"I see my first berb of the day before breakfast. I’m standing on the porch, drinking a cup of coffee and looking out over the Mojave to the east. Dawn has come. The desert is a hundred yellows: citron to pineapple, canary to corn, daffodil to flame. Out...
"Kuro?” I say softly. The back of the SUV is open, but all the carriers are still covered, and I can’t tell which is which. “Hello,” Kuro croaks. Middle row, left side. I resist the urge to turn and see if anyone is watching me. With my body blocking as...
"Iris put her boat in just upstream from where Harbor Island used to be. It was a fine March morning, balmy and clear, and the tide was coming in. The sky was pale blue, with a few lingering tints of sunrise to the east. The water was clear, too, and full...
"Wait, stop. Pause. Don’t move. Please. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Just…don’t touch anything. The remote, your phone, your always-listening voice-activated digital assistant designed to make modern life a breeze. Accept my cookies. Agree to...
"When the Fae stole my wife, I followed them into the dark woods to win her back. Jess dropped breadcrumbs along the trail, except she had no bread, so she dropped other things instead. Not far from the house, I found a blue sweater, embroidered with gold...
"It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to dread the sight of it. She moves, and the...
abusedeathmental-illnesspregnancy-losssexual-violencesuicide
"and in a strip mall parking lot off a side road in some Baltimore suburb my hand is trembling as I take the last of the voidwater in its little bootleg dropper and I peel my eyelid back and though I am so careful and try so hard a bit of the precious...
self-harmsubstance-usesuicide
"I don’t know if I can die. Maybe when this comet reaches the sun, I’ll keep right on being. Or maybe then, finally, after so long, I will stop. I am not ready to find out. I want to be immortal. To never die as those on your planet do. This place isn’t...
deathviolence
"In your head, the dead man wakes up crying. He stutters into awareness just as you manage to stanch the tears welling in your eyes, a response to the pressure of his presence on your limbic system. Your fingers brush, irritated, against the port at the...
"Start at the cleave of it, not at Zed’s meat death or Ep’s centuries-long destruction, but at the moment that Zed halves his own mind and walks away. Or as was reported in the internal memorandum, the moment when Pilot-Commander Zeta San Tano killed...
"I’m licking mala algae off a thin yellow and blue P sheet that says Nutterfinger when I notice the walls in my home are vibrating. Nothing ever happens in our world surrounded by P. P is what we call the material that makes up our world, and it’s what we...
"I did not want to write a report for this book, but Lady Koi-Koi convinced me to, even though she says it “does a disservice to our own stories.”1 I also have to pass my WAEC, and this book is on our reading list for the mock exam, so, fine. I will...
"For Julie, it was the cryptid out in the woods behind our old elementary school. Wings, red eyes. Yes, Julie came back knowing exactly when everyone she loved was going to die, but it was worth it, she told us. The six of us—well, five after Sophie...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"We’re here?” was the first thing Marcella Hamnet asked after thawing. At that point Arin was the Kepler, so it seemed the answer descended upon the cryopod from the whole ship. “We are. You’re first awake of course, Doctor.” Then they briefed Hamnet on...
"Sibby couldn’t decide about the man sitting across the aisle. She’d felt someone watching her since she’d boarded the hyloop in Atlanta, but her sideways glances never caught him staring. Possible, was as much as she could come up with. You never could...
"It is part of my process to be both places at once, so that while I am sitting on the stool at your bedside with my segmented fingers plugged into your cerebrum, I am also inside your first memory of walking. In the undamaged parts of your braincase lay...
abuseracismviolence
"They came on a mule ship, and they lived in what was left of it after they arrived. Its hull, laid down by poet-engineers in the high docks, was laminated from hundreds of thousands of layers of zepto-sec time and planck-length matter, each layer a...
"1 Now after the wars the world of men was of one nation and of one government, but much divided all the same (for the bonds that held them were weak); 2 And it came to pass, as the seas dried up and the sun was darkened in smoke, that they journeyed to...
"Something unexpected trots up Dora Schreck’s front steps. A self-delivering package, a sizable one. Dora ignores it for now. She’s busy with a telemarketer whose voice is loudly vibrating from her house’s walls. The house is a biotweaked kritter named...
"THEY SENT PREACHER SNEED to war with all these ghosts in his head. Haints and hags and conjure-horses. On Sapelo Island conjure-horses come out of the sky to run men down and hags do worse, but Preacher’s not doing his soldiering on Sapelo. He’s getting...
"TWO NIGHTS AGO. THEN-TIME… After he died for the third time that night, Tumble began to worry. Just five seconds down this latest chance branch, and there he was, facedown and dead in the dirt of the carnival midway, his skull all bad-wrong, what with...
"IT WAS SAID IN THE LORE OF Orisha that in the beginning of time, Olodumare existed alone in the vast, uncreated universe. But as time passed, Olodumare became lonely and yearned for company. He then created a pet which he named “Olutunudumare,” and the...
"Outside is the palace of slaughter. Under its gambrels of boiling sky, there is the cold unforgiving sea; there are mountains ready to cradle your bones. Along its corridors of singing grass, there are horseback warriors who will cut you to pieces. There...
animal-harmgoreviolence
"Lara is a summer witch born with fruit rich on her tongue, a monkey god’s chittering beneath her skin, and a full July sun’s worth of love for love. Her ba claims to have read Pasternak, but she knows it was Julie Christie’s face he traced when he named...
illness-and-pandemicsexual-content
"She tells the children to call her Kade Makasi, and if this was one of her stories, she’d describe herself as bent and wrinkled and spider-like for a touch of myth and poetry … but she’s none of these things … she’s tall, thick-browed, with two braided...
mental-illness
"Because Waigong ran out of money due to the rice shortage, he gambled away my mother, an eighteen-year-old girl known for her beauty and dance prowess. She danced like a majestic water dragon, elegant and unstoppable while flowing through the atmosphere,...
misogyny
"When I die, I want you to keep my bones.” Vasanthi floats in the dark pool, the softness of her voice punctuated by softer drops of water from stalactites. “You mean your ashes.” The best misunderstandings come from our language differences. “I’ll find...
death-of-a-loved-onewar
"Folks later claimed she was acting strange from the moment she boarded the plane. They described her as skittish, curt, radiating an aura of danger. Some, when confronted with the security footage, which showed her to have behaved rather unremarkably up...
child-deathgoreviolence
"There’s reasons not to go sit by the banks of the Dequindre. The mosquitoes bite something fierce this time of year, for one. May through September the air is thick with them. The river swells wide on its way through Wyandott."
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Tarma had only just begun the Widow Fenton’s flax when the Shadow Undying rose once more. At first she thought that the shutter on the upper window must have come unwedged, since the light shouldn’t have failed so early in the day. But the unholy chanting...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"THE DOORBELL RANG AS FOX Singh lay staring into the plumbing under the kitchen sink. “Go away!” He wasn’t expecting anybody, and if any of his neighbors ever rang, it was only to complain about the volume of his television. The joints on the p-trap looked...
"YOU’RE TEN YEARS OLD when you finally ask your mom, Jennifer, about your dad. You’d waited a good long while for her to bring him up, but she never did. To be honest, there’s no proof he existed, other than you, of course. No pictures on the wall. No high...
"THEY SAID IT WAS THE GREAT silence out here, but that was for those just passing through. Stuck inside the steel cocoon of their car, too scared to set foot into the blasted expanse of the Outback. Kev had found, after a few years, that the land had a way...
"ON THE MORNING OF MY 150th year as a working adult, I disposed of my fifth pet cat. Loki had died peacefully during the night, after a statistically average twenty years as an indoor cat, walled into my statistically average apartment and consuming a diet...
"AVAWINCED AND CLOSED her eyes as the phone started buzzing in her pocket. Just one minute, she thought, looking past the person in front of her to the checkout clerk. She should’ve brought the kids in with her, but gentle, warm days were so rare. She owed...
"NONE OF US KNOWS HOW we may die. You, when you have found these letters, will know the manner of my death. I do not. I face only an infinite darkness, as we each do. We move toward this darkness with whatever light we may find, hoping to see more, to know...
"MISTER CHARLIE THREW Miss Ann up onto the roof. It was a damn good throw, although maybe not in the best form or technique, thirty feet up. Miss Ann landed on her hands and knees and the side of her diamondstudded little black dress tore at her slim white hips."
"THE HOUSE SOARED NORTH, then veered west, where the land went up and up, and the buildings went up and up, like a metallic wave cresting ahead of the distant mountains. The house could see the prairies from where it crouched but could not see the thing it...
"BOTH PIECES OF THE SUNDERED moon shone bright over the steaming marshes. The little girl — the little spook — looked BB to Rood Farook with drowning eyes. Barefoot, malnourished, her clothes falling apart. It’s never the shod, the well fed, the wealthy,...
"THE OASIS SHOULDN’T have flourished there, surrounded on all sides by erg, by windswept dune sea, by desolation. The sand did not invade the oasis, even after windstorms, but there were no eyes to observe this, or minds to think it odd. There the oasis...
"On the day of the fitting, hope flits in Ava’s chest, a frightened sparrow she might stifle or set free. The day unravels languidly from dawn until midmorning, then hurtles toward noon so quickly that Ava must run to catch the subway or risk being late....
"It takes a Black woman to tell the truth about another Black woman, whether she likes that woman or not. If the woman in question is loved, the story reaches mythological heights, she could do no wrong, she was brown skinned and beautiful, intelligent,...
deathsexual-contentviolence
"I walk into Old Town. In a curio shop on the promenade, an old man sells paintings, deras, kikois, and ornaments. Tuk-tuks move swiftly along the cabro paving, passing the teapot sculpture at the round-about. Pushcarts lumber beside the street restaurants...
child-deathdeathwar
"The muse calls me ‘Digenia.’ It is not my real name; that is suspended while I am traveling through these verses, now some 690 years old. To pass through this realm of allegory and myth, of device and symbiotics, one needs to carry a standard. Mine is of...
"There isn’t a more resilient thing than a small flower. Your great-great-grandmother was a yellow daffodil. Where she was born people called her narcissus. Her many heads blossomed from a loamy opening in the forest on a particularly chill spring day....
deathwar
"A man who will be given a second name in ten thousand years and a man whose name will be forgotten sit in a forest, or perhaps a grassy plain, or perhaps a cold tundra. It is a biome that will not exist in ten thousand years but whose footprint will be...
mental-illnesssuicide
"Lacuna knew winter. Winter was the vast distances between the stars. Winter was the cold of space. You couldn’t measure cold; it was not a thing in itself. It was only the absence of heat. As darkness was only an absence of light. Yet both of these—the...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Metal parts that survived fire and shrapnel are no match for the saltwater rushing through the gaps in my armor, spilling between gears and wires, tainting my battered shell with the inexorable creep of rust. Corrosion is a ruthless god. The waves surge...
deathwar
"Up on the spoil heap Morag found a robot. This wasn’t that unusual in and of itself. She was always finding them, or parts of them anyway, frozen in contorted attitudes like dinosaur fossils, plastic housing cracked and aluminum limbs splayed. What was...
deathviolence
"The fireflies lead me to the clearing where my lover waits patiently. I can see her illuminated by the light of the moon. She stands under the udala tree, an image of perfection, her dark skin glowing in the silvery moonlight. The warmth of excitement...
violence
"Our storytellers sing that the Great River Gimamu brought life to the world when the gods first stepped out of it. But when I saw the ships that morning, I knew that it also brought death. As I sat at my stall, weaving the final threads of a new basket, I...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"His Majesty plights his troth to the boy by the failing light of the waxing Luster Moon, an auspicious night for waterfowl, prayer, and paladins. Wrong, all of it. Child-groom Softwind Sunder is hellebore and winter sun, plantcraft and rage. When he spits...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
When the the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can't find a solution to the city's worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Folake Adeyemi was slowly digging her index finger into the base of her afro and staring at the row of remote subsurface exploration monitoring screens when she heard the explosion. She’d let her mind wander for a few moments, subconsciously clenching her...
death
"Reza Saintsbury used tweezers to place each seed smack in the middle of the sterile aeroponic pads. Each pad went into the vertical germination chamber, where it was spaced precisely two inches apart, one on top the other, for the first five days of...
"Peter Van surveyed one of the many pits where the Romans had been tossing their plague-infested dead, standing a pace back from the crumbling, stained verge. He didn’t think he’d get used to seeing so many dead people on a daily basis, inured by the...
"In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at...
"The forest whispers of my sister’s arrival long before I sense her. Birds flutter between pink-girdled maehwa trees, mocking her voice in the tongue only shamans understand. Seonbyeon, Seonbyeon, they repeat mindlessly, and this is how I know my sister is...
"It’s so dark. Black-orange-bloody-bruised. Flashlights throw long beams across the sand. Police lights flicker blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and the Ferris wheel on the pier glows an obscene neon. No one thought to turn off the calliope. It...
mental-illness
"Back when I was a kitten, existing inside a hypothetical box a scientist had trapped me in, one where I might be dead or alive, from here or there, pansexual or not, I was definitely a fan of The Guest Cat, an audiobook that the young scientist, Soni,...
abusebody-horrorchild-abuse
"The beheaded tilapia nudged teasingly against the riverbank in a bloody soup, staining the lush weeds beneath the little girl’s feet. Oblivious to the stench, she squatted beside the muddy water, her gaze tracking over the dead fish. There were a dozen of...
deathviolencewar
"The chrysanthemums are dying. The yellow flowers face downward, stems wilting at the neck. Their petals curl and brown at the edges like burning paper. You lift one of the ragged blossoms up, as if to try and help it support its own weight. You keep the...
abusedeathviolence
"Your mother spends every evening working on her machine. It looks like no other machine you’ve seen. A hunk of metal on the ground, with wires stringing each section to the next. Like the inside of a giant robot’s belly, if someone cut it open to expose...
"Our generation ship never grows. Our faces—varied as the stars that swaddle us, far from everything we knew—never age. Do we learn, cut off from all the past? Do we change? I’ve asked myself these questions, and so many more, over the...
suicide
"One day, the Curator salvaged a robot. It was a model ST-19, a military machine, designed for search and destroy missions. The Curator found it outside in a knee-deep snowdrift. The robot’s ship had crashed into a hill two kilometers away, the explosion...
death
"Because I could, that’s why. Because the technology was there and if I didn’t do it somebody else would. Because I, perhaps naively, expected the acclaim of a grateful world and quite possibly a Nobel Prize. But chiefly I did it because the science was so...
violence
"Today is upgrade day and Gabriel, a model 2098 post-human intelligence robotic service assistant, wears an appropriately festive hat. The perfect cone of polka-dotted purple paper slopes to one side of his head, his glossy plastic surface giving the weak...
"The flutist peered over the ridge ahead of them. Wreathed in the sheerest cloth of fog, a city rotted. It was not a big city, maybe a town, maybe a village. The flutist was not of that age of plenty where plentiful things had names and could be easily...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolence
"My sister Angélique found me on a warm spring night. She was not looking for me but for a doctor who could treat women ridden by hags. (Such creatures were properly called soucouyants, but the printers took such liberties with the spelling in my weekly...
body-horrordeath
"I realized I was in love with Ivor the day he went up the mountain to speak with the goddess. We were at that age when the affectionate ease of childhood tips over into something different, when every touch could be the casual brush of friendship or...
death
"Nogorod is built of black rock and dull iron and pale ivory, a city of high towers rising like petrified trees beside the rough grey seas. The common folk are whale-fishers, hunting with harpoons from their ships, but the nobles are all wizards, and they...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"It is the shared birthday of the isle of Barradwyth. As a gift, Cyfris has promised his granddaughter Cydovan the one story he has never told her. They are sitting on the balcony of their home on Barradwyth Station, overlooking a street paved with mosaic...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"Ed Doutz was a boring little man who lived a boring little life that he supported by working a boring little job. He did not consider himself stuck. Some human beings require grand adventures to fill their lives. To that sort, any hour spent not surf ing...
"The results are in. I’m afraid your child is normal.” Emi and Zeika Chul looked to each other, then back to the administrator. “What does that mean?” “It means that Beny, your... uh... son?” the administrator stopped, scanned a display perched on a...
"Zeke came home to find wires dangling from the ceiling over the dining table. His light-fixture repair, abandoned mid-process. It hadn’t seemed important earlier, but now he couldn’t bear it. It was like the heart was ripped out of the duplex. Theory of...
death-of-a-loved-one
"We have a new copy machine at work. The thing is amazing. Top of the line. It’s aerodynamic, for whatever reasons a copier might need to be aerodynamic. It collates, sorts, duplexes, handles ten different sizes of paper, and orders its own toner...
"The number one thing to remember about matchmaking on Station 9 is to keep your hyper-synesthesia under control. When the client sitting across from you huffs and purses her lips, and trails of gray and beige puffs follow her every move, under no...
"Elizabeth Mauldin, driving fast along the skeletal remains of Arizona’s US-89, somewhere near Tuba City, saw a far-off glint and yanked her steering wheel hard to the left. Her custom-built tow truck left the broken roadbed and plowed into the scrub, red...
death
"It’s six weeks ’til Going Time. I never really got used to that naming convention. The phrase has “Going” and “Time” in it, the latter carrying the entire weight of the definition. The former is vague. Going where? Beneath the crusty morass of our...
death
"According to orbital observations, the aliens wouldn’t rise from their hibernation caves today. The three moons weren’t in position yet. Leena dialed a cup of coffee, checked her instruments, and settled down with her knitting. Observing the Amphim’s...
deathviolence
"The cadaver drone makes an incision along the inside of each finger. My stomach curls, waiting for the blood, but of course there’s none left. The body has been dead for days, all the blood drained and replaced with a sweet-smelling formaldehyde formula....
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one