1135 free-to-read stories tagged “Grief And Loss”
"Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Roud 423, Child 313) is a traditional English folk ballad. Like many traditional songs, the lyrics are unattributed. Child transcribed twenty verses, and a twenty-first got added later (and is included here for some unknown...
deathviolence
LT is ten when the alien seeds fall, and he spends the rest of his life studying them as they take over more and more of the planet.
death-of-a-loved-one
Stella’s helping an old high-school friend clean out his dead brother’s house, but the brother was a hoarder, and the task is horrible in several ways.
death-of-a-loved-onemental-illness
The inventor of trans-multiverse travel invites hundreds of instances of herself to a conference. It’s great fun until one gets murdered.
deathviolence
As civilization is dying on Earth, a woman building a monument on Mars by remote control gets a message from a Mars colony long thought to be dead.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicwar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-deathdeathviolence
The colonists on Dust usually hunker down for their years-long winter, especially when the companion star, Umber, blasts the surface with radiation, but a critical package from Earth needs to be retrieved now.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"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
"During one of the much smaller disasters that preceded the really big disaster, I met a lot of my neighbors online. I can’t remember if we set up the WhatsApp group because of the pandemic or the civil disorder or both. My Minneapolis block had always...
deathillness-and-pandemicviolence
"Paulie rushes out the elevator doors the moment they part, only to skid to a halt at the sight of his father’s wife. She shakes her head, but he doesn’t need the confirmation. If Tricia is out here and not in the hospital room with his father, it can only...
death-of-a-loved-one
A plague killed all the colonists before Saki’s ship arrived, and she has to investigate it while mourning the man she loved, who died down there.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Zee lives with her father in a windup world. Bored with her life, she decides to visit the carnival. She meets a boy, and things go from there.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
In a world desperate for wood for fires and paper, a man and his brother look for a tree good enough to make a world-class violin.
illness-and-pandemicviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onefatphobiasexual-content
The town barely survives the vicious weather because of the young people who turn into “weathermen,” leaving their families behind.
death-of-a-loved-one
Even the ghosts have abandoned the ruins of the space station once known as the City of High Bells. All but the faithful temple cat, who sees a starship reenter the system after many long years.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolencewar
Months after mysterious aliens scattered their spacecraft across North America, no one has a clue what they want. Avery knows what one of them wants, though: it wants a tour.
animal-harmdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
In a magical Old West, young Ellis has a love for the desert and an affinity for dead things. Both of these attract unwelcome attention from strangers visiting from back East.
abusebody-horrordeathviolence
"My dear Cara, Thank you for sending me the photos, I never thought I’d feel this way again. But the pictures help. They really do. I can’t stop looking at them. Thank you for scanning and emailing them to me. These photos and our old videos are all I’ve...
"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
"I will always remember the view of Paris from his window. Snow, pure and untouched, softens the outline of the buildings and covers the grime of the streets. White, the color of beginnings. His canvas is primed and ready to be painted, and stark winter...
death-of-a-loved-onewar
AirBody is like AirB&B except you rent out your body, not your home. Arsalan doesn’t expect any trouble from a middle-aged Pakistani woman, but everything she does reminds him of lost opportunities in his own past.
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
The aliens invited one human to their library 32.5 light-years away, and Hazel hopes to find lost research that might still save the Earth from final ecological collapse. If she can get in, that is.
deathpregnancy-loss
Lady Ida's visit to Venus was memorialized by the beautiful floral papercuts she made there, but this sensational story reveals the secret of the real purpose of her visit.
deathsubstance-useviolencewar
In this provocative and rich retelling of the Greek myth, Orpheus, the musician son of Apollo and Calliope, successfully rescues his wife Eurydice from Hades after her untimely death.
body-horrordeath
Until a visiting starship arrived, the other mermaids thought Essarala was silly for wanting to explore the galaxy.
death
Zanna settles into a remote mountain cabin to write her next book. No internet. No phone. No distractions.
body-horrordeath
The Regent rules as a tyrant, and he has separated Saffron from her husband to force him to bake the amazing confections that let you relive bits of the past.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
The crew of the new Mars mission are coming to the hotel where Emily works, and her mom is starting to say strange things about her involvement with the last Mars mission.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Alyssa seeks out the aliens who can give her an augment that will let her exchange thoughts and feelings with other humans. But why does she want it, and what is the cost?
body-horrordeath
In which we learn how the new court magician was recruited and find out how even a “market rat” can qualify. We learn that there is real magic, but it comes with a price.
body-horrordeathviolence
The girl he killed was much more than merely human, and there will be consequences.
deathmisogynysexual-violenceviolence
Teenage Tetley lives in a human settlement (one of the last) built on a miles-wide floating garbage dump. She explains why everyone hates her now.
deathsexual-violencesubstance-useviolence
Anat doesn't remember her parents, but she loves her brother Oscar. They live in a wonderful world full of strange creatures and machines. The more she learns, the stranger things seem.
deathviolence
Salman pursues the truth behind stories his grandfather told him about an impoverished princess he used to know back in Pakistan and the Jinn that protected her.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
While learning the ropes from a crafty Jazz Age bank robber, a young stowaway discovers their authentic self, a hidden gift, and that there are no straight lines when you run the fox roads…
deathracismviolence
"I’ve ferried two hundred and twenty-one souls across the river of death, and I can already tell my two-hundred-and-twenty-second is going to be a real shitkicker. I know by the lightness of the manila folder in my hand, the preemptive pity in the...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"A week before the Season began, as Mrs. Vanessa Saunders held brunch court at the Empire Hotel, a photo appeared on her phone: a large oak door beneath a pale green sign with silver lettering. Impossible, she thought, flipping the infernal device over...
death
Childbirth attracts zombies, so Brit has to leave the shelter for a while when she gets ready to give birth so as not to put the others at risk.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
In 1943 India, during the Bengal Famine, the Governor of Bengal tries to force an old woman to make a doll for his wife.
child-deathdeathracismviolencewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Hannah watched her sister Melanie die, incinerated with her own magic. Hannah can't accept that and sets out to use her own magic to put things right.
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneself-harmsuicide
Despite not being a telepath, Calla worked out a way to play chess with her captor, Major Larn, during the recent war. Now they're going to finish their game.
deathmental-illnesswar
Alzheimer's patient's family can't visit her very often, so they buy a robot to fool her into thinking they're visiting her. The robot tells the story.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"At first I thought something had broken in my book. I didn’t notice until the afternoon light from the windows began to recede. I tried to increase the brightness settings of the page, but no matter how I thumbed the margins, they would not change. For...
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-useviolence
An enhanced chimp and her human partner investigate an apparently pointless murder committed by a woman who was under remote control from an unknown source.
abusebody-horrordeathsuicideviolence
Fourteen-year-old Ghost gave up on finding a foster family a long time ago. She’s just waiting until she turns 18 and can leave “the Agency.” Then a new girl turns up—one who can actually remember her life before she was sent there.
abusebody-horrorchild-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-violenceviolence
A key scientist in the Dai Viet interstellar empire has died, and three people who were close to her mourn her passing in different ways.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Doc, there’s a ... hole growing in me,” the alien said through the spherical interpreting machine hovering over them. Semau barely registered the word “hole,” so taken was she by the sight of the alien. If she were just a tad less caring about propriety,...
deathviolence
"It was half past midnight when Olga heard the Devil cry. They were supposed to be wild tonight, the three of them. Cassandra had led the way and Maria and Olga didn’t put up much of a fight. They would visit the Devil’s bridge—anything that claimed to be...
body-horrorchild-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
animal-harmchild-deathdeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicmisogynysexual-violenceviolence
Long ago, Sylvie turned herself into a tree to avoid rape, but she wonders if there might not be a better way.
sexual-violencesuicideviolence
Lola (aka Eliza) has had problems dealing with people ever since she was a child, but she's always been good with snakes.
abusechild-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-violenceviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeath
"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.
body-horrordeathsexual-contentsubstance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
"The ship was a billion years old, and it was dying. The incalculable energies that had forced open the metric to permit its passage were all but spent, and now the relentless quintessence was taking over again: pulling the metric tighter, so that from...
A little robot travels thousands of miles underwater trying to return information to her creator, whose project seems to have lost the funding to return to the site she and her “sisters” were studying.
The human terraformers didn’t realize there was native intelligence until it was too late to save them. Now it’s just a question of what to do with the time that remains.
deathviolence
In 1888 a woman suffering a hideous deformity was murdered in London. Today, her descendent wants to find the culprit.
deathviolence
Adam has 70% of the memories of the man who created him, but something vital is hiding in that missing 30%.
death-of-a-loved-one
Madeline is having an adverse reaction to an experimental drug--she revisits episodes in her past.
"Atop a ladder was Naeto, reaching for the lights. The lights flickered as his touch neared. Down below, Gozi held the ladder, rooting it to the ground. A small breeze came, and the ladder tilted, and the ladder swayed, but Naeto did not waver. Gozi was...
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
An immigrant is distressed because her mother’s ghost is confiscated at the border.
death-of-a-loved-one
June’s sister Wanda suffered some kind of brain damage in an experiment aimed at learning the nature of reality. Two other people died in that experiment, and June would like some answers.
death
An orphan recruit on a Turkish airship tends the brainwashed monkeys that constitute one of their principle weapons. He fears them deeply, but the ones with mechanical parts he fears the worst.
deathgoreviolencewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-death
Mallory Iheji would do anything to watch her favorite artist’s lost movie, “The Hydraulic Emperor.” But what would she really sacrifice for it?
Leah studies stories people tell about their own experiences with ghosts. To her it’s all folklore—not real at all—until she gets hints her dead mother wants to talk to her about something.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Thuy seeks her daughter's remains in the twisted parts of unreal space where salvagers pick over the remains of wrecked starships.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Surreal tale about the loves and losses of Violet Wild, a girl from the purple country, who crosses the spectrum accompanied by a unicorn, a sorrow, and a herd of time squirrels.
deathviolence
"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
"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
"There’s nights in the deep end of summer so hot and thick and wet you can feel the dark wrinkling up your fingers like bathwater—and my last night breathing was one of those. 2 a.m. came to ring my bell and found me perfectly awake, swinging back and...
abusebody-horrorviolence
"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
"There is no limit to the number of curses in the world. For each one the monks try to exorcise, ten more take its place. We are not here because we enjoy it though. Please don’t misunderstand. As you dip into steaming bath waters, entwine your bodies...
cannibalismsexual-violencesuicideviolence
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
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
"Okay, so you know those things they sell called ‘useless machines’?” the inventor says. He is smiling. Of course, the boy knows them; he’d briefly had one that had been plucked from his bedroom floor and relocated into the inventor’s basement workroom...
body-horrorviolence
"Thuỷ stood in her cabin in The Goby in the Well, her bots arrayed on her shoulders and clinging to her wrists, and watched the heart of the nebula. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about it: the Great Mulberry Nebula was large, sparsely dotted with...
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"The causes of the disaster are these: First: The estimations of this planet’s temperature were incorrect. The beacon should never have been placed. This planet is no more capable of supporting human life than our own polar wastelands. Second: My...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathmental-illnesssexual-violencesubstance-useviolence
Whenever the captain dies, the new captain inherits his/her memories back to the start of the mission, but only the good ones; the sin eater gets the bad ones.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
When you were eight, the haunted house changed your life. Twenty years later, you’re determined to study it, but it’s determined to change your life again.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
As Lily dies from tuberculosis, she relives fantasies from “Through the Looking Glass,” by Lewis Carroll
child-abusedeathillness-and-pandemic
Mika is lost at sea, but lost in time, not space, landing at her home port over and over at different times spread across almost two thousand years as she tries to get home to her children.
death-of-a-loved-one
In which we learn how an over-enthusiastic chef inadvertently brought about the end of the war.
deathviolencewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Sometimes a unicorn assisted Judge Kao Yu, and because he was so just and honest, he never feared its judgment. Until now.
deathviolence
In one small town, the delicate balance between predator and prey is threatened when five girls are murdered on prom night.
body-horrordeathviolence
"You see them, the shadows, everywhere. They look like the person you knew, maybe someone you were related to, maybe someone you loved. Always someone you lost. But they aren’t that someone. That’s the infuriating and the comforting part. They can’t be...
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...
"Once, in a certain kingdom, at a certain time, a river flowed under a bridge. It flowed under a bridge and past a willow tree, and in that willow tree dwelled the spirit of a girl who had drowned. I dwelled in that willow tree, and I was content."
death
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusedeathgoreviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
It’s been two years since Jenna’s ex-boyfriend left her alone in East Texas heartbroken. Now he’s back in town and she wants to payback. One night, she stumbles upon a bloodthirsty Camaro that may be the key to carrying out her revenge.
deathgoreviolence
"For a long time, I wondered what kind of person would volunteer to have their skin exposed to temperatures cycling between the melting point of aluminium and the night-time surface temperature of Mercury, riding a wave of thermal torment that would drive...
deathviolence
"Irada the blacksmith ran a hand over the dents in Muallim’s chest. Most were superficial, but one was deeper than the others. The paint here was chipped. She could see some corrosion underneath. “I’m going to have to remove your whole chest plate,...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathhomophobiasuicide
Approaching 50, Mabel decides to become a glass bottle dancer. She tries to hide it from her family, but the local cockroaches notice it for sure when she gathers up their bottles, and they’ve got dreams too.
In mid-winter, a skeletal stag comes to the village begging for food, but it eats anyone foolish enough to talk to it.
body-horrorcannibalismdeathviolence
"He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest. And above the bottleneck,...
body-horrordeath
She wants to get out of Hell, but all the boys she has in mind keep letting her down.
Samantha searches Paris to try to find what’s killing fallen angels.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
A Russian fighter pilot in the battle of Stalingrad comes back from a mission to find a wounded alien stuck under the wing of her airplane.
deathwar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
After spending almost her whole life as a lunar soldier, Gita gives an interview to a reporter about what it was like and how she’s adapting to life in India.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onewar
A vast fleet of "jalopies" carry individuals on a one-way trip from Earth to Mars. People do it for different reasons, some of which we learn about in this story.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Claire meets a handsome older man at a dinner party held in a virtual reality where something has gone subtly wrong.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-abusedeath-of-a-loved-onesuicideviolence
"Upon my return to the village, it was my husband, Adamet, who took me gently by the arm and guided me across the docks spanning our marshes until we reached the preburial cottage overlooking the sound. We stood side by side in the shadows of the cottage,...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
A stoner kid and his best friend attempt to move a sofa across town during an alien invasion...
death-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
"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
"If you were to drive to my sister Violet’s house today, you would find yourself at a very different place from the one I encountered on my first trip. The road up the mountain has been paved, for one thing, to make it more accessible to the tourists who...
death-of-a-loved-one
"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
In this prequel novelette to the critically acclaimed The Water Outlaws, nine-year-old Li Li is introduced to a web of community secrets and family intrigue when she helps her mother bury the corpse of a man that has somehow wound up in the storeroom of...
cannibalismdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"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.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"i am a memory. i am an METI carrying a memory. i am an METI (Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) carrying a memory beaming through the vacuum of space. Because i am an METI, i presume my purpose is to communicate with extraterrestrials, should i find them."
deathwar
A photographer’s obsession with an unsettled subject exposes two friends to a darkness that won’t be contained by frames…
child-deathsuicideviolence
"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
"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...
An AI car is caught between its ruthless employer and the people she hurt…
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneself-harm
More than a hundred years from now, an arborist fighting to save the last remaining forest on Earth discovers a secret about the trees—one that changes not only her life, but also the fate of our world. Inspired by the real-life “Future Library,” a...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"Big Edie was a useless piece of shit. Johanna Telle found the most significant relationship of her life on a Saturday afternoon in late May, sitting on one of those excruciatingly handmade quilts crafty stay-at-homes used to make out of their precious...
deathviolence
In a sad, future Sri Lanka, the narrator watches his/her city die from the effects of sea-level rise and abandonment.
deathviolencewar
An ice-age girl who learns to play the flute has an unusual connection with a future girl starving in a flooded city.
deathviolence
A magician dies on stage performing his most famous trick, but what really happened?
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Exchange of pathogens has largely replaced traditional sex, but the archipelago has run out of new diseases, so four friends go to the mainland in search of new plagues.
child-deathsexual-contentviolence
A young hockey player charged with murder on the moon seeks asylum on Earth, but unhappy Lunarians are trying to find him.
body-horrordeathmental-illnessviolence
Mebuyen doesn’t get many lost souls anymore—modern Filipinos have moved on—so when a bunch of young people start showing up whom she can’t send along, it’s time to visit the Earth and learn what’s going on.
child-deathdeathviolence
Humanity is under attack from intelligent creatures we never knew about from the abyss of our own oceans. Cally is a researcher trying to communicate with them when the underwater facility she’s on is attacked and she has to escape before it disintegrates entirely.
deathsexual-contentviolence
Ostap can’t wait to visit his girlfriend and see her big project that’s trying to use quantum mechanics to develop faster-than-light travel.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
What if you tried to teleport and succeeded? What if you couldn’t manage to do it again?
After a disaster in the Oort Cloud left her family penniless, young Holly works on a farm on Earth to pay for her college education while waiting for her uncles to raise funds to put the family back in business.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Coop is eager to make a difference in his first mission as a new lieutenant on a search-and-rescue ship, but the rest of the crew doesn’t seem to work very hard or care very much, and they definitely don’t appreciate his meddling.
A sad tale of how, unable to bear losing your dog, you travel back in time to visit her again and again.
animal-harmdeath-of-a-loved-one
Vincent lost his mom on one of the first Mars missions. He’s had a career as a successful author, but he’s always refused to talk about his mother. Fifty years later, he tells us how he decided to end his silence and write a book about her.
death-of-a-loved-one
In 12th-Century England, six-year-old Ada flees the vicious reptilian wastoures who swam the countryside eating people and animals alike.
body-horrorchild-abusedeathviolence
A washed-up magician drinking whisky at 9 AM meets a mysterious British lady, who leads him into the worst day of his life.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
Chaplin Win is in trouble for letting an unauthorized ghost talk with hospital patients, and inspectors are coming tomorrow.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Somewhere near the every-changing Mocking Tower the Imagi Vert has hidden a sword that holds the soul of the late emperor, and a thief has come to try to steal it.
deathviolence
When the world changed and the sky turned silver, magic became real, Emma Anne became a little girl and her neighbor became a pirate. But can a little girl fight off an attack by the Loping Man?
deathviolence
During a flu epidemic, the narrator uses her cooking blog to tell the world about how she and her family make do on short rations.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-onegoreviolence
"The maadiregi at the temple of the talking drum say that there is a word in old Sauúti, the high language of our ancestors, that when spoken backwards, allows the speaker to fly. To take to the sky like a bird, unshackled from the persistent pull that...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
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
"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
"As always, I’m doing a buddy read with MariaReadsALot because she talked me into it, and boy, was she right! What a strange world and what powerful characters Titos Pavlou has created! I can’t stop thinking about this book even though this might be for...
death
"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
"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
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.
A woman visiting Las Vegas for a fun weekend encounters her ne’er-do-well ex-husband, who begs her for a favor that gambles with life and death…
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Misunderstanding threatens a commune whose survival is dependent on precise communication with another species…
death-of-a-loved-one
"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
"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.
"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...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorcannibalismviolence
The sister of an abducted child is haunted by a sinister figure who may or may not be real…
"Mirae sits on her bed, parting her hair with one hand and feeling for the access port on the back of her head with the other. She finds the notched edges of the cap and twists counterclockwise until it comes loose. Her eye twitches as she slides the plug...
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"There’s a dog in this house. A not-quite-a-dog. An undog. I heard its whimpering the first week I slept here, the thump, thump, thump of its bulky legs on the old tiles. I found long brown hair mixed with dust bunnies where the walls met. When there’s a...
abuseanimal-harm
"The point of Mars,” Serafina said over the radio as her rover crunched over the fine lacustrine surface of the Argyre Planitia, “is that it’s the opposite of a safe place. Why else would we be here, except to challenge ourselves, to challenge humanity?”...
death-of-a-loved-one
"The reading of Ma’s will marks the first time I’ve seen my mother in fifteen years. She looks frailer than I’d remembered, almost childlike, her limbs like disposable chopsticks under her gown. Her hospital room is decorated entirely with inoffensive...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathmental-illnesssuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathmental-illnesswar
Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. ... But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some...
body-horrordeathviolence
"Joy nearly got lost on the root-knotted red dirt path off of Highway 99, losing sight of the gaps between the live oaks and Spanish moss that fanned across her hood and windows like fingertips. Driving back to her family’s cabin twenty years later...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
In an alternate 1950s with robots, spaceships, and flying cars, the US Army sends a robot father to the son of a dead soldier.
deathviolence
Alice prefers to stay in human form, but one of her own kind is after her seeking vengeance, and she’s got to find a way to protect herself before he finds her.
violence
"Charlie wasn’t a ghost standing in the corners of the house, but at the same time he was everywhere. He had been haunting my thoughts since we received Uncle Jamey’s emails and the plane tickets. Now, everyone gathered at our mother’s house, my childhood...
deathracismsubstance-usesuicideviolence
The aliens occupied and controlled the bodies of animals, destroying most of humanity. A few survivors in a ski resort pass the time preserving the bodies of friends who didn’t make it.
animal-harmdeathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Dez is abandoning his acting career in mourning for Cherie, his one true love. But there is a technology that can temporarily bring her back—or something like her, anyway.
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
After watching a make eat her mother, Malatina isn’t sure she wants one anywhere near her web, but she’s lonely, and so she responds to a very unusual arachnipede who seems to be lonely too.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Intensifying earthquakes are gradually destroying the world, but Marina still has her art, and Elodie is building a robot.
deathmental-illnesssuicide
After eighteen years, a colony ship reaches Neptune, and the children born on board wonder what their future holds.
Cassie takes her hallucinating uncle and a needy animatronic dinosaur head on a road trip through the suburbs of a decaying city.
death-of-a-loved-one
In an empire obsessed with war, a healer married to a warrior seeks to escape the endless fighting, killing, and dying.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolencewar
Two top-notch time-travelling assassins get an assignment to expose a corrupt aristocrat by killing a magistrate and later bringing her back from the land of the dead.
deathsubstance-useviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorsubstance-useviolence
As a new leader in an independent-minded community in the Dakotas, Tony gets the job of disposing of the body of an alien assassin. Between the locals and the aliens, things get complicated fast.
As the last stars in the universe are dying, an entity piloting an enormous starship that used to be the Earth tries to decide what to do next.
death
To return to power, the godlike Hollow Ones recruit Spear to kill the Great Beasts that hold the laws of reality in place, and Hark to cook them so they can absorb their power. Only one remains before the end of the world as they know it.
body-horrorgoreviolence
In 1933, Doug quits his job to go on an expedition to Antarctica to kill the Great Shoggoth and retrieve the priceless treasures of the lost city of Leng.
animal-harmviolence
Master Zhao shares his tale of how he discovered his time-travel ability and what he’s done with it. But why hasn’t he used it to become more successful?
deathillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathracismsexual-violenceviolence
An Australian detective investigates a woman who apparently killed her husband and children before disappearing.
child-deathdeathviolence
Bilqis, the only real doctor in a dying community of religious exiles, finds something strange when she examines a pregnant woman.
pregnancy-loss
Only Marianne can see that her new brother-in-law is a horror, and although she knows she can summon the faeries to get rid of him, she also knows the price will be very high.
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-onepregnancy-lossviolence
Meant to clear plastic from the sea, the artificial “squids” have put the oceans off-limits to humanity. Not everyone takes that lying down.
death
The Dunyshar are stranded on an outpost, but NuTay dreams of going home to Earth.
A woman appears to be helping a child recover from some form of brain damage. His perceptions and memory are off, but something is off about her too.
child-deathdeathviolence
What if rhinoceroses behaved like human beings and talked about their upcoming extinction during book club meetings?
death-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
A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
"It turns out you’ve missed your favorite season. Your wheelchair rolls along a path strewn with ginkgo leaves, and you catch sight of the SWAILS building complex: fourteen dome-shaped structures surrounding a flat monument of what looks like black marble....
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
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
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
"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
"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
"Alvin’s scripts arrived in yellow envelopes. They were hand delivered, placed inside his letter box as if part of the regular mail, but with no address or stamps on it. The scripts were typed on unlined paper. They were short, never longer than a page,...
deathviolence
"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
"The aquarium is different every time I die. Exhibits reshuffling like a deck of cards. The blood loss, though, that’s reliable. Death ninety-three was the jellyfish room: all those ghost bodies and moonsilk, limned radiant in the blacklight, jetting about...
abuseviolence
"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
"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
"Memories of Memories Lost" by Mahmud El Sayed is a story about the price of the things we choose to forget. Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by Mahmud El Sayed, edited by Isabella Kestermann. Audio edition read by Karim Kronfli and produced by Lian...
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
"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
"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
"In July 2088, shortly after I woke up from cryosleep, I received a copy of 2181 Overture. Assuming the book was science fiction, I didn’t even bother touching it. My only concern was how I could adjust to the new world I found myself thrown into. After...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"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."
"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....
"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
"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
"The Taghrib Colony had existed for almost two hundred years, and all that time it had been waiting to die. Then one night Rustem, tinker of Biskra, discovered a nova in the sky. The beautiful, deadly sun had just gone down, and the twilit air was...
"Modern bodies are made in large quantities. Factories line the edge of the Fissure Basin. Workers scoop sand and mud into large churning vats, feeding extruders that empty into molds in the standard shapes. Factory supervisors smooth out imperfections and...
death-of-a-loved-one
Author : Michelle Denham Narrator : Isabel Kim Host : Shingai Njeri Kagunda Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh Discuss on Forums PodCastle 721: A Chestnut, A Persimmon, A Cunning Lie is a PodCastle original. Content warning for the loss of a child....
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Tana was in a humid cave checking the rind on a round of Tomme when the messenger arrived to tell her that the war was lost and her wife was to be hanged. She took her time rewrapping the cheese before she responded. Still too soft. Another week, she...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"I didn’t expect the trailer to feel so small and that some of the blood would still be wet. But I must have expected some blood because I cuffed my jeans before going in. And I didn’t expect the cats would have come back—a window was open, its screen...
deathviolence
"Jinah stands in her old underwear and scrapes the future from women’s skin. Their scales fall to the floor. The women sit up scoured red and smooth. The scales are impossible to see unless you’ve learned how to look, but impossible to miss once you’ve...
"I don’t want to say goodbye, but with dawn brushing Ri’s warm forehead, I can’t help kneeling by her bed and saying, “Wake up, darlin, Ma’s going out.” Jer’s look asks why I’d ever do anything different, and why’d we have that whole fight about it last...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
For Grant Rutherford, work is both life and legacy — but when he dies a mere week after his wife, what he leaves behind will have metaphysical reverberations he could never have foreseen. Content warnings: Grief, medicalized illness, death of a loved one...
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicsubstance-use
"When they ordered me down off my pedestal, I had nowhere else to go. Life as a statue is easy. They make you ascend the pedestal, turn you to stone, remove your ability to move, and leave you to watch the turn of the seasons in a world you cannot touch or...
abuseviolence
"You ready?” asked the first man, his face pockmarked, lips leering, eyes sullen. “Light’em up,” replied the second. The third nodded his head and produced the gasoline. They knew the children slept inside. No one had to tell them. The Freedmen’s School in...
child-deathracismviolence
Fear was already on the street waiting for her. Tulaya had seen this purge-and-nightmare Manifest before in Fatih, tagging the footsteps of an old man in the spice market with its shadow like claws.
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneracismviolence
"It’s not a real baby,” Jain says flatly. “And we should kill it.” Another sunless morning in the Waste. She and Stromile have woken up to a gift: a canister of pepto-pink fluid with an infant inside it. The tiny figure is chubby and squirmy and perfect,...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"Once upon a time, in that place right near to us, there lived a man and a woman, together as man and wife, though, like most peasants, no one had married them nor given them any word. It was simply that their love for each other was stronger even than...
abusechild-abuseviolence
"Your grandfather is dead. Your instance gave you the news: a phone call in the dead of night that woke you from a dead sleep. “Hello?” you said, accented with slumber. “Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean. “Yes,” you said. The...
death-of-a-loved-one
"I’ve got a signal,” Cora said. “Elena, come look!” I rushed to Cora’s bank of computers. For six long, working-into-the-evening days, we’d gotten only the faintest of quantum signals, nothing usable. Our grant only gave us three weeks on the TU Delft...
deathsuicide
"By the time I hear that my brother is looking for me, and has somehow scraped together enough credit to get on a commercial flight to New Tel Aviv, and that he’s also brought his three-year-old daughter on her first interplanet trip, my insides are...
deathsubstance-useviolence
"As the people began to die, desperation drove us to the depths of the sea for cures. We mined mineral-rich vents until the tube worms went extinct, stripped polymetallic nodule fields bare, squeezed sludge out of sea sponges to treat the new diseases,...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"I don’t realize how far apart I have grown from my mother until, upon meeting her again, I have to force myself to hug her. When I heard the news, I packed a few things from my personnel apartment at the Omega hospital and booked a ticket on the next...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"Seated on the balcony of the house across the street is a man. He is slumped in his chair and has remained unmoving for several hours. The tattered frays of his agbada spreads about his person like an old sailcloth, snapping in the wind. His equally...
death-of-a-loved-one
A generation ship arrives at its target planet only to discover a civilization has arisen in the centuries since it was launched. The captain sends the navigator out to explore the planet and see if there’s a place for them there.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorgoreviolence
When the Demon of the North takes her father, young Claudette teams up with a university professor to hunt it down and kill it.
Even as a grad student, Sarah Levy focused on her research to the detriment of her family, and things only get worse when she makes a breakthrough discovery.
death-of-a-loved-one
Exile’s End is a complex, sometimes uncomfortable examination of artifact repatriation and cultural appropriation. An artifact of indescribable and irreplaceable beauty created by an “extinct” culture has been the basis of another culture’s origin stories....
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Awenato is the only Uma’u on the space station after terrorists kill the rest of the diplomats from his world, including his lifemate. He wants revenge, but first he has to figure out how to just get by.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
The night watchman was warned not to look at the imprisoned witch, Kalmashi, but it was hard not to, and now he’s having strange dreams.
deathwar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorwar
On his deathbed, a man implores his son to visit his plaque at their ancestral temple—which appears to exist in virtual reality.
When the Dynast dies, his daughter Lin flees before her older siblings can kill her. She has a place of safety in mind, but she’s never been there herself and needs help to get in.
deathviolence
The narrator undergoes a special treatment that lets her revisit (and change) key memories that trouble her—all of which involve people she had sex with.
sexual-contentsexual-violencesubstance-use
In 2028, Kitty has a role in a play about a mass murder committed in 1978, but when she visits the setting of the crime, she’ll pulled into the past right before the crimes take place.
abusedeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
A crew member describes the songs he and his friends made when they put together a band centuries from Earth and centuries from their destination.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Connor works at a restaurant in New York where he has a magical touch with food (literally). Problems with his family keep interfering with his career, though.
Serving good food is always a challenge, but it’s even harder when your restaurant has to cater to dead people as well as live ones.
violence
Isiuwa survived the apocalypse, and its people live on in the middle of a desert. The chief says leaving means certain death, but Nata thinks he’s lying.
violence
Judith takes a job as companion to a young man who appears to be terminally ill and has retired to a family estate by the sea.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathmental-illnessviolence
On the eve of World War II, five years after King Kong’s death, a young New York taxi driver meets Ann Darrow and learns they have something in common.
racism
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
sexual-contentsexual-violence
Attacked by endless flocks of ravens, the Bjebu people flee their village to a strange place controlled by a strange god, who grants them safety in exchange for “three offerings of sorrow.”
deathviolence
An aspiring young stage magician meets an older magician over coffee to try to convince him to share some of his tricks. And to show him a few of his own.
Eva and Didecus lived together happily in exile on an obscure planet, but they were important people once, and the universe has a way of coming looking for important people—even when they thought they were retired.
deathslavery
A mother talks to a scan of her daughter taken just a month before, ah, something happened. It’s a short conversation but it packs quite a punch.
death-of-a-loved-one
Sentient characters in a massive online multiplayer game exploit a flaw in the operating system to escape to a safe place that’s only rumored to exist.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
The narrator and her friends go fishing for snakehead in a stream in Singapore, but the biggest one is something more than just a fish.
Sa races in dangerous places throughout time and space, but she’s getting old, the challengers are ruthless, and there are a lot of ways to get hurt in this sport.
A woman found an alien space probe in the dry valleys of Antarctica, and three generations of her family try to decide what it really means.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorchild-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-useviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
The last living human being lives with her aunts, who are all incarnations of the last survivors of various extinct species.
death
Action, Adventure, Tragedy, Victory—with Lots of Cats.
deathviolence
Ben Clarke travels to Hollywood to settle his late brother’s affairs. He learns a variety of things about his brother, but the biggest surprise is what he finds in the bedroom.
deathsubstance-usesuicide
The prince’s huntsman finds himself trapped in an abandoned castle, prisoner of a once-human beast.
violencewar
The Life Tree protects the villagers, at the price of human sacrifices. When it takes Jiteh’s brother, she starts looking for ways to escape.
body-horrorchild-deathdeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
The world is gradually being destroyed by what seems like an alien plague that attacks people and software alike. Caitlin lives in a seaside Scottish town, nursing her dying lover.
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Edgar Allan Poe’s writing has brought a creature into this world and it inhabits a young woman who wants to be rid of it. It has its own agenda.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusedeathgoreillness-and-pandemicsexual-contentsubstance-usesuicideviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesubstance-use
Ava recounts the visit of the "Needlers" to Earth and her part in the attempts to communicate with the aliens.
Eleven years ago, the Blue-Lily plague devastated the Empire. Now Yen Oanh attends to unfinished business with a dead mind-ship and a living survivor.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemicviolence
Aliens decide to rule the Earth indirectly, picking a middle-aged woman from an insurance company to be their intermediary.
deathsuicide
An aging robot, on a journey to visit a friend, reflects on their adventures together.
death
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
"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
"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...
"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
"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
"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...
"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 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,...
"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 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
"We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it...
"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
"The oldest members of the asamblea all agree that the idea for El Zopilote came out of the Plantation in Texas, back when it was still one more state in the old US. The Plantation is what they called the Sysco-Bush Memorial Carceral Center and it had...
deathsexual-violenceviolence
"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
Even death is no match for a trio of elderly, stubborn, ever-sparring sisters, who refuse to rest in peace while their grudges live on…
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"When my parents heard I was selected to serve in the Alariel’s shining palaces, I think it broke them. Letters made of actual paper were so expensive that I ran as soon as the drone handed the envelope to me. I banged open the front door of our tiny...
violence
"A micro alarm sounded, and Chuck Grimshaw double-checked the suit integrity readings. He was losing air. Slow, but sure. Inside the pressure suit, he was actually surprisingly warm and comfortable. The AJ19 was an older suit model, and this particular one...
Unknown forces attempt to stop Judge Dee and Jonathan from transporting a mysterious and possibly dangerous prisoner, who holds a secret about the Judge, to an executioner in France…
"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...
"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...
"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
A sculptor struggles when he is commanded to perpetuate the lies of a deceitful and cruel king…
death
"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...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-onewar
"Got a new one for you,” the mover said. Small man, in neat overalls, wheeling the box on the stacker. That’s what the robot saw when they opened the box and let it out. It stepped cautiously out into sunshine. An unfamiliar city skyline, a boxy...
deathwar
"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
A mother, left behind on Earth, receives a birthday card from her son, who is worlds away. How much time do we have together with the ones we love, especially when they grow up and away? How much is remaining? Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by...
death-of-a-loved-one
In "Kwong's Bath" by Angela Liu, Kwong is visited by the ghosts of the people she has trouble letting go. Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by Angela Liu, edited by Sachiko Ragosta. Audio edition read by Lauren Kong, with casting and production by...
death-of-a-loved-oneself-harmsuicide
"Umeboshi" by Rebecca Nakaba is an exploration of what it means to be connected through heritage—and chain email. Copyright khōréō magazine 2023. Story by Rebecca Nakaba, edited by Sachiko Ragosta. Audio edition read by Heidi Tabing, with sound design by...
body-horror
"My cat hops up to his favorite spot by the window to observe the nebula, the pitter-patter of his paws and the low hum-rumble of the engine the only sounds in the room. Misty tendrils amble past, glimmering and cloudlike, carrying an entire medley of warm...
death
"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
"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...
"Long before you came along, I was myself just a seed in Raffa’s pocket, something she fumbled with as she stepped on the plane, her other hand clutching her mother’s. Small as I was, I sensed her fear. I tried to hum reassuringly. Above the ocean, I...
abusedeath-of-a-loved-one
"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...
"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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathviolence
"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
"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
"The seven siblings sit in a place beyond the boundaries of space and time, where everything is made of stories. Even them. Especially them. People are made of stories too, but only the versions of their stories that they tell themselves. Curated, limited,...
death-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
"The creature was not the last of its kind, but it had been a very long time since he had seen another like himself. Loneliness had been Deviltree’s unrelenting companion, driving him to the edge of the cliff once more to look out onto the valley below....
death
"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....
"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
"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
"I find Aleda’s scale, sticky with ichor, tucked between the tentacles of our pink anemone bed. I tweeze it out from the undulating appendages with my thumb and index finger and flounder against my escalating heart rate. Aleda’s swishing back and forth,...
Vashti is a pathogenic diplomat—an ambassador to the world of viruses, whom she communicates with through a machine that can translate their chemical signals into images, tastes, smells, sounds, and memories. She begins a negotiation between the US...
deathillness-and-pandemic
"This is the dead thing becoming the body. This is the dead thing opening the body’s eyes. This is the dead thing rising from the grave. This is the dead thing saying “What the hell—I didn’t ask to be summoned. I was having a great time being dead and...
deathviolence
"Leo Gregory is losing altitude. He coasts on the thermals of a legacy fading behind him: a documentary here, a retrospective there, some greatest-hits collection down in the corner for the dilettantes. Oh, the work has lost none of its grandeur: his...
illness-and-pandemic
"Grandma died last year, yet she comes every Saturday to have lunch with me. When she was still alive, she loved telling everyone that we were roommates. She would say to her embroidery club friends that her roomie had landed a very hip job in the city...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Down here among the dead, our fairy tales begin at the end. So Skullbone—hero, trickster, corpse—plans to dive into the great Maw that rends the sea-ice far beyond our gravelled shores. Against the frozen waves’ mottled blue and glassy white, the Maw...
death
"The coffin lies at the curb, tilted aslant on the strip of grass next to the sidewalk. Old Mr. Byerly spies it on an evening walk through his suburban neighborhood. It’s been put out alongside a pile of other discards—an old-fashioned lawn mower, a...
child-abusedeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
"Snow was falling in dithering flurries, spilling from the clouds like a shower of white confetti. The accumulation on the ground was already deep, and the horses pulling the sleigh were struggling, their hooves sinking into the drifts as if wading through...
"Patricia could hear them gathered on her front porch, the kings and popes and saints, gossiping and chattering and generally having a good time. She turned. King Solomon lay sprawled across the bed like it was his golden throne. He raised his head to...
death-of-a-loved-one
"This much was clear. At some point in my future, I would have access to a time machine. This was a ridiculous sentence and a tragically irrelevant concern while my wife Judi was on the floor and possibly dying, but there it was: nonsense, in the presence...
death-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"Time is absolute. My son is born and there is blood, screaming sweet as rain, tears, and joy. I hold him. Things precede. Time is a straight line that exists independent of observers. My son’s second birthday follows his first. He walks shortly after his...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
A student of multiversal time travel slips from one version of New York to another, discovering that love may transcend timelines, but so too can heartbreak…
"She laid in bed and stared at the bottom of the bunk above her, riddled as it was with sticker and tape residue, which was stubborn as piss. The human race could contrive to send her to Venus, but it had not been clever enough to figure out how to remove...
deathsuicide
Children have always disappeared under the right conditions—slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere... else. Adventures are always interesting, but they’re...
"The intact remnants of Tess’ pressure suit sat alone at the bar, slumped before an untouched pint of beer. No one around the Waystation blamed Hae’cera for what they did after the reactor blew. According to the logs recovered after the accident, the blast...
A boy, desperate to escape the drudgery of life in his small town, gets caught up in the machinations of a traveling time keeper, and slowly watches his town and his life unravel by the seams.
death-of-a-loved-one
"I’m pretty sure I’m photosynthesizing. That’s what I mean when I say this year made me a real plant lady. I promise this isn’t another weird quarantine derangement thing, like losing track of time or holding conversations with taxidermy. I still need to...
"We hunt for the structure of the universe in its ghosts. – Dr. Michelle Francl / In the beginning / In the beginning was the trigger warning: / Prepare for insects. Prepare for words in Latin and Spanish. Prepare for science and other species of the...
death-of-a-loved-oneracismviolence
"There’s a story that sounds completely fantastic and yet is true. It happened here and in the neighboring lands. It goes like this: Once upon a time, there was an ocean, deep and cold. And in the ocean there was salt. For a long time, salt did not know...
pregnancy-loss
"Elizabeth is the first person to notice I’m inside her. “Tell me how to do it,” she whispers. It’s a shock. No one has spoken to me directly in ages. I’m nothing more than a whisper when I slip beneath her skin. I’m less than a breath. I should be...
body-horrormental-illnessself-harm
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
mental-illnesssubstance-usesuicide
"The infomercial jangles for DoubleSpace were never quite as catchy as the ones for its more expensive alternatives, and yet, you and I would hum them indiscriminately, little heads bobbing, lips vibrating, as we ran about the house. The day the installers...
child-deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"There had to be other islands capable of supporting human settlements, Alain told himself. Life should be possible beyond the shores of Heora. That was the article of faith that drove all Exploration. They simply haven't sailed far enough to find a new...
body-horrordeath
"The funeral began when the temple clock tolled at sunset, crimson and lavender and gold clouds against a violet sky. Or an artificial version of nightfall—day changing to night on the video screens tiling the walls and ceiling of the giant cavern that...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"When Golem opened her eyes for the first time, she saw Magda. “You are Golem,” Magda whispered, her oil-stained fingers prodding Golem’s metal joints. “Golem,” the machine repeated, the rust along the two half-tin cans forming her jaw chipping onto...
deathviolencewar
Author : Leah Ning Narrator : Graeme Dunlop Host : Summer Fletcher Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh Discuss on Forums PodCastle 679: Pull is a PodCastle original. A content warning for end of life care. Rated PG-13 with a content warning for end of...
animal-harmdeathillness-and-pandemic
"Commander Maeb Len knows that, more than anything, an army needs hope in order to struggle onward. They need a vision to fight for and faith that the future will be better than the past. Better than the present. The People’s Army itself is one such hope....
deathwar
"The boyo working the transmitter doesn’t look like much, except his face is radiant. Radiant, like one of those pooka upworld adverts for neural templates. Dopamine-druggy, but lucid. Like he’s in love. Boyo also looks like he hasn’t spoken to a human in...
deathviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
"The truth is that I lost my arm the same summer I lost my brother. Lost is a euphemism. In fact, my arm was retrieved by the paramedics and brought to the hospital, along with the two fingers severed from my left hand, and the various parts of my...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"That first autumn it felt as if the whole world had been made for them—which, of course, it had. They walked down the avenue of oaks that reached above their heads like Gothic arches, red leaves drifting lazily down to collect at their feet. Ashwin was...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesuicide
"Dill.” Keith settled down next to her on the storage tub they used for a bench. “The plant was just big enough to trim.” “Ooo.” Blaine kissed him in the steam over her cup. “My man can COOK.” After two months on Mars trying to get anything to grow, after...
"The egg must have hatched overnight, though he could see no sign of a hatchling anywhere. Only empty shell bits remained, strewn here and there across the tatami."
death-of-a-loved-one
"What do you mean, Why didn’t I warn them before? Are you serious? I did! Answer me this if you are so smart. If you had seen it, what would you have done? It all began with a scrap of fabric I used to test the machine’s tension. Over and over and over,...
death
"The technician swallowed. “She’s in pieces. I was uploading her and I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t work.” Her face flushed. “I broke her.” ... “Okay, first thing is calm down. I got this. What’s the patient’s name?” “Angela Spelling.” His head...
"Here’s the thing you need to know to understand this story: I was meant to be an only child. The doctors, when they examined my mother, only counted one heartbeat. One. Me. I don’t know when my sister came along. My mother, so ready to accept, so...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"When Elisabeth takes the baby to the beach on Thursday afternoon, another shambler has got through the fence. “Stay ten meters back,” the guard says, his translucent face mask fogged with the heat. “Yes, yes,” Elisabeth says. “And the child. Ten meters.”...
child-deathdeath
"They say the universe was created when a Giant lit a matchstick. That her great sigh fanned the flames that danced and wept into stars and constellations. They say some seas are blue and Slugs are naturally submissive. They also say that I cannot exist....
child-death
"Callme curled with her back to the corner and watched Julie’s every precise move. The old border collie often knew more about their surroundings than Julie, and so Julie trusted her to help guard. This morning, Callme’s ears pricked forward in benign...
"A pause only Winnifletch herself notices, a twinge in her guts as she unsacks the gull that Gert Mews has lugged to her sea-spindle shack. Dazed but not dead, the bird crawks down onto her workbench. Think of shearwater honey, Winni tells herself, with...
animal-harm
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
abusechild-abusesexual-violence
In 19th-Century Texas, a German immigrant mother defends her farm and family (in the absence of her husband and eldest son) against a vicious wolf as well as some of the local townspeople.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onegore
Laema joins the Pirate Queen’s voyage to the south pole but secretly plots to assassinate her.
death
Young Wipwai’s tribe has always fought their neighbors, but she’s secretly made friends with one of them, and they plot a future of peace.
child-deathdeathviolence
A child struggles with the loss of his big brother and his feelings that maybe things are better without him—and maybe he’s not really gone.
child-abusedeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
The narrator tries to find the path to the impossible ocean at the top of the mountain to dispose of the ashes of his/her parents, but there are obstacles in the way.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
"Truth be told, I have not done much with the entryway. It keeps up appearances. I am told it is a perfectly acceptable facsimile of a standard human receiving room. My handlers nod approvingly when I sit them on its low velvet cushions and shallow couch...
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathhomophobiaviolence
The Augur can tell your future just by studying the skin on your body. His prophecies are detailed, and he’s only been wrong once. But when he raises an orphan girl, he’s bothered that she wants to follow in his footsteps.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death
"The first time Rang died, it stopped a typhoon. The typhoon raged at the entire Orphan Cousin enclave. Torrents rolled in for hours, swallowing the harbor in foam and brine, dashing fishing trawlers against the shore. Storage houses were dragged into the...
deathself-harmsuicide
"Adam is washing his hands when it happens again. First the water pouring out of the faucet becomes icy cold seafoam. Then the porcelain bottom of the sink dissolves, making him flinch backward. The bathroom’s tiled floor is intact; the mirrored medicine...
deathviolence
"Now, dry and dead, the gardens sulk in the center of the city; not our pride, but our shame. Now the beds and planters are dry with dust, the carvings are chipped away for lime, the paths are run only by rats and ragged dogs. Now it is a place where no...
death-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Every Halloween, an elderly woman hands out candy to a young trick-or-treater who’s dressed as a witch each time, looking exactly the same age. With each passing year, the woman grows more attached to the little witch and her odd nature. But she is no...
death
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Sorrow Farregon is a master perfumer, but the Queen wants something to make her conceive a child—which is challenging when the King is a clockwork automaton.
deathsuicide
"Juana thought this was bullshit. She had found the broken sailboat in the south wind and tried to pilot it to Hispaniola, but it wouldn’t go in the right direction. You’d think flying would be the hard part, but no, it was steering. And you’d think...
child-deathdeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
violencewar
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-oneillness-and-pandemic
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
child-deathdeath
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrordeathsubstance-use
In a hostile, ruined Earth, a teenage girl struggles with the consequences of the death of her twin sister.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
deathsexual-violenceviolence
When it sees its neighbors torn down, a smart building appeals to the government not to let it die.
A half-ghost gets a premonition that the Emperor has died, and his ghost ship flies off to Homeworld because whoever gets the Emperor’s ghost first gets free wishes.
deathsexual-contentviolence
Val leads an almost solitary life keeping the lighthouse at an inland lake. A man needing help with his magic interrupts her routine and brings unwelcome reminders of the life she lost.
In which grown up Gerda and Kay from “The Snow Queen” get separated, and she goes after him again, finding that much has changed and yet a lot is just the same.
misogynysexual-violenceviolence
A young god buys a common patience stone from a crow. A girl takes the task of removing a thousand needles from a sleeping panther. Both of their lives will change forever.
A middle-aged man settling his dead mother’s estate discovers he can still slip through the wardrobe into a different world.
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
death-of-a-loved-one
A vignette about what happens on a Venerean cloud colony when an old man dies in his sleep and those who love him come to bid him farewell.
death
Ten years ago, all the members of the IRIS band died in an accident, and Ruriko blames herself. She keeps visiting robot constructed with the personalities of the band members hoping to find absolution.
deathself-harm
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
self-harmsexual-contentsuicide
In the wake of her husband’s death, Anke leaves the Oort cloud for a job on Callisto, bringing her kids with her. A planned side-trip to Triton goes awry, and they made a hard decision.
Adriana’s going to be all alone when her best friend moves away, she’s bracing herself to be all alone, and she’s starting to have strange dreams that affect the real world.
deathillness-and-pandemic
Everyone has a timer on their wrists counting down the years, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until they meet their soul mates. Fiona’s just 24, and her timer says she’ll have to wait 40 years. So what to do until then?
Kleave’s life is upended when a freak accident disables all three of the archives where he stores copies of his experiences and memories.
Chime’s husband is also another woman’s wife. The sharing isn’t a problem, per se: she has her own wife when she’s male. The problem is that she keeps getting him back in increasingly beat-up condition.
It’s been a long time since Ravi left Guyana, but he’s sure he recognizes a Jumbie, even in New York, where they don’t believe in evil spirits. And it’s following him.
sexual-contentviolence
Summer of 1955, the last summer of high school. Mike remembers his girlfriend and how wonderful it was being in love. And he remembers the awful things that happened at the end.
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Zayred and Meiri used to be close friends and powerful magicians who could win battles through singing, but now they’re devoted to destroying each other’s reputation.
deathwar
In the future, lottery winners will get their hearts’ desire, whether it’s turning into a bird, going to Mars, or vanishing into thin air.
violence
Jared has almost brought the princess to safety, but he worries that Kat, the crazy women who accompanies them, might have betrayed them.
sexual-violenceviolence
Jin is a mercenary hired to protect archeologists investigating an ancient ship built by the extinct human race.
child-deathdeathviolence
After the government rules he isn't really human, Chris loses his human wife and hybrid kids.
child-deathdeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
A government agent secretly watches Ryx (age 10) and Hector (age 19) because they both have dangerous “variant” abilities.
deathsubstance-use
The narrator wants to spend the last hours before the asteroid strike with her parents, but she runs out of gas in the middle of South Dakota.
Xin’s orderly life on Eighth Colony changes forever when she ushers a mutilated body through the portal.
deathviolence
A member of a group of powerful beings who make stories real tells us the truth about Solomon Grundy and why he had to die.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
In his old age, a TV writer reflects on a show he worked on fifty years ago--the only work he's really proud of--and the almost supernatural way it came to an end.
abusesubstance-use
Ellie is trying to catch a train from Boston to DC so she can visit her ailing mother when her sister calls to tell her she needs to "go to the skunkworks and repair the physics of this universe."
illness-and-pandemic
In alternate-history America, an uplifted chimp gets certified as a person and goes to the moon.
A woman paramedic and her best friend fear that despite their best efforts, they end up causing more pain than they relieve.
deathsuicide
All the imaginary creatures a young person could want to make apartment life more pleasant.
While human beings try to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences, parrots wonder why we're not trying to talk to them.
A lonely old Chinese man gets involved in the fight against smog--without government approval.
illness-and-pandemic
From childhood, Flora, painted disturbing paintings, and her nurse fears the young lady carried this obsession into adulthood.
deathillness-and-pandemic
"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
"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
"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
Two ex-military nurses, one human and one alien, share a friendship in a city following an alien invasion.
racismviolencewar
"Poland, 1979 Warm sun filtered through the leaves and dappled the sidewalk as Helena walked back from the farmers’ market. In May, the linden trees bloomed all over the city, the same cheerful green fringed with white as the year before, as if nothing had...
abuseviolence
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horrorself-harm
"My ghost bled through the shadows, an icy wind stirring the leaves. Eyes like candle flames shuddering and crescent moon mouth, it had found me as a girl and never let go—the only thing that was really mine. It led me to an overgrown graveyard, pelts of...
deathdeath-of-a-loved-onesexual-violence
Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-oneviolence
"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
"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
"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
"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...
"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
"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 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
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
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...
The spirit of a recently deceased young boy helps a group of ghosts seek revenge on a corrupt and abusive town minister.
child-deathdeathviolence
Damon’s UBI royalties just crashed. His social capital went up in smoke. His girlfriend left him. Now he finds out he’s going to die. What to do? Solve his own murder, for starters…and maybe, just maybe, strike it rich along the way.
deathsubstance-useviolence
A woman talented in the art of spinning–creating pottery by manipulating clay in her mouth–longs to become the best, but wonders if it is worth the sacrifices she must make…
body-horrordeath-of-a-loved-oneself-harm
"El detonated the EMP against the feeder’s sensor, a delicate organ that he had only seen in fragments, suspended in cytology slides the shape of dominoes. The lab just days ago had been inundated with new specimens, washed up on the long white beaches...
body-horrordeathself-harm
"The angel Azrael rode the dead horse across a broken plain that went on so long he lost track of the days. The empty heavens gave him no clues, for the sun seemed to linger just beyond the horizon without actually making an appearance. As if it were as...
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
"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
"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
"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...
"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...
"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
"Good stone, like water, wrought truce by necessity. Here, the river became a waterfall and ate the earth like honeycomb. Here, teardrops of flint washed up at a stone knapper’s feet. Bands of every people in the vastness of the world came for the stone....
animal-harmgoreviolence
"Yesterday, I didn’t care much about much. Back then, there hadn’t been any cars in the parking lot. We didn’t see any muddy footprints stamped into the dirt. Not even the hoofprint exclamations of deer. The weather was partly to blame, but really people...
deathracismviolence
"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."
"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...
"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
"Good morning, Akasma.” I say these words to my spaceship every day, whether it is a good morning or not, because she is the only being I can safely talk to, and she has said she likes my voice, froggy and raspy though it may be. My spaceship is not, for...
body-horrordeathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
fatphobiaillness-and-pandemic
"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 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
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
In a post-nuclear event Silicon Valley, a man grieving the loss of his wife struggles to find comfort when he is forced to communicate with his neighbors’ AI devices, rather than the people themselves.
deathdeath-of-a-loved-one
Not reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank.
body-horror
"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
"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...
"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
"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
"Q: What (or who!) is Eudaimon? A: We are a nonprofit organization that empowers people to live their best lives. A “life,” in our view, is best defined simply as a contiguous sequence of experiences, and thus the best life is the one consisting of the...
death-of-a-loved-one
"Hands trembling, Shiv Mehta snatched the print copy of his wife’s ribcage off the conveyor belt and lowered the print into an organ tank. Those hands had healed thousands of patients, but these days his hands had gotten good at stealing. Over the last few...
deathgoreviolence
"Rally is a dance on wet gravel to the roar of six cylinders and the flutter of turbochargers but I say again, Rally is a dance. I remembered when I discovered this truth, when I stopped jogging in place and began to ice skate on narrow back trails, not so...
deathviolencewar
"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
"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...
"The planet was dead and alive. It was the strangest thing to look down on. Ed Linklater squeezed his way into the narrow forward observation nacelle. The nacelle was shaped like a coffin, which wasn’t a nice thought. Anyone claustrophobic would never...