Podcast appearances and mentions of Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Crafty contestants, twisted challenges, and cameras, oh my! Shaun Duke and Daniel Haeusser are joined Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam for a riveting discussion about Grim Root. Together, they talk about the connections between reality TV and horror, what makes for a good scare, the intensity of illusion, and much more! Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy the episode! Show Notes: If you have a question you'd like us to answer, feel free to shoot us a message on our contact page. Our new intro and outro music comes from Holy Mole. You can support his work at patreon.com/holymole. See you later, navigator!

Breakfast with Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam as we discuss how her new horror novel toys with the tropes of reality TV, the importance of balancing multiple POVs in a novel to keep them all equally interesting, our differing views on the revision process, the three years she spent writing 1,000 words per day (and why she stopped), the message she took from her two Nebula nominations, the importance of community, what she learned about herself by rereading her short stories to assemble a collection, why we both believe in ambiguous endings, and much more.

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, author of GRIM ROOT. About GRIM ROOT: On the set of The Groom, a group of women must compete for the heart of Midwestern bachelor Tristan by spending a week in a haunted house. Divorcee Linda, resigned to her role as the show's underdog, finds her […] The post Episode 626-With Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

In this episode we discuss Our Souls To The Moon by Tamara Jeree, Onward by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, and A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad.  Tune in for Isaac changing his mind completely about one of these stories midway through the podcast!

This week, Patrick and Tracy welcome Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, author of Glorious Fiends and Where You Linger. About Glorious Fiends: When infamous hot mess vampire Roxanne resurrects her deceased best friends, she's confronted by a dream-dwelling Guardian of the Underworld, who demands that she replace them in his afterlife with three equally nefarious creatures—or he'll […] The post Episode 558-With Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam appeared first on The Functional Nerds.

What happens when you're centuries old and the thrill of unlife pales? We invite Nebula-nominated author Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam to watch Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and find out. Check out Bonnie's new novella, Glorious Fiends https://www.amazon.com/Glorious-Fiends-Bonnie-Jo-Stufflebeam/dp/1630230669 Or her short story collection, Where You Linger: https://www.amazon.com/Where-You-Linger-Bonnie-Stufflebeam/dp/1952283221

"Creatures of the Dark Oasis" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam — published in Apex Magazine, issue 132, July 2022. Read it here: https://www.apex-magazine.com/ Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam's fiction and poetry has appeared in over 90 publications such as Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Lightspeed, and LeVar Burton Reads, as well as in six languages. By night, she has been a finalist for the Nebula Award. By day, she works as a Narrative Designer writing romance games for the mobile app Chapters. She lives in Texas with her partner and a mysterious number of cats. Laura Jewell is an English teacher in Evanston, IL. She holds a BA in Theater from Miami University and a Master of Science in Education from Northwestern. In her free time she's a Level 7 Enchantress and a full-time mom to an orange cat named Orange Cat. This is her first narration. This Apex Magazine podcast was produced by Alyson Grauer. Theme music by Alex White. Sounds used in this episode are licensed from Soundstripe.com. Music in this episode includes “Ghosts” by Enoch Yang, licensed from Soundstripe.com. Apex Magazine podcast, copyright Apex Publications. Apex Magazine is a bimonthly short fiction zine focused on dark science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Find us at http://www.apex-magazine.com.

Guests Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam Premee Mohamed Shadow Visions Paranormal Call The Mystery Hotline at 1-888-726-0055. Tell us your mysterious story of the strange, the unknown, and the paranormal. If you have a guest or topic that you would like to hear on this show, please email podofmystery@gmail.com. You can also send any feedback or comments to that same address.   This audio program is copyrighted by me, Jason Rigden in 2021. And is freely available under the Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution License. 

A panel on Gothic Horror on the occasion of the release of Castle of Horror Anthology Vol. 4: Women Running from Houses (https://amzn.to/3dqyvv1) , a collection of Gothic-themed horror stories, in paperback and Kindle.The panel features In Churl Yo, Michael Aronovitz, Amanda Dewees, John Ohno, Charles R. Rutledge, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Jim Towns, Jeremiah Dylan Cook, Rob Nisbet, Leanna Renee Hieber, Sam Knight, Henry Herz, Alethea Kontis and Scott Pearson, hosted by editor Jason Henderson.The authors talk about their own stories as well as their recommendations:The Castle of Horror Anthology Vol 4: Women Running from HousesCastle of Otranto (Walpole)Rebecca (Du Maurier)Jane Eyre (Bronte)Gothic Tales of Terror (Haining)Paperbacks from HellSomeone in the House (Michaels)Order Women Running from Houses at https://amzn.to/3dqyvv1Visit Castle Bridge Media at http://castlebridgemedia.com

Narrated by Judy Young.

This special episode we invite you to listen in to a very special gathering-- Jason Henderson invites the authors of the Castle of Horror Anthology Volume 3 in to talk about their stories of "Summer Lovin'" horror. The Castle of Horror Anthology Volume 3 (available in Kindle and paperback) is the third collection of horror stories to be put out under the Castle of Horror brand. This go-around, the theme is summer! If you're headed to the beach in reality or in your dreams, watch out for our collection of ghostly gothic tales, deadly toys, time warps, wasp women and other sun-drenched terrors.The collection features stories from David Bowles, Jo Whittemore, Sam Knight, Michael Aronovitz, Alethea Kontis, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Leanna Renee Hieber, John Peel, P.J. Hoover, Drew Wolle, David P. Geister, Jason Henderson, In Churl Yo, and Rob Nisbet.

A fantasy tale about a royal family, a flower seller, and a shocking discovery. Recorded live at the Majestic Theatre with musical accompaniment by Zhenya Rock.  This episode is sponsored by Calm (www.calm.com/LEVAR).

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 46 for September 21, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is a reprint by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, "Nostalgia." Content warning for the good, the bad, and the ugly: sex, drug addiction, and references to stalking.   Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam's fiction and poetry has appeared in over 40 magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and Selected Shorts' Stella Kupferberg Memorial Prize. Her audio fiction-jazz collaborative album Strange Monsters was released from Easy Brew Studio in April 2016. You can find her online at www.bonniejostufflebeam.com or on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle.   Nostalgia by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam     Tori takes another hit of nostalgia; the smoke is creamy mint cookie down her throat, smooth and hot. It fills her lungs, tickles, burns, and as she coughs it out she laughs, smoke pouring from her lips. Fog fills her head. The live oaks’ winter skeletons crisp into focus as the drug takes hold. Tori feels the cold on her skin as if she is a little girl in the snow, her hand in her father’s glove, surrounded by his smell of smoke and vodka. Her mother hates the cold but watches from the window. Tori’s belly is full. It hasn’t been this full for years, not since home, that word a lighthouse beacon she will never again reach without this burn of throat, cloud of mind, her parents having pushed her out once they met her first girlfriend. Tori passes the pipe to her companion. “I haven’t done nostalgia in years,” Kay says. “Since I was in college. Homesick.” “No pressure,” Tori says. “Just offering.” Her new friend confuses her; she’s never been with a slate before, and even though Kay is pre-op, it’s taken some concentration not to mix up the pronouns. Shu¸ Tori practices on nights that Kay does not sleep over. Shur. Still, she’s messed up a couple of times, accidentally said she instead of shu, her instead of shur. Kay does not seem to mind these slip-ups, and it is because of this easy-goingness that Tori has let Kay into her head nearly as much as nostalgia. Kay flicks the lighter over the blue-black herb but does not inhale. Instead shu watches the leaves char in the pipe’s bowl. “Hey, knock it off.” Tori grabs the pipe, the lighter. “Don’t waste it.” “Sorry.” Kay shrugs shur thick shoulders; the grey scarf around shur neck shifts in the breeze. Tori itches to bat the decorative balls which hang from it but doesn't. Instead she remembers. When she was a little girl, she had an orange cat who batted at her scarves. Another cat in college, living with that first girlfriend, Meredith. Meredith’s skin against her own, protection from the cold, a laugh like medicine she didn’t know she needed. “You okay?” Kay asks, squeezing the nub of her shoulder. Tori opens her eyes. She had closed them without realizing. This is sad to her, like the day Meredith moved up north. “Fine,” she says. “Cold is all.” Later, atop the flannel red-and-white holiday sheets, Tori closes her eyes again and imagines familiar fingers, longer and thinner than Kay’s, inside her, lets the nostalgia hum within like a tongue, lets herself dissolve into the memory of love. One day, she thinks, kissing the nape of Kay’s bare neck, shu will feel like memory, shur blank, nippleless chest a comfort of familiarity rather than this stiff newness, this gloss. Tori wants it dull like a pencil worn to the nub. When they are finished, breathless in one another’s embrace, Tori burrows her face in the hair of Kay’s armpits, the smell of animal musk and orgasm. As the nostalgia wears off, a veil lifts on this moment, the past fogging instead like a breathed-upon window. Kay’s skin is real under her ear, the drum of shur heartbeat a surge through her. It makes her own heart beat faster, her palms sweat. She swallows her spit. To quiet the silence, she pulls her face from the sweat of Kay’s body and examines shur in the room’s dark. “Your photographs,” she says, “they’re good.” Kay laughs. “I know. Is that the only reason you’re with me?” Tori lets her head fall back into place. She knows that Kay is not comfortable enough yet to push, and the question is difficult to answer. Yes, she should say, the photographs. But this would be too much. It would stress her throat, already sore from the smoke. Behind her eyes she recalls them, the photographs, dancers leaping from frame to frame like in a flip-book. Tori had glimpsed Kay every day at the college as Kay walked past Tori mopping the same spot again and again, trying to look busy so that she would not have to catch Kay’s eye. Because she knew who Kay was, had seen shur picture in the school paper, had heard shur name repeated back when Tori was a student, back before her only affiliations with the school were the mop and broom they issued her, the paycheck they sent her monthly for cleaning the classrooms and bathrooms of the art buildings. Whenever Tori had a moment, she stopped to stare at Kay’s photographs. Once she dared to touch them; she wanted to see if the dancer was real, some little person imprisoned in the film, forced to tango and ballet and flamenco hour after hour, day after day, year after year, but it was just paper under Tori’s finger, glossy as what would be Tori and Kay’s future bedroom shenanigans. The dancers were always slates, or disguised as slates. Tori couldn’t believe there could be so many of them in Riddle, Texas, their small college town. And the way they changed from photo to photo, like devils. Like angels. Like monsters. Like memories Tori struggled to remember without the help of smoke down her throat. “Do you want to learn how to take them?” Kay asks. “I can teach you. I think you’d be good at it.” The idea sends a shiver down Tori’s spine; it both intrigues and terrifies her. Too new. “I can’t,” she says.   Tori is at the sink filling a glass with water when Meredith knocks at the kitchen door. “Whose car is that outside?” Meredith asks as she pushes past Tori. “You better not dance for her, whoever she is.” In the time since she has been away, she’s shaved the sides of her head so that the middle patch of hair falls over two bald spots. “If you dance for her, I swear.” It isn’t a surprise to see Meredith there, but also it is a surprise, as each time she shows up it sends a shock down Tori’s belly to her groin. A Pavlov’s bell. Tori leaves the faucet on, lets the water run over the sides of the glass and down the drain. “I don’t dance,” Tori says, leaning against the sink, digging her hands into the pockets of her pajama pants. “Bullshit you don’t dance,” Meredith says. “We used to dance all the time.” “Not anymore. I only danced with you.” Meredith's smile dimples her cheeks. She looks stronger, thicker; from her letters, Tori knows that she’s been climbing rocks, running races, cycling across mountains until her muscles quiver. “Prove it,” she says. Even though Kay is in the other room, asleep with shur head on Tori’s pillow, Tori’s belly aches for a kiss she knows the taste of. Berries and salt. If she could bury her head in Meredith’s hair, she would smell the slick oil sweet. She knows this. She knows, too, the way Meredith will move against her in a dance of sweat, the way Meredith will not let Tori touch her. The way she will, once Tori is gasping in her arms, jump up and disappear to the bathroom, how she will emerge flushed and breathless. How she will say, “I took care of it myself.” And how Tori will accept this. She knows, too, that as they sit on the couch with their legs intertwined, Meredith will not ask about Kay. Sure enough, it happens like that. Meredith is out the door twenty minutes later. When Tori crawls back into bed, Kay rolls over and kisses the top of her forehead. “I don’t care, you know, about her,” Kay says. “I think you’ll find I’m pretty open-minded.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tori closes her eyes and counts the hours until she can light up again.   When she runs out of nostalgia, she calls up her high school friend, Logan. He and her other friends from that time have never left the small town where they all grew up together, Agape, where they spent weekends downing stolen vodka and imbibing a rainbow assortment of drugs until nostalgia became their drug of choice. One hour’s drive south and Tori is knocking on Logan’s door. Logan answers, his skintight jeans smeared with forgotten food particles. His eyes are red as emergency exit letters. When he wraps his arms around her, she feels as though this moment has already occurred. Déjà vu. But of course it's happened before, at least once every two weeks for the last six years of her life. “You have some?” she asks. Logan leads her by the hand back to his room, where four old friends and one man Tori has never seen sit around a hookah. Inside his parents’ house everything is the same: the same black curtains drawn across every window, the same stuffed moose head mounted above the neglected fireplace, the same smell of stale smoke and semen-filled napkins left too long in Logan’s wastebasket. The coal atop the hookah smolders redder than their eyes. As Tori's eyes adjust, her chest constricts; it’s a scene straight from senior year when she didn’t yet know who she was, when she hadn’t yet grown into her own skin, was still shy and ashamed of herself, awkward in her body. This is a thought she struggles to swallow every time she comes here. Instead she takes the pipe they pass her and sucks in the rancid smoke. Once her eyes match theirs, she feels right again. She looks from face to face in the circle. Back in the day, they used to sneak into the woods to smoke this stuff. They would break into a rundown shed and sit on a ratty couch that smelled of mildew. They nearly got caught by the cops a couple of times, but they were young. Maybe that is the difference, Tori thinks, I know now that I can crumble like charred nostalgia. There was another one of them back then, a boy Tori thought for a while that she loved. They let Daniel be their leader, clung to his every word. She let him be her first boy. The only mistake she ever admitted to. She recalls his lips on her neck, his fingers tracing the necklace he slipped around her neck like a collar. This is not the way, he said, this is not the way to love you. Even though his raving words made no sense, she believed them. Later she realized he wasn’t right in the head. He smoked too much. Took other drugs. Shot some into his veins. Back then, especially, it had been nothing more than cigarettes and booze pilfered from the bottom shelves of their parents’ vice cabinets for the rest of them. They left Daniel to his own. “Are you staying for a while?” Annie asks. “I don’t think so,” Tori says, taking another hit. This one tastes like day-old salad in her throat. A bad hit. She pulls her water bottle from her purse and tries to swallow the taste. “I have to get back.” “It’s okay,” Logan says. “Big college grad, we know you’re not like us anymore.” Nothing could be closer and farther from the truth.   At home Tori arranges the baggie of nostalgia in a cedar box where she also keeps papers and a glass pipe with a rainbow flower blown onto it. She calls Kay and asks shur to come over.  When shu arrives, shu has brought along a digital camera which shu hands to Tori like a holy relic. The camera is red and feels heavy in Tori’s palm. “It’s neat,” Tori says, thrusting it back at Kay. “Is it new?” Kay won’t take it back. Instead shu stands by Tori’s side and shows her how to turn it on. “It’s for you,” shu says. Shu arranges Tori’s fingers over the buttons, uses Tori’s hand like a puppet to take a photograph of the window in Tori’s living room. “You have an eye for this,” shu says. “Don’t waste it.” “I can’t take this,” Tori says. It feels hard and slick and smells of new plastic. She hates the smell. She tries again to give it back, and when Kay won’t take it, her fingers go limp. The camera falls to the carpet with a thud. Kay leaves it where it has fallen. Takes Tori’s hands in shur own and kisses the knuckles. “It’s okay,” shu says. “You don’t have to.” Lets shur lips graze the hairs on Tori’s arms, kisses the mole on her neck, kisses her eyebrows. Unbuttons her. Tori can tell shu wants to disrobe all of her, peel off her skin even, see inside her body like an X-ray. But Tori won’t let shur. Kay’s body will change after shur operation. Tori isn’t sure that she will be okay with this. Thinking of Kay’s body as something she will have to get used to twice leaves a heavy food feeling in her stomach. Although she’s familiar with the way a typical slate body looks post-op – she took a class on gender and sexuality at the university – she wishes she could have met shu once she was already complete, once shu had already grown into the new skin, the smooth Barbie V between shur legs. At least, Tori thinks as she runs her hands over the flat chest she has made a fascination, Kay got this part out of the way before we met. “I won’t know what to do with you,” Tori whispers, “after the operation.” Kay’s voice, usually calm, is hard-edged when shu responds. “What is that supposed to mean?” Tori isn’t one hundred percent sure. She laughs at herself. When is she ever? “I just wish, you know, that we’d met once you were complete.” She thinks it might help if she explains, but she can't seem to spit the words out. Not without time. She wishes she could freeze the moment and collect herself, but the world doesn’t grant wishes that way. “Complete?” Kay pushes Tori off shur chest. “I’m just as complete now as I’ll ever be. I'll be more comfortable in my skin, sure, but I'm not incomplete. And besides,” shu says, “you’re one to talk. What are you doing with your life? You think your reason for living is so you can clean other people’s messes?” Shu stops, though Tori can tell shu wants to go on. Then shu looks away. “I’m sorry,” shu says. Shu doesn’t wait for Tori to say anything, and Tori isn’t sure she would say anything given the chance. Once Kay has gone, Tori loads a bowl, tripping over the camera on her way back to bed. She kicks it underneath the couch like the soccer ball she and her father used to pass back and forth out in the cool green grass, tinged with dew, until the chill on her bare feet became too much and her father would carry her inside and lower her onto the dry carpet. It's a memory empty of the sound of ice clinking in a glass, empty of the alcohol smell. She scrunches her toes against the carpet, a dirty shag she hasn’t vacuumed in at least a month. It doesn’t feel the same. If the world granted wishes, she would wish that it would feel the same.   The bonfire in Tori’s yard is already blazing when Meredith skids into Tori’s gravel drive on her Harley. It has been three days since Tori’s fight with Kay, and she is surprised to see Meredith so soon after the last visit. It’s surprising not to have to reacquaint herself; it’s nice. The fire’s warmth makes her bare legs burn. “Long time no see,” Tori says. “I missed you,” Meredith says. Tori has known Meredith long enough to decipher this code. What she means to say is, she couldn’t stand the thought of Tori with someone else. And so she has returned. Tori takes another hit in the hopes that she can convince herself that this time will be forever. They sit by the fire. “Can’t believe you still do this shit,” Meredith says, lighting the bowl. “And you don’t?” Meredith laughs. “I didn’t say that. Just, you were always so smart, Tori. Smarter than any of us. I figured you’d grow up faster.” Tori doesn’t want to think about it. She blows smoke from her nose. The burn makes her body tremble the way fingers will, later, when the two of them are once more wrapped in Tori’s sheets. Tori recalls that first time, when Meredith pushed her onto her own bed. Took control of Tori’s room without asking. Tori loved that she didn’t ask. She felt in capable hands. They made love to B.B. King on repeat. When they woke in the morning, the air was too hot for such closeness, but they clung to each other anyway. They turned off the music and let the noise of their breath soothe them back into fevered half-sleep. “Where’s the old gang?” Meredith dumps the cashed bowl into the fire. “Call them up.” Once Meredith left, there was nothing more to hold their group of college friends together, though during the five years of undergrad they spent every weekend together. Meredith had been glue, and none of them had ever noticed, not even Tori, who had felt her sticky sweat-soaked skin. But Tori still has their numbers. An hour later, three chairs around the bonfire have filled with the warm bodies Tori used to cling to, sloppy with drink and smoke, as they stumbled home from evenings of smoke circles and study sessions, one-night stands and late-night movie marathons. When Daniel wouldn’t stop calling, even two years after the breakup, it was these friends who, never having known him, demanded he leave her alone. Only two of their old gang is able to make it; the rest, like Meredith, moved away from Riddle after graduation. Still, looking from face to face around the fire is like looking four years into the past, and Tori’s body hums, static building under skin. She wants nothing more than to run through the field surrounding her house, to float kites as Meredith scribbles poetry in her little black notebook. Always Tori used to wonder if Meredith was writing about her. Then she knew she never was; instead she wrote of the foreign places she disappeared to more and more those days. A fantastic life she hadn’t asked Tori to be part of. Once the beer has been drained and the empty bottles tossed into the fire in hopes that they will burst, once they have finished off the last of the nostalgia, leaving only ash and a charred roach to burn, they sit back in their chairs and dream of running, though in reality none of them could summon the energy. The hum takes Tori over like an orgasm that never stops. She feels as if, for the first time since graduation, since she lost her place in this college town, she is home. The hum intensifies. It vibrates her legs and creeps up into the space between her legs. For a moment she remembers Kay. Then forgets. Then it is Meredith again, Meredith’s dimpled smile, her soft thighs. Music that she recognizes. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Meredith slurs, clapping her hand over Tori’s pants pocket, where Tori’s phone has been ringing. The phone feels strange in her sweaty palm, like an object that was never meant to be in this world. The caller ID tells her before she picks up that Logan’s will be the voice on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry,” Logan says when she picks up. “I had to tell you. Daniel killed himself two weeks ago.” A wave of numb travels from her ear to her feet. Her stomach flops as if she has swallowed sour milk. She can feel Daniel all of a sudden. His hands like a bandage across her wrist, pulling her onto his bed while his parents were away. Refusing to let go of her hand in the night. Saying, if something ever happened to you. If anyone ever hurt you. And she knew, back then, that he was damaged. Had seen his own stepfather’s dead body hanging from the ceiling. Had heard the fights from the other side of thin walls for all his childhood. She thought he was strong, thought he had grown from these experiences. How, she wanted and did not want to ask. So she didn’t. She could feel his lips down her neck and thought of how those lips would go blue-black in the earth. “God,” she says, as if she believes in Him. “How do you know?” “His mom called me today. Got my number from his phone.” Meredith’s hand grips her knee, travels up her leg. Tori doesn’t think to stop her. “Is there a funeral?” “No. They had a secret funeral already. But we’re having a memorial, next weekend. We’re going to the barn. We’ll say a few words about him, you know. We’re meeting at my house. If you want to come. If you can stay a while.” “I’ll be there,” Tori says. The phone goes quiet. Meredith doesn’t ask who it was, what it was, and Tori moves her leg so that Meredith’s hand falls away. “What’s up?” Meredith asks, crossing her arms across her chest. “Daniel’s dead. Killed himself.” Meredith’s eyes widen. “Are you okay?” she asks. “Will you go to the memorial with me next weekend?” “I can’t. I have a family thing next weekend, out of town. I already told them I’d go.” “Right.” Tori nods, though what Meredith said seems strange, like déjà vu again. Tori remembers her grandfather’s death, how her tears made Meredith anxious, how Meredith shrugged stiffly, told Tori she had to leave. That she had a family reunion to go to. Left Tori on the edge of her bed, clutching her own shaking body. “Right,” Tori says. Tori leaves the fire, goes inside, locks the door behind her. No one bothers her for hours, and when they do, she ignores the knocks, the pleas to please let them in to use the restroom. She googles Daniel’s name. She finds an old arrest brief from Daniel’s breaking-and-entering charge, which happened the year after college. Daniel had called her about it, drunk and sorry for himself. But there is no obituary, no news of a suicide. She searches for hours and finds nothing more, her fingers a fever on the keys, her mind a blank race of guilty thoughts. Could she have saved him? She wishes she had someone to tell her that she couldn’t have. But it sounds as if, outside, the party has moved on. It’s the hour of nothing good when there is another knock at the door. “Please open up,” Kay says. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.” When Tori opens the door, Kay wraps shur arms around her. Tori shakes in shur embrace. “What’s wrong?” Kay asks, running shur hands through Tori’s hair. “What happened?” Tori tells shur everything. “Doesn’t it sound fishy?” she asks. “There’s nothing, nothing at all online about him.” “It’s weird, but maybe they just wanted to keep it secret. Don’t tear yourself up about this, okay? Listen, I’ll go with you, if you want, to the memorial.” Tori lets herself disappear beneath Kay’s armpit. Breathes in the musk smell. She will let shur take care of her. Will let shur hold her and hide her from the light. Will let shur apologize for her and, yes, even love her.   Having grown up in the city, Kay says during the drive down from Riddle, shu has never been in a town like Agape. “As you can see, you’re not missing much,” Tori says as she navigates the car along the one road which curves like a snake through the small town, from the high school to the diner to the post office to the elementary to the gated community of houses which could fit five of Tori’s tiny duplex within their walls. This is her past, laid bare without the itch in the throat, though Tori has brought along the last of her nostalgia for the memorial. “I bet you could take some great photographs here,” Kay says as they pass the stone mega church. “Will the memorial be there?” The memorial. For the length of the drive, she let herself forget, but now she must remember. Every bitter detail. There will be no turning around. For the last week she has felt on edge, always shaking in the night, looking every day for information, calling up old friends to see if they have heard. And no one else has. “No,” Tori says. “Not there.” To stop her shaking, and because she cannot, at the moment, go on to Logan’s, Tori stops at the town’s only coffee shop, a little place with crosses on the walls and in a jewelry case at the front counter. The young man behind the counter is someone Tori used to know, an old friend. Jaden. She wonders why, smart boy like him, he never got out of this place. “How are you?” he asks, smiling briefly at Kay before looking back to Tori. Kay stands with shur arms in shur jacket pockets. Tori shrugs. “Okay enough, considering the occasion.” “What occasion?” He doesn’t know, she realizes with cold dread. Although he and Daniel were never best friends, were never lovers, they were close. As if shu can read her, Kay grabs her hand. “Daniel’s dead,” Tori says. “Killed himself.” “What? When was this?” Jaden says. “Three weeks ago.” He laughs. The sound is a fire alarm. When he realizes Tori isn’t laughing with him, he opens his mouth, shuts it. “I saw Daniel at the general store last night. He was fine.” Cold dread is becoming as familiar as a fever. Because this news is neither good nor bad; it moves into her gut and twists her insides. “Excuse me,” she says, and she rushes from the coffee shop, the door’s jingle a throb in her head. Beside the car, she calls Logan. He answers on the first ring. “Where are you?” he asks. “You’re late. The rest of the gang is here already. We’re ready to go.” “Daniel’s alive,” Tori says. “Jaden says they saw him last night, at work.” “That's impossible,” Logan says. “I’m telling you, I just saw Jaden, and he says Daniel is one hundred percent fine.” “We’re all here. Waiting for you. Just come on. It’ll be like old times. We can’t know for certain. Let’s just have the memorial, go out to the barn, share some bowls. Say a few words. In honor of Daniel. I mean, his mom called me. She called me the day it happened, a week ago. She was crying. There’s no way she was faking that.” “A week ago,” Tori says. And she knows then not to argue. She hangs up. Kay has joined her beside the car, and without explaining where they’re going, they climb in. Tori drives. She remembers the way; she would remember it with her eyes closed. Back then she took this road out of mind. She is out of mind again, and no drug has passed through her system since the night before, when Kay watched her smoke a bowl of nostalgia to black. Daniel’s father’s house is stone, situated back from the road and surrounded by lean live oaks. The yard is dark, and as they walk hand in hand up the gravel path Tori’s heart hyperventilates in her chest. Before they reach the door, a man emerges, his arms crossed. “Can I help you?” “We’re looking for Daniel,” Tori says. She doesn’t know if Daniel’s father will remember her. If he knows that she was the first woman to strip him down and take him into her mouth, to crawl on top of him and initiate him into the world of lovers. That she has regretted that decision, and not only because Daniel wasn’t ready, not only because Daniel blamed her for losing himself. “I’m an old friend. I had dinner here once.” Matzo balls in broth. Toast and steamed Brussels sprouts. “Not really, but my memory’s not all it used to be. Daniel’s in his room, up there. Do you want me to go get him?” Tori’s body wilts. Relief. She thinks about the last time she saw him, his hair tangled, clothes baggy and torn, eyes bloodshot. The memories overwhelmed her like a drug, and it was because of him that she no longer frequented Agape unless she needed to. Unless she needed nostalgia shoved into clear plastic baggies. “No, thanks,” she says. “I’m tired of rehashing. But he’s not dead?” “Dead? No, Daniel’s not dead. Why?” “A friend lied to me,” she says. “Doesn’t sound like a friend to me.” Daniel’s father’s arms have come uncrossed, and Tori isn’t sure when in the conversation it happened, but it seems to signal some small degree of remembrance. And what else could she ask for but to be remembered? “Yeah,” she says. “Thanks so much. Don’t tell Daniel I was here, please.” The man nods. "I remember you," he says. "I won't." Tori and Kay turn and walk from the driveway, slower this time, Tori listening to the crunch of their footsteps on the path. Kay’s hand in hers makes her feel safe, as if Kay could protect her, if she needed it, which she doesn’t. They don’t go to Logan’s. Tori deletes his number from her phone, as she did Daniel’s long ago. Later she will block it, too. She is not mad at him. She understands the urge to hold on, to keep the people who were once close nearby. To relive that which you remember in a hazy euphoria. Instead, she and Kay drive home, where they sit beside the fire and look, without speaking, into the waves of heat lifting to the sky like a mirage in the air. Tori doesn’t load a bowl. Kay snaps a picture of her in the firelight; when developed, it will show her body dark as night. She will not be smiling, though there will be a rosy fire glow on her cheeks. “Can I?” Tori asks. “So long as you don’t drop it.” Kay grins. Shur grin splits shur face like a crack to let light in. The camera feels like her pipe in Tori’s palm, the same weight.   It will not be easy, Tori thinks, to stop. She will want to remember. Her photographs, then. She will capture the places she once loved, the people she will try to love in new ways. She opens the box on her desk and spreads the remaining nostalgia across a blank piece of paper. Arranges it to form a picture; a figure with no shape, no curves, no breasts, no genitals. Not too bad, she thinks. I can get used to it, she thinks. The flash lightning cuts the room in half. Dots swim before Tori’s eyes. She hopes the picture will come out, but there’s no way to know until she develops it in the art building’s darkroom. It’s a beautiful feeling, to see and not see what the future will bring. END   “Nostalgia” was originally published in Interzone, and is copyright Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam 2015. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original: "The Last Spell of the Raven" by Morris Tanafon and a poem by Jes Rausch.

Hello! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Today we have another GlitterShip original and a poem. Our poem today is "A Seduction by a Sister of the Oneiroi" by Hester J. Rook, and our original story is "The Pond" by Aimee Ogden. If you enjoy this story and would like to read ahead in the Summer 2017 issue, you can pick that up at glittership.com/buy for $2.99 and get your very own copies of the winter and spring 2017 issues as well. Finally, the GlitterShip Year One anthology is still on sale in the Kindle and Nook stores for $4.99, and you can pick up the paperback copy for $17.95.   Hester J. Rook is an Australian writer and co-editor of Twisted Moon magazine, a magazine of speculative erotic poetry (twistedmoonmag.com). She has previous prose and poetry publications in Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Liminality Magazine, Strangelet and others. She's on Twitter @kitemonster and you can find her other work on her site http://hesterjrook.wordpress.com/.   A seduction by a sister of the Oneiroi Hester J. Rook   The night is velvet warm, mosquito pricked. There is prosecco through my tongue and pear juice sticky down my wrists. Her mouth is sugar rich and cream softened, velvet dipped in moonlight. “We are goddesses already,” she is wine voiced and dusk cloaked, autumn leaves behind eyes translucent as cathedral glass. “My heart is wraithlike sour, bitter as lemon rind and my realm soft-surreal and afraid. But you you taste of marzipan at sunset earthen-toed and iron scented, like a storm. A goddess already.” She ties back her dream-soaked curls and lights up each star, palm raised high and fingertips aflame. “Come back with me.” And, fizzy-tongued and plum sweetened, I do.     Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester. Nowadays, she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses. Her work has also appeared in Apex, Shimmer, and Cast of Wonders. Aimee lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where you can find her at the gym, in the garden, with a faceful of cheese curds at the local farmer's market, or, less messily, just on Twitter: @Aimee_Ogden.     The Pond by Aimee Ogden       Laura almost misses the first message. A screaming match with Sana has driven her out into the frost-rimed evening. The baby’s cries and Sana’s frustrated shushing chase her across the yard; Ifrah is not an easy infant like her brother was. Laura and Sana’s relationship is not an easy one like it was back when Christopher was born, either. Laura stops to cram her skis onto her feet only once she is far enough away to shut out the sounds from the house. Her only illumination comes from the headlamp clipped to her hat; the moon hides behind thick, dull clouds. It would have been so easy to race past the windswept pond without a second glance. But the headlamp glints on the dull frozen surface, and two stark words etched beneath catch and hold her eye: HELLO MOMMY. Snow crunches when she hits her knees beside the pond. Her ankles twist under the torque of the skis, but she is paralyzed by the cruelty carved into those two words. Her heart throbs in her chest. Which of the neighbor’s teenage children could have, would have done such a thing? In spite of herself, she reaches out and puts one hand on top of the words. Through her thin gloves, she can’t feel the ridges that the prankster’s knife should have left in the ice. Impossible. She lays both hands flat over the words, squeezes her eyes shut, as if her hands can erase what has been done. When she opens her eyes and parts her fingers, the words are gone. Relief and panic wrestle for control inside Laura’s chest. After this awful year, is she finally losing her mind? Maybe the heat from her hands has melted the ice and erased the words. As she struggles for a grasp on reason, new lines appear in the spaces between her fingers. Her hands curl into claws around the new letters: ARE YOU MAD AT ME? And Laura is lying on her side on the ice crooning to a carved question from a dead little boy: “No, baby, no, sweetheart, never. Never. Never.” When she finally drags herself to her feet, there is a long, shallow indentation in the ice from the warmth of her body, and pink light seeps over the horizon. Her body is stiff and cold, and there have been no more messages but those first two, but there is a smile on her face as she walks back to the house. Sana emerges from the bedroom with crusty eyes and mussed hair as Laura tiptoes up the stairs. “Were you up all night?” she hisses, and Laura shrugs. “Well, I hope you got your head clear. You can have the bathroom first; I need to go make the baby a bottle.” “Thanks,” says Laura, and Sana gives her a look that cuts deep, probing for insincerity under that solitary syllable. Whatever she finds, she grunts, and brushes past Laura onto the stairs. Laura turns the shower on as cool as she can tolerate and stands beneath it as long as she can. The more alive she feels, the more distance stretches between her and Christopher. She wants that space to shrink down again, to a few narrow inches of ice. A distance measured in inches is still too far, but it’s better than the entire universe. She ignores Sana’s first bangs on the door, but when Sana shouts that she’ll be late for work, she finally kills the flow of water and reaches for a towel. Her fingers, still half numb from her night on the ice, only start to tingle with life when she finally steps out and begins to rub herself dry with a towel. Her office at the back of the hospital lab is a welcome refuge from home. No noise here, except the distant chatter of the technologists out front and the regular whir of the pneumatic tube. Reports to write and biopsies to result: this one cancerous, this one benign, this one missing margins and in need of re-sectioning. No patients to see today, and Laura has mastered the art of speaking to the techs as little as can be politely managed. Right now she can only deal with small chunks of humanity: a twenty-millimeter cube of breast tissue, a fraction of a gram of liver, a two-minute update on a test result from Dave or Xue.   When she arrives at home, both Sana and the baby are napping: Ifrah in her swing and Sana sprawled along the length of the couch. Dark rings are smeared under her eyes, and a half-eaten bowl of instant soup cools on the floor beside her. Her full, hard breasts stretch the fabric of her stained shirt, either she or Ifrah will wake soon to make sure the baby gets fed. The puckered, soft flesh of her belly peeks out from under the hem of her shirt, too, a sight Laura is both disgusted by and grateful for. Sana has carried both of their children. To Laura, the development of a fetus, pushing and groping for space inside its mother’s viscera, is too much like the growth of a tumor, unseen and unknowable and somehow obscene. She slips out the back door without a sound. There are more words etched into the pond today. Laura is almost running by the time she gets close enough to read them: DO YOU MISS ME? She gets down to her knees more carefully today than yesterday, afraid of breaking the ice under her weight. “I miss you more than anything. You took my heart with you when you left us.” Can he hear her? Laura seizes a stick poking up through the snow, but it’s too soft to scratch the surface. Panic sets her heart thumping wildly in her chest as the question melts back into the ice, but then new shapes form. I MISS YOU TOO, MOMMY. The words pour out of Laura then, memories of family weekends and long vacations, favorite meals, books shared under the covers on quiet Saturday mornings. And of that fearful diagnosis, the one that Laura understood long before either Sana or Christopher could. When she finally lapses into silence, the pond is as blank as the cloudless sky. The words skitter out a line at a time, scattershot with hesitation. IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT. And Laura kisses, just ever so briefly, the frozen surface of the pond, as if she can force her love through the layer of ice with the pressure of her lips.   Sana is on her hands and knees beside the couch, scrubbing spilled soup out of the carpeting. She looks up at the creak of the door as Laura steps inside. “There’s dinner in the fridge,” she says. “I didn’t know when you’d be home. Did you...” The rag twists between her hands. “Did you have a good day at work?” “It was fine.” Ifrah is on her belly on a blanket on the floor, grunting as she works to lift her head off the floor to watch what Sana is doing. Laura puts a teddy in front of her so the baby has something to look at as she walks past to the kitchen. She takes a plate of cold morgh polou with her into the office. Out in the living room, Sana is reading to the baby, one of those tiresome books with an ounce of story stretched over a pound of pages. Laura shuts the door and sits down at the computer, where she opens a private browsing session. There are thousands, millions of hits for people claiming to have been contacted by the dead, but Laura can’t find anything comparable to her experience. Sad, desperate people reading messages from lost loved ones into lost-and-found objects, oddly-timed sounds, piles of soggy tea leaves. She closes tabs one by one until she’s only left with a blinking cursor on an empty search engine field. She types: how to bring back the dead. Sana is already in bed by the time Laura turns off the computer and trudges upstairs. She unbuttons her pants and slides out of her bra in the hallway before sneaking into the bedroom and slipping beneath the covers. But Sana rolls over anyway, putting her mouth beside Laura’s ear. “I’m worried about you.” Her whisper is too soft to disturb the baby, but blunt enough to batter at Laura’s heart. “I know this time of year is hard for you. It’s hard for me, too.” “I’m fine.” She could tell Sana about the pond. She could tell Sana what she saw on the Internet. She doesn’t. This secret is all hers, twisting darkly in the corners of her heart. “We’ll all be fine. I promise.” “Laura, I think you should—” “You’ll wake the baby.” Laura knots her hand in the blankets and pulls them with her as she turns onto her side. The warmth of Sana’s body lingers behind her, and then she curls away from Laura, turning toward the corner where the bassinet rests.   A pink-fingered dawn is reaching through the blinds when Laura wakes. Her alarm won’t go off for two more hours; she turns it off and crawls out of bed anyway. The blankets are tangled around Sana, who has been up and down feeding the baby during the night. Laura tucks a flap of the comforter over her wife’s bare feet, and pulls jeans and a sweater from the pile of clean laundry on the dresser before slipping out of the bedroom and down the stairs. A greeting is waiting for her on the surface of the pond. GOOD MORNING MOMMY. She sits cross-legged in front of it and traces each letter with one gloved fingertip. “Good morning, baby,” she says, and yawns curling steam out into the morning air. YOU’RE TIRED. “Yes. I didn’t sleep well last night.” BECAUSE OF THE BABY? Laura flinches. Neither of them has made any mention of Ifrah till now, nor Sana either. “No ... no more than usual. I was up late, that’s all. We don’t have to talk about the baby. I have something I want to tell you about.” But the words on the ice drive all the air out of the lungs, all the air out of the space around her. DID YOU HAVE HER AS A REPLACEMENT FOR ME? No, thinks Laura, and her mouth silently shapes the word. But her finger traces a different word on the surface on the ice: YES. There is no answer from the pond. Laura shifts as the cold gnaws at her ankles. “We thought ... we thought we needed someone to take care of. To keep us from falling apart without you. She doesn’t fill the hole that you left.” And Ifrah isn’t enough to keep Laura and Sana from falling apart, either, but Laura can’t make herself say that aloud. “We missed you so much. We were so lonely.” I’M LONELY TOO. Tears burn Laura’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry. But baby, listen, I have an idea, I was doing some research, on how we can be together again.” YOU’LL COME WITH ME? “No...” Laura drags the back of her hand across her face, trailing tears and snot. “No, honey, I think it’s possible that I can bring you back here. To live with us. Me and Mama Sana and—and the baby.” COME WITH ME. The words repeat themselves: COME WITH ME. COME WITH ME. COME WITH ME. The lines crisscross and fold back on themselves until they are unreadable. “Christopher!” The palm of a tiny hand slams into the ice right beneath Laura’s knees, making her scream. She scrambles backward off the ice, falling elbow deep into the snow just as the ice cracks under the place where she was sitting. “Stop!” The words vanish, leaving only the white lightning-strike pattern of cracks behind. Laura stands alone in the yard with her arms wrapped around herself until the sun heaves itself up over the horizon. Then she puts her head down and hurries back to the house.   She spends the day at work responding to Xue and Dave in odd monosyllables. Her queue of specimens grows and grows while she buries herself in a new set of web searches, fruitless ones. When she looks up, the lights are off in the front of the lab and she is alone. There’s no amount of research that can give her the answers she’s asking for, and there’s nothing on the Internet that can make her accept what she already knows in the pits of her heart. The house is dark when she comes in: no cries from Ifrah, no kitchen clattering or TV noise. She finds Sana in the office, scribbling on a pad of paper. The grocery list, maybe, or a list of chores for her and Laura to ignore. Laura clears her throat. “I’m going out.” Sana’s head bobs up, and a tremulous smile swims onto her face. “Okay,” she says. “Everything is going to be all right, Laura. You know that, right?” “Sure.” Laura looks away. “I’ll see you in a little while.” She makes one stop before going out to the pond. She stands at the water’s edge, and the weight in her hands reassures her that what she is doing is right. MOMMY? Laura hefts the axe and brings it down into the ice. The impact judders her arms up to the shoulders. The impact crater left by the axe head is like a broken mirror, reflecting spiderwebs of words: MOMMY NO, MOMMY NO, MOMMY NO. She raises the axe again, brings it back down, chops until she can see gray water between the floating chunks of ice. She is in water up to her knees as she reaches the center of the pond, her feet are numb. Everything is numb. But she keeps working until a scream splits her in half. It’s not the child’s scream she expected. It’s the scream of a woman grown. She turns to see Sana, clutching a shawl around her shoulders with one hand and holding the baby carrier in the other. She’s staring at the axe in Laura’s hands. “What did you do?” Laura fumbles her way into a lie about being afraid of the ice growing thin and the neighbor’s kids falling through. But Sana’s eyes are wide and unseeing, and the words die in Laura’s mouth. “What did you do,” Sana repeats. “What did you do?” She drops the carrier and runs into the pond. But not toward Laura, and Laura’s name is not the one she cries out as icy water splashes up to her knees, to her thighs. Ice floes in miniature batter around her waist, deeper than this little fish pond has any right to be. Laura reaches out for her, but Sana chooses instead the embrace of the water. She disappears beneath the surface. Laura climbs up onto the bank. The ripples in the water grow still. The broken bits of ice tinkle gently together. In her carrier, Ifrah pumps her little red fists and wails. But the pond is silent. END   “A Seduction by a Sister of the Oneiroi” is copyright Hester J. Rook 2017. “The Pond” is copyright Aimee Ogden 2017. Assorted dog noises are copyright Finn, Rey, and Heidi, 2017. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “Nostalgia” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

"“The Centaur's Daughter” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (Originally published in A cappella Zoo.) As a little girl I never understood my father’s night self. It’s hard to be a kid whose father is two people. He changed every day with the sky. I cried at sunrise. I had trouble sleeping. Still do, and I’ve had seventeen years to process my father’s differences. When I was small enough that my hands didn’t fit around a soda bottle, I couldn’t be left alone. The babysitter would coax me from the safety of my closet with chocolate granola surprise shakes and a broom guitar upon which she sang classic Elvis. Despite myself I always laughed. I loved that babysitter, but babysitters don’t follow you into high school. Now when I think of her, I see the woman who, once I was old enough to understand, told me that my father was a monster, warned me that I had his blood, that even though I would never look half-horse like him, I could still develop the night terrors, The Confusion. “You better be careful, Ruby. It runs... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You know how this story goes: the girl was kissed in the womb by the devil. When she emerged into the too-bright world, she was missing half her face where his teeth tore it off. The doctors did their best; they grafted skin over the left side, added collagen in her cheeks. “Smile,” they said, tickling her feet. But she could not smile, and so no one smiled at her. A girl is supposed to be beautiful. A girl is supposed to have rosy red cheeks and a laugh that makes men wilt to think of her bright future. A beautiful girl will have a beautiful life. | Copyright 2017 by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Coming Up Good Evening: 00:42 D J Kozlowski’s Spirit Board as read by Josie Babin: 04:02 Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s They Come in Through the Walls as read by Nikolle Doolin: 00:10:22 Pleasant Dreams: 37:16 Pertinent Links The District of Wonders Network Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/districtofwonders Parsec nominations: http://www.parsecawards.com/announcements/nominations-for-the-12th-annual-parsec-awards-open-now-through-june-1-2017/ It Comes At Night | Official Trailer HD | A24: https://youtu.be/6YOYHCBQn9g D.J. Kozlowski @ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveKozlowski Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam: https://bonniejostufflebeam.com/ Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam @ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bonniejostuffle Nikolle Doolin: http://nikolledoolin.com/ Nikolle Doolin @ Twitter: https://twitter.com/nikolledoolin See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, TJ & Dave talk about the movie Sleight and the first episode of American Gods. Dave read the short story Needle Nose by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and TJ has read Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire. Also, they discuss the #sfdod where Captain America is apparently an agent of Hydra and everything to date was just a snow globe.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam https://bonniejostufflebeam.com/ twitter: @BonnieJoStuffle Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over 40 magazines and anthologies such as The Toast, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, The Masters Review, Hobart, and Everyman Library’s Monster Verse. She and her partner collaborated on the recently-released audio fiction-jazz collaborative album Strange Monsters. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and created and coordinates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Bonnie is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary Agency.

By Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, from Issue #214 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online MagazineIntroduced by the author.I wanted to ask her more questions, about the way the world was made, about death and dreams, but did not want to know the answers.More info »

By Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, from Issue #214 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online MagazineIntroduced by the author.I wanted to ask her more questions, about the way the world was made, about death and dreams, but did not want to know the answers.More info »

“Scars” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam .

Skeletonsby Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam   “Who’s gonna watch the skeletons?” I ask.            We’re about to go camping. Cathryn’s undressing before the closet in her garage apartment. I’m trying not to watch, though she wants me to. Instead I peer into her glass terrarium where the skeletons live, three of them: a dwarf T-Rex and two dwarf stegosauruses. The T-Rex stands atop a lonely pile of rocks.            “I was going to leave them extra food. You think that’s okay?” Cathryn rummages through the clothes pile on the floor, such beautiful chaos. I stare at her reflection in the glass. Her bra, lacey and black, makes me want to glimpse what’s underneath, even though I have before, five times.Full transcript appears after the cut.----more----Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 20 for January 19, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.Before we get started with this episode today, I've put together a small Listener's Poll for the first nine months of GlitterShip, covering the stories that we put out in 2015. This is intended to be a low-stress, just-because-I'm-curious poll. I will have the link up in the transcript on glittership.com, and you can also find it at: goo.gl/forms/sp9XsEJANj The poll will stay open through February 29, and I'll announce the results in one of the March episodes.Our story this week is "Skeletons" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, read by guest reader Ranylt RichildisBonnie Jo Stufflebeam lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats–Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth, Texas. Her work has appeared in over 40 magazines and anthologies such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Goblin Fruit. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or at her website bonniejostufflebeam.com. She is represented by Ann Collette at Rees Literary Agency.Ranylt Richildis is a writer and editor based in Ottawa. Her short story, “Charlemagne and Florent,” was selected for Imaginarium 4: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Ranylt is the founding editor of the Aurora-nominated Lackington’s Magazine, an online SFF quarterly devoted to stories told in unusual or poetic language.Skeletonsby Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam“Who’s gonna watch the skeletons?” I ask.We’re about to go camping. Cathryn’s undressing before the closet in her garage apartment. I’m trying not to watch, though she wants me to. Instead I peer into her glass terrarium where the skeletons live, three of them: a dwarf T-Rex and two dwarf stegosauruses. The T-Rex stands atop a lonely pile of rocks.“I was going to leave them extra food. You think that’s okay?” Cathryn rummages through the clothes pile on the floor, such beautiful chaos. I stare at her reflection in the glass. Her bra, lacey and black, makes me want to glimpse what’s underneath, even though I have before, five times.“I guess so,” I say. I look back at the T-Rex. His name, Cathryn tells me, is Ronald. The steggos are called Thelma and Louise; she thinks she’s being ironic. The T-Rex’s bones are so small I'm sure that if I picked him up I would break him. His eyes are tiny as sequins and suspended in empty sockets. He wails like a cat in heat. “I think something’s wrong,” I say.“He’s just hungry, Emma. Feed him. Food’s next to the cage.”I open the yellow bottle of skeleton food; the musty smell makes me cough. The bottle is full of squiggling little worms. I pour some into the terrarium. Ronald clambers down the rocks. He dips his jaw into the worm pile and scoops them into his mouth, swallows. I can see them travel down his throat and into his empty bone stomach where they wriggle inside him.Cathryn clears her throat. She stands before me with her hands on her hips, wearing tight blue jeans and a bumblebee-striped halter top. She’s dressed for clubbing, not camping, and I realize that the kind of camping we’ll be doing won’t require the hiking shoes or the toilet paper I brought. I tell her she looks great. She does. I look back at the tank. The T-Rex peers up at me.“Let me free,” he whispers. His voice is like an echo. I can’t. We’re going camping.In the shallow forest we set up our tent. The land has been cleared for people like us, who want to be in nature but not too far in. Our tent is a miniature house. The box says it will fit twenty people, but we’ve only got five. It has French doors that fold down and collapsible walls to give everyone a sense of privacy, but through the first night I hear Cathryn and Anne, the girlfriend she brought along, their heavy breath and little moans. They make the whole tent sweat.The site is close to the river, but not too close. At night we cannot hear the current. The bathroom is just around the corner, and there’s a leaky water faucet next to where we parked the car, ten feet from the tent. Our friend Wendi brought a portable mini fridge and a fan; they run on batteries, but the fridge eats two an hour so we have to run to the store once a day and buy at least twelve packages of four. We make a game of it. In some ways the drive is the best part of the trip, mostly because Cathryn is the one with the car, and she’s asked me to go with her each time. We roll the windows down. She talks about the new girl, Anne, how they’ve just met but already spend nearly every night together. Every word she says feels like a secret between us. I don’t want to hear about Anne, but I don’t not want to hear about her either, because I want to know if she’s better than me. I want to know when we’ll share a bed again. I try to deduce the information from the cutesy story of how they met at the campus coffee shop, but I can’t, because Cathryn has always been unpredictable, mysterious. With her unflinching face she reveals nothing. Every time she asks me to get in the car with her, I do.The nearest trash can is two whole miles from our site, so we’re forced to rough it in that regard at least, dumping our food scraps into a plastic bag. Most of what we brought is food. Peanut butter, bread, baked beans in a can and hot dogs with mustard, two bottles of cheap red wine and a plastic handle of rum. Our broke friend Mike does the cooking. It’s his way of paying us back. He also does the majority of the drinking. He’s brought his set of oils, and his paint-stained hands dye whatever he touches. Each hot dog bun has a blue handprint, and by the time dinner’s finished the rum bottle is covered in fingerprints.The second night Wendi builds a fire and we sit around the flames. The smoke follows Cathryn. No matter where she sits, the wind moves in her direction. Finally she settles in one spot, lights a cigarette, and lets the smoke clog her eyes. We play a drinking game, Never Have I Ever.“Never have I ever been to Disneyworld,” I say. Cathryn and Wendi put down a finger; they went there once together.“Never have I ever done acid,” Wendi says. The rest of us admit defeat.“Never have I ever been in love,” Cathryn says. No one puts down a finger; no one is sure enough to commit to that. We all four of us look at Cathryn through the smoke. Her hair is up, the skin of her neck glistening with sweat. That we all want her is common knowledge; we can’t help ourselves. This is what holds our friendships together, the flame to which we are helpless as moths.That night, as we sleep, trees rustle, and the fallen branches on the ground crack like knuckles. When I leave the tent early in the morning to walk to the restroom, I find the contents of our trash bag scattered, the bottom ripped. By the river I spot a leopard, its white fur stretched so tight the bones poke through. In the disappearing moonlight I nearly see the heart pumping in its chest. It’s looking right at me, and I stand and stare until the sun creeps up and the leopard, its fur no longer see-through, bounds into the brush.Back at the campsite a crowd is gathered around the dying embers of last night’s fire. A dodo skeleton hops around the fire pit. One of the bones from its foot is missing. Without the feathers it looks just like any other bird. We only know it’s a dodo from its fat chest, its dodo beak. Plus it tells us what it is when we ask it.Cathryn shoos the bird. “Go, fly away.”“Dodos don’t fly,” it says, lifting a bone wing. The invisible joints crack. “I’m stuck.”It hangs around until we change into our swimsuits and leave for the swimming hole. It’s only a couple of miles away, so we walk. Cathryn and Anne hold hands. The rest of us walk behind them. We talk about the dodo. Mike had never seen one. “I’m going to paint it,” he says.Wendi huffs. “I was gonna paint it.”“In my painting, he’ll be wearing a tie and drinking a martini.” Mike laughs, and Cathryn turns around and gives him an eye. She knows that laugh. Since high school she’s known it.“How much have you had?” she says. “I swear to god, Mike, if that handle is gone.”“Excuse me,” he says. “Excuse me if I like to have a little fun.”Once Cathryn turns back around, Wendi reaches into the pocket of her swimming trunks and pulls out her flask. She and Mike take turns.“In my painting, he’ll be flying,” I say.“You don’t paint,” everyone says at once, except Anne, of course, who doesn’t know the first thing about me. Anne’s ass hangs out of her suit, and her walk is too sure, like she thinks she has this down, this Cathryn thing, like she’s permanent here, the most recent fixture. Wendi and Mike and I gulp and giggle.“Two more weeks, tops,” Mike whispers. His guesses are usually the most accurate. He’s known her the longest. My skin tingles all of a sudden, part rum, part the image that flashes in my memory; her clothes a pile on the floor, the scratch of Ronald’s gimpy paws on the glass, the stale smoke smell, and the feel of that skin, soft in my palm. Two weeks.At the swimming hole we rush the water. It laps our thighs as we sink our way in, getting used to the shock of cool. Submerging my whole body, I forget to hold my breath and rise up coughing. Mike grabs my legs, and I go down again. I open my eyes under the water. Bones litter the lake floor under our feet, many of them ground to form a second layer of sand. We walk all along them without noticing. I let the water carry my legs instead. I swim. When I come up for breath I’m at the far bank, where Wendi sits atop a rock with her feet skimming the water surface. Her face is red and wet, though her hair is dry.“You okay?” I ask. A brittle fishbone snaps under my weight.“I’m okay,” she says, shaking her head. “I think I’m in love with her.”Yeah, well, I want to say but don’t. I feign surprise. “You’re straight, though, right?”Wendi shrugs. “Does it matter? I hate seeing her like this.”“Happy?” Me too. “Well, if you really loved her, you’d want her happy.”I remember the first time I knew Cathryn wanted it. Wendi, Mike, and me in the car, driving down streets with no names for no reason. Cigarette ash blowing back in through the windows and staining our clothes with the stench. “You’re on her list.” Mike grinned. “She told me so.” Then it was a party at my place and we snuck into my bedroom and stuffed a chair under the doorknob. The curtains were attached by flimsy little clips and had fallen down, so we put them back up but you could still see through little holes where the fabric was worn, and we did it, aware and uncaring, while partygoer’s faces appeared and disappeared like apparitions at each hole in the window, trying to see in.“You’re right,” Wendi says, wetting a toe. “What the fuck is wrong with me?”A school of skeleton fish passes over my feet. Their bone-hard bodies make my hair stand on end. When I stick my head under the water and my eyes adjust, they are already far away, but bringing up their rear is a phantom shiner with the last vestige of its transparent orange scales intact.“Huh,” I say when I bring my head again above water. “I thought those had fully skeletoned a while ago.”“This water freaks me out.” Wendi stands and turns, and we both see the leopard this time, its body stretched across a rock in the sun, its rib bones now visible. Wendi’s closer to it than me, and I wish we could trade places as she steps toward it until she is so close she can touch it if she wants. She reaches her hand out. She pulls it back. She helps me out of the water. Together we run back to camp.When the gang returns from the swimming hole, Mike has a saber-tooth skeleton at his side, around its neck a collar he has made from the drawstring of his swimming trunks, which now hang below his navel. To keep them on he walks bow-legged, and once he arrives at the fire he hands Wendi the end of the string and disappears into the tent to change.Wendi and I have been silent, passing a notebook of portable haikus back and forth, each of us writing one page. It’s a game we all used to play. The haikus are nonsensical, the language of ridiculousness. When Mike comes back out we put the notebook away.“This is Tegan,” he says. “I’m gonna take her home with me.”“Another pet?” Wendi asks. A whole wall of Mike’s room is covered in aquariums already. “Dude, you can’t breathe in your room as is.”“I hate that name,” the saber says. “Give me another one.”“Okay, your name is Nimrod.”“Another one.”“Tilly?” Mike says.The saber shrugs.“Tigger?”The saber snaps Mike’s hand. Its teeth draw blood. He slaps its head. The bones rattle. He marches to a tree and ties the saber up, then wraps a dishcloth around his hand. As we eat peanut butter sandwiches and take shots of wine, the saber shouts insults. “Morons,” it says, “you don’t know shit about life. You think you know everything, but you’re fucking clueless.”Mike hits it over the head with an unburnt log. No one screams; it happens too fast. The saber’s body falls. Mike unties it and carries it to the river. I follow him, try to tell him to stop, but my voice catches. He tosses the bones in the river and wipes the dirt from his jeans; on top of the dried paint, the stain looks like a skewed portrait, blue eyes and lips and all the rest dirt.After walking back in silence, we find Cathryn holding the lucky girl, visibly shaken.“Fucking thing was reminding me of my parents,” Mike says.Cathryn doesn’t even bother to shoot Mike the eye. She takes Anne by the hand and leads her to the tent, and when we hear the click of the lock on the tent doors, Mike grabs hold of the wine, opens his throat, and guzzles. I sit beside Wendi and the fire and we don’t say a word. The bottle empty, Mike drops into the dirt and rolls back and forth, moving his arms in angel shapes. “I’m sorry,” he says again and again. Wendi and I don’t comfort him. The firewood crumbles like the bones and we just look on. I’m used to looking and not touching, staying out of the way until it’s my turn. I know that Anne won’t want us after this, won’t want to be a part of this, and somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. Two weeks tops, Mike said. He was wrong. It’ll go back to normal before that. We’ll forget it ever happened, starting tomorrow when we’re back in the concrete world.We sleep the way we are.On the way out the next morning we drive across the bridge over the river. In the backseat I stare out the window, and from the water's edge the leopard stares at me. As it pads to shore I notice its legs, all skeleton now. I imagine its claws, invisible but deadly.The whole ride no one says a word.When Cathryn and I get back to her place, the skeletons are still in the tank. The T-Rex claws at the glass. His bones creak. “Let me free,” he says. I knock on the glass, and Thelma and Louise scurry to the back. Ronald doesn’t move, static in his pleading.Cathryn disappears into the bathroom. I look around her room, at the mess she’s left of clothes scattered over the ground. It’s hard to see the floor. I groan as I tiptoe over the piles. I reach my hand into the tank and pick the skeleton up by his shoulders. He falls apart in my hands. I carry his bones outside and look across her big backyard, which we only enter to smoke brief cigarettes at night when we need the air. In the back of the yard is an abandoned raised bed, one we all built together when we had nothing but time on our hands then forgot about, and I lay him down amongst the dead tomato plants, their thin spines snapped so that they seem to bow as we approach. His bones scatter in the dirt. I shake a plant. Its brittle leaves fall from the branches and bury him.END"Skeletons" was originally published in the Geek Girls issue of Room, 37.3 in Fall 2014 and was reprinted in Heiresses of Russ 2015.This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back on February 2nd with "Her Last Breath Before Waking" by A. C. Wise.

Coming Up… Interview: Nathaniel Calhoun Main Fiction: “The Damaged” by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam Originally published in Interzone. Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She lives in Texas with her partner and two literarily-named cats: Gimli and Don Quixote. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program and curates the annual Art & Words Show in Fort Worth. You can visit her on Twitter @BonnieJoStuffle or through her website: www.bonniejostufflebeam.com. Narrated by Katherine Inskip Katherine weighs galaxies for a living, and builds worlds in her spare... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the ScoreBy Gary KlosterI had a frat-boy stretched out on the table, a pink slab of drunken meat just itching for ink, when Huck blew back into my life and brought the blood trade with him."Dead gods, Woody, this is the shit-hole you crawled into?"  The shop was damn small, Huck was damn big, and the perfectly tailored black ass of his suit pants leaned against my desk before I'd even raised the humming needle from frat-boy's hide."I'm busy, Huck.  Back off."Full transcript appears after the cut.----more----Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 19 for January 5, 2016. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you.It's been a while since I ran a story for you, so I hope you've been well in the past few months. Before we get started today, I have some bad news and some good news. The bad news is that I've decided to shift GlitterShip back to two episodes a month instead of four. This is mostly because with moving, and grad school, and trying to do everything else I need to do, I was having trouble sustaining a 4 episodes per month. The good news is that this means that GlitterShip's funds will last until April 2017 at the very least, and that I will be able to showcase more guest readers.I also have some original fiction lined up to start in April 2016, at which point GlitterShip will finally shift from all reprints. Instead, each month I'll bring you one original and one reprint story.If you're a writer or reader and are interested in getting involved, check out the submissions guidelines at glittership.com/submission-guidelines.Our story today is "And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score" by Gary Kloster.Gary Kloster is a writer, librarian, martial artist, and stay at home father. Sometimes all in the same day, but seldom all at the same time. His first book, Firesoul, is out now.And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the ScoreBy Gary KlosterI had a frat-boy stretched out on the table, a pink slab of drunken meat just itching for ink, when Huck blew back into my life and brought the blood trade with him."Dead gods, Woody, this is the shit-hole you crawled into?"  The shop was damn small, Huck was damn big, and the perfectly tailored black ass of his suit pants leaned against my desk before I'd even raised the humming needle from frat-boy's hide."I'm busy, Huck.  Back off.""Busy?"  Huck pursed his lips, made a show of studying the stencil I'd taped across the customer's shoulder blades.  "Gettin you some ink, boy?  A tribal?  Something all spiky and black and awesome to show off to the bitches back home?"Huck's deep voice slowly penetrated my customer's drunken meditations, and his blood shot eyes rolled to blink back my ex-partner's regard.  "Who the hell…"  The young man's voice trailed off, the twitchy edge of drunken belligerence fading as he caught sight of Huck's face.Huck smiled, and his smile stretched the pink rift of scar tissue that ran up from the corner of his jaw, across the twisted pit of his ruined right eye and onto his broad forehead.  Before Nikolai's betrayal, Huck's face had been sternly handsome and the blood tatted into his dark skin had shone like lightning.  That tat's magic had made him beautiful and terrifying, like a storm rolling, and with a look he could make all the world his bitch.  Now, left with just the scar and the spark of rage that still burned in the depths of his remaining eye, he had to be content with just scaring people shitless."Tribals are crap, redneck poser ink.  Do yourself a favor and piss off."Two minutes after Huck banged in and my only customer that whole damn day was sulking out, a black dot of ink no bigger than a pimple hidden beneath his shirt.  "Follow him out, Huck," I said as the door rattled shut and I trashed the ink that I'd laid out for the job.  "We're done, remember?""Woody."  He picked up my sample book, stared at my name splashed across its front in bright red graffiti style.  "Dumb ass name.  Nikolai helped you pick that, didn't he?  Did that cocksucker give you a wooden pecker to go with it?"My teeth clenched, locked back the curse I wanted to hurl at him.  It'd always been so easy for him to control me, to drop a few words and make me flare up in rage.  Or desire.  But those days were gone.  We were different people now.  "Just go.  Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it.""You don't want to hear it?  Don't even want to hear it?"  Huck's big hands flipped restlessly through the pages of my sample book, but his eye was roaming the cheap sample-art posters tacked to the lumpy plaster of the walls.  "You rent yourself some space in a crappy little parlor on Hollywood so you could draw ugly tats with plain ink onto tourists, and so you don't need to hear me out?  You sure you can afford to say that?"Threat growled like distant thunder through his smooth voice, but I wasn't going to let him shake me that way either.  "I can afford to stay out of jail.""Jail."  The scar shifted around his smile.  "What was that to you?  Four years learning to ink and picking out girlfriends.  Jail must have been nothing for you.  Tough guy."Four years being the freak in a cage.  That wasn't nothing, no, not at all.  I rubbed a hand over the rough bristles on my chin, shook my head, so sick of Huck and all those memories that rode his wake.  "They weren't my type."Huck's hands snapped my book shut, dropped it to my desk where it teetered and fell to the floor in a glossy heap.  He pushed himself up straight to tower over me, the bright spot of spite in his eye burning down at me.  "Yeah, and you ain't my type anymore either, are you?"  In his face, I could read the disgust, the anger he still had at me for what I'd done, for the truth I'd carved into my flesh.  Flesh he once thought he had claim to.  "So stop trying to play the big boy.  There's new blood in town, big god's blood, and I mean to have it.  So that means I need me a bloodhound.  I need you.""I ain't your dog, Huck."His hands were on me, yanking me into him, and suddenly all I could see was his bright, furious eye and its ruined twin.  "You are my dog, Woody.  You're my bitch.  Always."  He shoved me away and I hit the table behind me, stumbled and landed on my ass.From the floor I stared up at him, body shaking, anger and fear rattling through me.  We'd been lovers for years before it all burned down, before Nikolai destroyed us.  Years good, bad and chaotic, especially at the end when I had told him what I really was, told him that his pretty girl never believed she was a girl at all.  And that I wanted to change.  Through all of that, in all the twisted grotesquerie of what we had called our love, he had never touched me in anger, never dared name and claim me like that.  "Get out.""No."  He stared down at me, hands twitching, his ill-leashed fury hungry for release, but as I pushed my back slowly to the wall he reined it.  "No.  This isn't just some score.  It's the score, the one that wraps this business up for all of us, you, me and Nikolai.  This pays it all."Nikolai.  I close my eyes and let my head rock back to thump my crew-cut into the wall.  Of course it was Nikolai. Of course he'd come back to LA, blood in his hands and a smile on his lips.  "Oh gods, Huck, just give it up.  He hurt me too, hurt me bad.  Four years of my life are gone because of him.  But I can't steal those years back, and you can't hurt him enough to bring back your tat. Cut your damn losses and move on.  Going after Nikolai, getting back in the trade, it's just a slow bullet through your brain.""You think I can let this go?"  His finger traced over the ruin of his face.  "He burned me.  He set me up and burned me, burned the blood of Zeus right out of my face.  I'm never going to let that go.  My balls won't let me.  How about yours?"A cheap shot and I gathered up my book and stood while I let the pain of its bite fade.  "No Huck.  No.  I don't want your revenge, and I don't want your money.  Find yourself some other dog.  I'm done with the blood trade.""I wasn't offering money."The softness of his voice made me look at him, but he was staring away from me now, through the neon and out at the tourists passing in the garish unnight.  "What?""He has Ungud.""Fuck!"  The book hit the wall, pages flying, the bright wings of butterflies torn away by a storm.  The trap had shut, and I never even saw it coming.  "Fuck me," I whispered, and damn he was smiling at me, sympathy and satisfaction."Not anymore, baby-girl.  Not anymore."I watched them kill a god, once.  My mother took me.She made me wear a dress, and I hated that.  I hated the crowd, the heat and perfume stink of the people around me as everyone pressed close to glass so thickly etched with wards that the altar below seemed to float in a fog of incantation.  I hated it all, but she made me watch.  Mom thought they were saving the world, culling the idols of the infidels.  Even then, I wondered if they were just making a profit.The god looked like a dirty old woman, senile and sick.  It felt obscene, watching the priests stagger to the altar under the weight of their icons of protection, dragging her with them.  While they made their prayers, she drooled and muttered.  I watched, and couldn't believe it would happen.  Couldn't believe that anything so sad, so contemptible, could be a god.  Couldn't believe they were going to kill that wasted old crone.  Then they bent back her head and cut her throat.One quick flash of a knife, and the blood came.  The black blood boiled out of her, writhed and splashed like a thousand snakes and the priests caught as much as they could.  Caught it to seal up in sacred vessels and sell for the glory of their particular truth.  That black essence of belief, sold by the ounce.Truth wins, chaos dies.  My mother pointed to the sacred circle carved into the altar, stained black.  The old beliefs were all going away, and the world would be pure.  I listened, silent and horrified at the thought.  A world where everything fit, just so.  Where no one could be out of place.  She pulled me away, content in her sanctimony, but I looked back and watched the priests trying to gather every last dark drop.  And I saw them fail.It escaped them, slipped past them, ran away.  Some portion of that tainted tincture of everything that the dead god's worshippers had once invested in her ran back into the world.  Escaped, to pool in graveyard shadows and on the wings of crows, in bottles of dark beer and in the eyes of sick children.  No one could contain the blood.  That was a truth I could believe in.So the blood of the dead gods gathered in the dark spaces, the secret places, and of course there were those stupid enough, crazy enough, to seek it out.  We found the dreams of a million souls gathered in the curdled essence of a deity and packaged it into little glass spheres, convenient for sale.  Of course the dealers were all fucked up.  And I had fallen in love with two of them, and my hands had been soaked in the blood of the divine.  It didn't matter that I was a blood hound, one of those dubiously gifted few who could sniff out the blood where it hid, who could resist somewhat the madness it cast in its raw form.  It still tainted my life.  Trying to turn my back on it had been a stupid dream.Stretched out in my narrow bed, I stared at the peeling walls of my tiny apartment, tacked over with diagrams, photos, maps of the hills above LA.  Five years of impotent rage hadn't done much for Huck's temper, but it had honed his cunning, and now my room was a shrine to his dream of revenge.  For the past two weeks he had been force-feeding me every detail of Nikolai's return.  Dead gods knew where he'd gotten it all, or how he'd paid for it.  But now it was my job to know it.  Just like the old days.The good, crazy days.  When Huck planned the scores and I pulled them off, riding his smarts through the job until I hit the point where the information broke down and I would just have to gut it through.  Then Nikolai would line up the buyers and bring in the cash.  That was when we were one tight little family, completely screwed up and seething but together, functioning somehow.  Until it had all blown apart.I had tried to pretend I could turn my back on Huck and Nikolai and everything we had done to each other. Tried to pretend that we were over and done.  A stupid mistake.  We would never be over as long as all three of us still breathed.  Huck was too furious, Nikolai too careful, and me… They both knew me too well to let me go.  They knew exactly how to pull me back in.  Ungud.  The aboriginal god of snakes and rainbows and desire, a god who could be male or female, depending on its want.  Who was what it was, what it wanted to be.  A god whose blood could make me exactly what I was.Three days, and maybe this would really would be over, like Huck said, solved under a sky painted red and black by his rage.  Three days, and maybe I or Nikolai or Huck might finally get what we wanted.  Or maybe again all our dreams would just spill out and be lost to violence, like the blood of that dead god.A helicopter thundered overhead, hauling water east to the fire lines and that finally shut Huck up."I know," I said, before he could start up again when the noise faded.  "I know, and if I don't know it's too damn late to worry about it.  You've done your job, now let me do mine."  I watched his hands tighten on the steering wheel of his Tahoe, remembered how mad this made him.  A control freak, placing his carefully crafted creation into the hands of an improviser.  Five years of obsession hadn't changed that."The fire is rolling in faster than I wanted it too.  They might be thinking of moving.""Yeah, maybe.  So what?  I'll deal with it."  My hands were slapping a quick beat over my body, checking pockets to make sure every piece of equipment was where I wanted it.  "You wanted me, you got me, now let me go.  I've got work to do.""A real tough guy now, ain't you?""Always was."His eye looked me over, and I could imagine him trying to picture me the way I was when we met, to see again the person I'd been when he'd wanted me.  It made me itch, uncomfortable.  "Were you really?""Yeah.  Why do you think you loved me, instead of all the other women you'd screwed?"  And then I was out of the car, slamming shut the door and leaving him with that.  As good a last line as I was going to get, if this all went to hell and I never saw him again.  I started down the street, heading for the bike paths that would take me to the house hidden high in these dry hills where Nikolai and the blood were waiting.  As I walked, I wrapped a black bandana across my face to block out the smell of burning.  And wondered if things had already gone to hell a long time ago.The wards were easy, always were.  My nature makes me slippery, hard to fix with magic.  And I had them marked on a map.  The alarms were harder, but Huck knew my weaknesses and had drilled me on how to handle the ones that were still operating, the ones that hadn't fallen when the fire took out the power and the data lines.  The fire or some hired hand of Huck's, using the fire for cover.  Even the cell nets were almost useless, jammed with the panicked calls of property owners.I pulled myself up onto the bumpy tile roof of the house, giving thanks as I did to the testosterone injections that built the muscle that made it easy.  It was a big place, some old money mansion built out in the wilderness before Santa Clarita had blown up in the valley below.  It must have cost Nikolai a bundle to rent, and I was betting he wasn't going to be getting his deposit back.  If he really had the blood of ten dead gods down there, it didn't matter how hard they warded the spheres that encased it.  Power would bleed out, and the shadows of this house would crawl with nightmares for years.That, though, was the least of my ex-partner's problems.  I found the skylight I wanted and peered down into a room, empty and lit only with the ruddy glow of the approaching fire.  An empty room, except for the brass bound box that gleamed below me.  I frowned down at it.  Clear the ward on this skylight, slip down and gather up the loot, then away.  Just like Huck had planned.My fingers danced around the skylight's edge, pasting in place the twists of iron and hair, spit and paper.  Charms to break the ward without letting it know it's been broken.  Then I worked loose the alarm wire, slipped open the lock and tied off my rope.  All in the plan.  I swung myself in, quiet as a cat, and slid down.  Adrenalin danced in my veins, waiting for the moment the plan went to hell.I could smell the blood, even before I cracked the case.  I'd never been very gifted at sniffing the stuff out, had never been a good tracker.  My bloodhound abilities lay more in my gift at resisting its gnawing effect on my sanity.  But the scent was so strong here I could taste it, and I knew that there must be more blood in the case than I had ever seen before.  With care, I lifted away the soft packing meant to prevent the psychic hell storm that would burst forth if one or more of the globes inside broke.  And that was when the plan burned.Eleven spheres nestled carefully in velvet.  Big crystal globes, and in the heart of each black liquid rolled and stirred, moving in tides that were steered more by my heartbeat than the moon.  Eleven.  Huck had said ten.  Behind me, the door swung open and my job really began."Woody.""Nikolai."  Five years had barely changed him, but he was vain.  Exercise to keep the belly away, dyes to tint the grey that was creeping in, injections and charms to smooth the nascent wrinkles.  Still, he looked good.  He stepped into the room alone, shut the door behind him.  Didn't matter.  The guards would be on the periphery, waiting."I like what you've done with yourself."  His grey eyes roamed me, flicked across my short hair and goatee, the muscles I'd added, lingered on the bulge in the black fatigues I wore.  "You're packing now.""In more ways than one," I said.  But I kept my hands still, didn't try to pull on him.  Nikolai wanted to talk, and I was fine with that."You like the merchandise?""It's interesting.""It's expensive."  Nikolai walked a little closer, stopped.  With the box open, I knew he had to be feeling it, the buzzing edge of distortion that gave normal people the fits and left bloodhounds like me mostly alone.  An advantage, since it kept him back from me.  A little one."South American, mostly.  Huitzilopochtli.  Weet-seal-oh-POACHED-lee  They mix a tiny drop of that with meth and slam it.  Guys do that and they can dodge bullets.  For a little while.  Tezcatlipoca. Tez catly pouka Put a trace of it in the ink of a jaguar tattoo, and no one will ever lie to you again.  And nine more.  The trade's been good to me, lately.""I see."  Good.  Eleven full globes, each the size of a damn softball, each one a pure god, each of them worth a fortune.  We'd risked our lives for a globe of mixed blood a tenth the size of these in the old days.  That case cradled more money and power than I'd ever seen in the trade.  Power enough that I could feel it gnawing at my inborn protections."I'm glad Huck persuaded you to come.  I've been wanting to see you.  I owe you an apology.""You don't owe me anything."  Friends, lovers, family, they hurt each other and had to apologize.  Nikolai had been all of those to me, once, but he wasn't anymore.  Burning out Huck's tat had been a too clever attempt at assassination, and if I hadn't gotten spooked and ditched the blood I was carrying down a storm sewer, I wouldn't have been doing four years for breaking and entering.  Transporting even that little bit of unsanctioned blood would have kept me in a cage for life.  Nikolai had tried to take both our lives when he decided to stop freelancing and left us to join the east coast family that was muscling in on the LA blood trade. When he betrayed us, he stopped being anything but an enemy.  And enemies, they never need to apologize.Nikolai read the thread of my thought in my body's tension.  He nodded, and I knew he never expected any other answer.  "I always thought I was the clever one.  But you both were smarter than I thought.  But this isn't really smart at all."  He waved a hand at the spheres.  "Who do you think fed Huck all the info that led you here?  Who do you think his informants were really working for?  And why do you think I made sure that he knew that I had Ungud?  I wanted you to come, Woody.  So I brought you a gift."The spheres gleamed, shining soft in the red fire light.  I reached down, slow, and plucked up the odd one out.  In its depths, the black blood moved and flashed, brightened.  There were colors there, every color, vibrant as a rainbow, and they twisted together into the form of a serpent, into a woman, into a man.  Ungud.  "A gift.  Or a payment?""What is he to you, Woody?  What did he do when you told him what you really were?  When you told him that his girlfriend wasn't really a girl at all?  He would have driven you out, thrown you away.  I was the one who understood, who let you be what you are.  Who loved you as you really are.  Who let you stay.  That was me."  He looked at me, blue eyes so sincere, and my hand gripped the sphere so tightly I wondered if it might crack.  "Take my gift.  Then lead me to him.""So you can finally finish with him?"  And here it was again, the real sick heart of our little family.  It had always been about the struggle between these two, to find out who was really in charge, who was really the alpha dog.  And I had always been a marker, part of the score.  That's why he hadn't just let me take the stuff and followed me back to his ex-partner.  He had to know that I was betraying Huck.  That he had won, finally.  "Fuck you.""What other choice do you think you have?" Nikolai always sounded so sad when he had you right where he wanted you.  When he thought you were his bitch."What choice?  Did I ever have a real choice, pinned between you two?"  I looked out the broad windows at the distant hills, at the bright flames that stretched up into the darkness.  Ungud's sphere was tight in my hand.  "Here's my choice.  Everything breaks, and everybody dies."Nikolai was smart, but slow, too damn slow.  He didn't even have time to wipe that sad, smug look from his face before my hand was wrapping around the velvet, yanking it free from the box.  In the air the dead god's blood shone in their clear cages, beautiful.  Then they slammed into the floor and shattered.  I only heard the start of Nikolai's screaming as the air broke around us, filled with ten thousand dreams of gods, dead and howling.  In my head, I denied them, walled them out and fumbled through their passions for the rope that hung beside me.  It was in my hand, the black nylon harsh against my skin, when they broke through and the whole world began to burn.Around me, the ash fell like snow.  Smoke rose, black columns that made the sun a sick pale circle rising slowly in the east.  Closing my eyes blotted out that grey light, but the visions that had been burned into the darkness behind my eyelids gave me no comfort.  I opened them again and watched the fires crawl across the distant hills until Huck came for me."Woody."  He swung himself out of his truck, hand hidden beneath his suit jacket, waiting for an ambush.  "What happened?""What do you think?"  I wiped my bandana across my face, tried to blink away the smoke and visions.  In the ruins of his face, colors ran and danced like a broken rainbow, making my eyes burn.  "It was a setup.  It all went to hell.""You didn't get the blood?"I opened my hand, let the wan sun shine on the glass orb it still held.  "Ungud.  Only Ungud.  I dumped the rest."He grunted.  "You dumped them?""I broke them all.  Broke them and crawled out through the chaos.  It was the only way to get past the guards.  And Nikolai."  I watched him twitch when I spoke the name.  "I smashed them at his feet."Huck stared at me, his one eye red and burning.  "Then you did good."I'd spilt out hell in that house and run away, and the screams of Nikolai and his men had echoed behind me until the fire finally swept over them.  I'd bought a new life and Huck's vengeance with the blood of dead gods and the screams of damned men.  My dreams were going to be tainted with both, forever."Good.  Yeah."  In the globe, the blood trembled, stirred by the tremor in my hand.  "I always do my best when your plans fail, and when chaos rules."    Holding the glass sphere tight, I made myself go on.  "Huck, I need something.""I thought we were done.  I thought that was what you wanted.  You did your job, and your payment's in your hand.""Huck, I don't want your money.  I want your help.  We used to do that, sometimes, remember?  Just help each other?  When you still loved me?"He looked away, stared out at smoke and ruins, a big man with a rumpled suit and a scar.  "What?""I need a tat.  With this blood.""So you can finally become a real boy?"I ignored the stupid, useless bitterness in his voice.  He could never believe that this had nothing to do with him. "So I can be what I am.""A man," he said.  "That much blood, you could be more than that."I turned the sphere and watched the colors shine in the dark blood.  So much power, so much potential.  "Yes.  I can be every man.  Young and old, big and small.  All different, and all the same.""A shapeshifter.  A changeling."The idea pleased me, so much possibility after a lifetime of being trapped.  "I like change."Huck's eye came back to me, and the corner of his mouth moved, almost made a smile.  "No lie there, baby-girl."  The words made me twitch, his name for me when we had been lovers, what he called me when we were tangled together.  "You could even be a woman.  Again."I looked up and met his eye, and for first time ever he looked away.  "It's not for you, Huck.  I'm not going to be your girl again.  Ever.""No.  I guess not."  He pushed himself up straight, walked around the truck and stopped by the door.  "This smoke is killing my eye.  Let's get out of here."I stood, but didn't step forward.  "The blood?"Huck frowned at me, his scar darkening.  Then he shrugged.  "I know a guy.  But he'll want to get paid."My turn to shrug, and I did it while walking toward the car.  "Shouldn't be a problem, for us."  His eye narrowed, and I smiled.  "We just agreed not to screw each other anymore.  Best basis for a partnership we ever had.""Shit."  He shook his head, but then slid into the truck, popping the door for me.  "Spilling that blood's made you crazy.""No.  It made me sane."  In my hand, I clutched the blood tight, and in my head I held just as tight to the image of a serpent spiraling across my skin in every color of the rainbow.  A serpent that could weave my flesh into a thousand shapes that made a greater truth.  I would bear the blood of a dead god, and become what I'd always wanted to be.  Myself.END"And the Blood of Dead Gods Will Mark the Score” was originally published in Fantasy Magazine in August 2010 and reprinted in Podcastle later that year.This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.Thanks for listening, and I'll be back on January 19 with "Skeletons" by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam.

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