Podcasts about mirror dance

Originating from Edinburgh Ann Tweak is one of the founders behind the long running party series The Mirror Dance – an eclectic party which has been based out of the longstanding Sneaky Pete's venue having played host to the likes of Yu Su, Dj Python, Shy One and more. As a DJ he draws upon a broad set of influences – this mixtape demonstrates a deep understanding of the roots of house music as it begins with its roots in the classic Chicago sound before meandering into more progressive, dubbed out tendencies later on. A classy assortment of tracks, folk up north don't do things by half measures.

If you'd like to get these episodes early AND ad-free, please go to https://www.patreon.com/unspoiled and become a patron, or just follow us as a free member for updates!Thank you very much to Jen for commissioning this episode! It's time to begin a whole new book, and this time we're starting in the POV of Mark, the clone created to kill Miles and take his place. But this time he's on a much more altruistic mission, and I wish he'd just talk to his brother about it.Thanks so much to you all for listening, and I will see you soon with a new episode!Wanna talk spoilers? Join the Discord! https://discord.gg/rEF2KfZxfV

Another attack of the clones. We liked it! DM: Haley CW/TW: rape, sexual abuse, transphobia, intersexphobia, fatphobia Music by Pets of Belonging Links: The Extractivism of Setting and the Traitor's Text - Vajra Chandrasekera Jo Walton's Review  

Jo Walton joins Meg and Alex to discuss Mirror Dance. Come for the clones, stay for the amnesia.

Episode 88: Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold [transcript] Next Time: Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher Facebook: Backlog Books Podcast Contact: backlogbookspod@gmail.com Music from josephmcdade.com

Welcome to the Indie Writer Podcast where we talk about all things writing and indie publishing. Today we are excited to talk about Jamieson Ridenhour and David Allen Voyles. Jamieson Ridenhour is the writer and producer of the popular audio drama Palimpsest, the author of the werewolf murder-mystery Barking Mad, and writer and director of the award-winning short horror films Cornerboys and The House of the Yaga. His ghost play Grave Lullaby was a finalist for the Kennedy Center's David Cohen Playwriting award in 2012. Jamie's short fiction and poetry has appeared in Strange Horizons, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, TheNewerYork, Across the Margins, Mirror Dance, and Architrave, among others, and has been podcast on Pseudopod, Cast of Wonders, and Radio Unbound.  His newest play, Bloodbath: Victoria's Secret, premiered in October of 2021. Jamie has a Ph.D. in Victorian Gothic fiction. In addition to publishing scholarly articles on Dickens, LeFanu, and contemporary vampire film, he edited the Valancourt edition of Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla (2009) and wrote a book-length study of urban gothic fiction, In Darkest London (Scarecrow, 2014). He has taught writing and literature for over twenty years, currently at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. Some of the tales in David Allen Voyles' collections of original horror stories, The Thirteenth Day of Christmas and Tales from the Hearse were those he told while conducting tours for his ghost tour company, Dark Ride Tours in Asheville, NC. Having taught literature for thirty years, Voyles is no stranger to weird tales and horror fiction in general. His lifelong obsession with Halloween ensured that it was just a matter of time before he published his own tales of terror. In addition to publishing his stories in various anthologies, he is also the creator of the horror podcast, Dark Corners with David Allen Voyles.     KEEP UP WITH OUR GUESTS!   Jamieson Ridenhour: Twitter - @jmridenhour Instagram - @jamiesonridenhour Facebook - JamiesonRidenhourWriter http://www.jamiesonridenhourwriter.com/   David Allen Voyles:  Twitter - @DavidAVoyles Instagram - @DavidAllenVoyles Facebook - DavidAVoyles13 https://davidallenvoyles.com/   RESOURCES/BOOKS MENTIONED: Podbean Audacity (free) Adobe Audition ________________________ Check out the following books by our Patrons!  Deadly Declarations by Landis Wade Mission 51 by Fernando Crôtte Want to see your book listed? Become a Patron! 

Seth's nephew Jacob joins him for a quick conversation about Mirror Dance, winner of the 1995 Hugo Award for Best Novel. No real non-spoiler discussion on this one since it's pretty hard to discuss without spoilers both for this book and for the rest of the Vorkosigan Saga.

Luke talks to Juliane about a small but major storytelling choice which means he won’t read another Vorkosigan Saga novel, and also reviews the rest of Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold. Buy this book at , or discuss this book at Goodreads.com Luke blogs at: https://www.lukeburrage.com/blog Follow Luke on twitter: https://twitter.com/lukeburrage Luke writes his […]

Catriona McPherson stops by the Corner to chat about The Mirror Dance, the 15th Dandy Gilver novel. Tune in to this holiday bonus episode to hear stories about killer puppets, reverent donkeys, sherry, and mince pies, and how you're really supposed to celebrate New Year's. Find Catriona at http://catrionamcpherson.com/ Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, please leave a 5-star rating or review. Web: https://thecozycornerwithalexiagordon.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecozycornerpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/podcast_cozy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/podcast_cozy/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/alexia_gordon/the-cozy-corner-with-alexia-gordon-podcast/ Support the podcast on Patreon! Gain access to patron-only posts, thank you gifts, and giveaways! A donation of as little as $3/month gets you a shout-out on The Cozy Corner. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/AuthorAlexiaGordon and thank you for your support. Find me, your podcast host, at: Web https://alexiagordon.net/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlexiaGordon.writer Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexiagordon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexiagordonauthor/ Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/alexiagordon/poc2pov

Catriona McPherson stops by the Corner to chat about The Mirror Dance, the 15th Dandy Gilver novel. Tune in to this holiday bonus episode to hear stories about killer puppets, reverent donkeys, sherry, and mince pies, and how you're really supposed to celebrate New Year's. Find Catriona at http://catrionamcpherson.com/ Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, please leave a 5-star rating or review. Web: https://thecozycornerwithalexiagordon.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecozycornerpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/podcast_cozy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/podcast_cozy/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/alexia_gordon/the-cozy-corner-with-alexia-gordon-podcast/ Support the podcast on Patreon! Gain access to patron-only posts, thank you gifts, and giveaways! A donation of as little as $3/month gets you a shout-out on The Cozy Corner. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/AuthorAlexiaGordon and thank you for your support. Find me, your podcast host, at: Web https://alexiagordon.net/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlexiaGordon.writer Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexiagordon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexiagordonauthor/ Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/alexiagordon/poc2pov

Catriona McPherson stops by the Corner to chat about The Mirror Dance, the 15th Dandy Gilver novel. Tune in to this holiday bonus episode to hear stories about killer puppets, reverent donkeys, sherry, and mince pies, and how you're really supposed to celebrate New Year's. Find Catriona at http://catrionamcpherson.com/ Subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. If you enjoy the show, please leave a 5-star rating or review. Web: https://thecozycornerwithalexiagordon.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecozycornerpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/podcast_cozy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/podcast_cozy/ Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/alexia_gordon/the-cozy-corner-with-alexia-gordon-podcast/ Support the podcast on Patreon! Gain access to patron-only posts, thank you gifts, and giveaways! A donation of as little as $3/month gets you a shout-out on The Cozy Corner. Sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/AuthorAlexiaGordonand thank you for your support. Find me, your podcast host, at: Web https://alexiagordon.net/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlexiaGordon.writer Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexiagordon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexiagordonauthor/ Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/alexiagordon/poc2pov

This series is beloved by its fans, but doesn't get enough recognition in the wider world. These are incredible, character-driven stories that are a breeze to read but beneath the surface have so much to say about what's most important in life and the meaning and definition of personal identity. That makes them the perfect intro to sci fi for anyone new to the genre, and a refreshing read for any longtime sci fi fan. 4.25 / 5 stars. The Vorkosigan Saga is a series of 16 books by Lois McMaster Bujold, three of which won the Hugo award in 1991, 1992, and  1995. The Vor Game, Barrayar, Mirror Dance, and the rest of the saga follow the members of the Vorkosigan family, one of the feudal ruling families on the planet Barrayar. The books are digestible and concise by sci fi standards (350-600 pages, 11-18 hours of audiobook). The series is also loosely episodic, so you don't have to read them in order. These are character-driven stories, and you're sure to remember these characters for years. The most important of them, Miles Vorkosigan, is clearly the inspiration for George R.R. Martin's Tyrion Lannister, and is even more likable than the knock-off Lannister version. He's a dwarf who suffers from several physical disabilities, but he's wildly brilliant, funny, and imperious, and is constantly throwing himself into danger to protect his friends and family (or just get himself out of a jam of his own making). Across the generations, the Vorkosigan family are the main advisers to generations of Barrayaran emperors, and have to use their wits and intellect to get the empire out of trouble and slowly push Barrayaran society out of its backward nature. These are books about people, the stories that make them who they are, and how they create and define their identities in an unfriendly universe.

GMD is a show on Cruise FM celebrating seventies music ...disco and Jazz Funk

Watch the video of Ruf Dug spinning the records (and all previous live recordings) on Facebook, and follow to keep up with Bside news - www.facebook.com/BsidePodcasts/ Follow the instagram for updates/news/vinyl and general music chat - www.instagram.com/bsidepodcasts/ Ep. 26 RUF DUG: What a treat we have for you this time! Episode 26 of the Bside live series is brought to you by world class DJ and Producer, passionate vinyl digger and record store owner, NTS Radio host, member of Cherry Garcia, Rüf Kutz bossman, and long time staple of Manchester's booming nightlife... Ruf Dug. ‘Rüf Dug presents the Committee', released on Rhythm Section International in April last year, provided one of our favourite Bsides of 2019, thanks to a collaborative approach which brought us two amazing tracks: ‘All U Get 2 Do' with Bradley Zero and ‘Sunrise' with Natalie Wildgoose. (listen here -https://rufdug.bandcamp.com/tr…/sunrise-ft-natalie-wildgoose) His Bside mixtape remains true to his electrifying style. Intricate details, groovy basslines, rhythmic percussions and euphoric horns. This a true showcase of his amazing record collection and proof of his turntable talents as you move through ambient soundscape into a deep funky throb, a few deliciously dubby numbers and a some soulful ska. We also bring you a (likely) exclusive exposure of his most expensive Bside which the man himself describes as “really shit”. But don't worry he'll let you listen to the “real side” which we're sure you'll agree is “mega”. Huge thanks to Ruf Dug for agreeing to come on the show! The music industry is filled with sound people who have a passion for sharing music, we really appreciated his time and everyone else we have had on the show. Give Ruf Dug some support. Ruf Dug soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/rufdug Ruf Dug NTS show - https://www.nts.live/shows/ruf-dug Ruf Dug bandcamp - https://rufdug.bandcamp.com Huge thanks also to The Mirror Dance who booked Ruf Dug and threw a mad party at Sneaky Pete's after the Bside. They have made some class bookings over the past years with the likes of Dan Shake and Giovanna. The Mirror Dance FB - https://www.facebook.com/themirrordance/ The Mirror Dance mix series - https://www.mixcloud.com/the_mirror_dance/stream/ The Mirror Dance instagram - https://www.instagram.com/the.mirror.dance/ Thank you to House of Gods for letting us film the podcast in their very classy cocktail bar which is the reception for their boutique hotel on the cowgate. If you haven't been already, grab a drink or 2 there - https://www.houseofgodshotel.com/ As always, shouts to our Holly Mickey for providing the artwork, we are ever grateful. Check out her art here - www.instagram.com/mollyth.art/

Time to go so deep, that the needles start to feed back (because I forgot to calibrate them properly). Tracklist for September 25, 2019 01 :: Afefe Iku - Mirror Dance 02 :: Laurent Garnier - Drifting In Midwaters 03 :: Octave One - Black Water 04 :: 05 :: L.I.E.S. - Comeback Dust (Max D's Big Top Dustheads Rmx) 06 :: Nicholas - Work This Out 07 :: Boogie Nite - Cardiac Arrest 08 :: Osunlade - Camera Shy (Justin Imperiale Remix) 09 :: Emmanuel Jal - Kuar (Henrik Schwarz ...

Désiréby Megan Arkenberg   From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943             Egon Rowley: It was the War that changed him. I remember the day we knew it. [A pause.] We all knew it, that morning. He came to our table in the coffee shop with a copy of Raum – do you remember that newspaper? The reviewers were deaf as blue-eyed cats, the only people in Südlichesburg who preferred Anton Fulke's operas to Désiré's – but Désiré, he had a copy of it. This was two days after Ulmerfeld, you understand. None of us had any idea how bad it was. But Raum had gotten its hands on a letter from a soldier, and Désiré read it to us, out loud, right there over coffee and pastries. [Full story after the cut.] Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 73 for June 13, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is Desire by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly. Before we get to it, if you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them. http://www.storybundle.com/pride And now for “Desire” by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly. Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com. Dani loves to keep busy and narrating stories is just one of the things she loves to do. She’s a former assistant editor of Cast of Wonders, a retired roller derby player and current soap maker and small business owner. She rants on twitter as @danooli_dani, if that’s your thing. Or you can visit the EA forums, where she moderates the Cast of Wonders boards. You can find stories narrated by Dani on all four of the Escape Artists podcasts, at Star Ship Sofa, and on Audible.com (as Danielle Daly).   Désiréby Megan Arkenberg   From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943             Egon Rowley: It was the War that changed him. I remember the day we knew it. [A pause.] We all knew it, that morning. He came to our table in the coffee shop with a copy of Raum – do you remember that newspaper? The reviewers were deaf as blue-eyed cats, the only people in Südlichesburg who preferred Anton Fulke's operas to Désiré's – but Désiré, he had a copy of it. This was two days after Ulmerfeld, you understand. None of us had any idea how bad it was. But Raum had gotten its hands on a letter from a soldier, and Désiré read it to us, out loud, right there over coffee and pastries.             Albert Magazine: And what did the letter say?             Rowley: The usual things. Blood and, and heads blown clean off, things like that. Horrible things. I remember…[Laughs awkwardly.] I remember Baptist Vogel covered his ears. We all felt it quite badly.             AM: I imagine. Why was this letter so important to Désiré?             Rowley: Who can say why anything mattered to him? Guilt, most likely.             AM: Guilt?             Rowley: Yes. He hadn't volunteered for the army, and that was something of an anomaly in those days. Everyone was so patriotic, so nationalist, I suppose you'd say. But he had his reasons. I mean, I don't suppose Désiré could have passed the examinations for enlistment – the psychological examinations.             AM: But it bothered him, that he hadn't volunteered?             Rowley: Yes. Very much. [A pause.] When he read that soldier's letter…it was the oddest thing. Like he was reading a love letter, you understand. But, like I said, there was nothing romantic in it, nothing at all. It was…horrible.             AM: What did Désiré say about it?             Rowley: About the letter? Nothing. He just read it and…and went back to his rooms, I suppose. That was the last we saw of him.             AM: The last you saw of him?             Rowley: Yes. [A pause.] Before Alexander.   A letter from Margaret von Banks to Beatrix Altberg: August 2892 Dearest Bea,             The scene: Leonore's drawing room, around nine o'clock last night. The moment I stepped through the door, Désiré came running up to me like a child looking for candy. "Thank goodness you're here," he said. I should add that it was supposed to be a masquerade, but of course I knew him by his long hair and those dark red lips, and I suppose I'm the only woman in Südlichesburg to wear four rings in each ear. He certainly knew me immediately. "I have a bet running with Isidor," he continued, "and Anton and I need you for the violin."             He explained, as he half-led, half-dragged me to the music room, that Anton had said something disparaging – typically – about Isidor's skills as a conductor of Désiré's music. Isidor swore to prove him wrong if Désiré would write them a new piece that very moment. Désiré did – a trio for violin, cello and pianoforte – and having passed the cello to Anton and claimed the piano for himself, he needed me to play violin in the impromptu concert.             "You're mad," I said on seeing the sheet music.             "Of course I am," he said, patting me on the shoulder. Isidor thundered into the room – they make such a delightful contrast, big blond Isidor and dark Désiré. Rumor is Désiré has native blood from the Lysterrestre colonies, which makes me wonder quite shallowly if they're all so handsome over there. Yes, Bea, I imagine you rolling your eyes, but the fact remains that Désiré is ridiculously beautiful. Even Richard admits it.             Well, Isidor assembled the audience, and my hands were so sweaty that I had to borrow a pair of gloves from Leonore later in the evening. Désiré was smooth and calm as can be. He kissed me on the forehead – and Anton on the cheek, to everyone's amusement but Anton's – and then Isidor was rapping the music stand for our attention, and Désiré played the opening notes, and we were off, hurtling like a sled down a hill. I wish I had the slightest clue what we were playing, Bea, but I haven't. The audience loved it, at any rate.             That's Désiré for you – mad as springtime, smooth as ice and clumsy as walking on it. We tease him, saying he's lucky he doesn't wear a dress, he trips over the ladies' skirts so often. But then he apologizes so wonderfully, I've half a mind to trip him on purpose. That clumsiness vanishes when he's playing, though; his fingers on a violin are quick and precise. Either that, or he fits his mistakes into the music so naturally that we don't notice them.             You really ought to meet him, Bea. He has exactly your sense of humor. A few weeks ago, Richard and I were at the Symphony, and Désiré joined us in our box, quite unexpectedly. Richard, who was blushing and awkward as it was, tried to talk music with Désiré. "This seems to tell a story, doesn't it?" he said.             "It most certainly does," Désiré said. "Like Margaret's uncle Kunibert. It starts with something fascinating, then derails itself talking about buttons and waistcoats. If we're lucky, it might work its way back to its original point. Most likely it will put us to sleep until someone rudely disturbs us by applauding."             All this said with the most perfectly straight face, and a bit of an eyebrow raise at me, inviting me to disagree with him. I never do, but it's that invitation that disarms me, and keeps the teasing from becoming cruel. Désiré always waits to be proven wrong, though he never is.             I should warn you not to fall in love with him, though. I'm sure you laugh, but half of Südlichesburg is ready to serve him its hearts on a platter, and I know he'd just smile and never take a taste. He's a man for whom Leonore's masquerades mean nothing; he's so wonderfully full of himself, he has no room to pretend to be anyone else.             That's not to say he's cruel: merely heartless. He's like a ruby, clear and dark and beautiful to look at, but hard to the core. How such a man can write such music, I'll never know.             Yours always,             Maggie   III. From a review of Désiré's Echidna in Der Sentinel: July 2894             For the life of me, I cannot say what this opera is about. Love, and courage. A tempestuous battle. I have the libretto somewhere, in a drawer with my gloves and opera glasses, but I will not spoil Désiré's score by putting a story to it. Echidna is music, pure music, so pure it breaks the heart.             First come the strings, quietly humming. Andrea Profeta enters the stage. The drums begin, loud, savage. Then the melody, swelling until you feel yourself lifted from your chair, from your body, and you are only a web of sensations; your heart straining against the music, your blood singing in your fingertips. Just remembering it, I feel my fingers go weak. How the orchestra can bear to play it, I can't imagine.             It is not Echidna but the music that is the hero. We desire, like the heroine, to be worthy of it. We desire to live in such a way that our world may deserve to hold something so pure, so strong, so achingly beautiful within it.   From the Introduction of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele: 2934             Societies are defined by the men they hate. It is the revenge of an exile that he carries his country to all the world, and to the world his countrymen are merely a reflection of him. An age is defined not by the men who lived in it, but by the ones who lived ahead of it.             Hate smolders. Nightmares stay with us. But love fades, love is fickle. Désiré's tragedy is that he was loved.   From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: And what about his vices?             Rowley: Désiré's vices? He didn't have any. [Laughs.] He certainly wasn't vicious.             AM: Vicious?             Rowley: That's what the papers called it. He liked to play games, play his friends and admirers against each other.             AM: Like the ladies.             Rowley: Yes. That was all a game to him. He'd wear…favors, I suppose you'd call them, like a knight at a joust. He admired Margaret von Bank's earrings at the opening of Echidna, and she gave him one to wear through the performance. After that the ladies were always fighting to give him earrings.             AM: To your knowledge, was Désiré ever in love?             Rowley: Never. [A pause.] I remember one day – summer of 2896, it must have been – a group of us went walking in Brecht's park. Désiré, Anton Fulke, the newspaperman Richard Stele, the orchestra conductor Isidor Ursler, and myself. It was Sonntag afternoon, and all the aristocrats were riding by in their fine clothes and carriages. A sort of weekly parade, for us simple peasants. You don't see sights like that anymore.             [A long pause.] Anyway, Désiré was being himself, joking with us and flirting with the aristocrats. Or the other way around, it was never easy to tell. Isolde von Bisswurm, who was married to a Grand Duke at the time, slowed her carriage as she passed us and called… something unrepeatable down to Désiré.             AM: Unrepeatable?             Rowley: Oh, I'm sure it's no more than half the respectable women in Südlichesburg were thinking. Désiré just laughed and leapt up into her carriage. She whispered something in his ear. And then he kissed her, right there in front of everyone – her, a married woman and a Grand Duchess.             AM: [With humor.] Scandalous.             Rowley: It was, in those days. We were all – Fulke and Ursler and Stele and I – we were all horrified. But the thing I'm thinking of, when you ask me if he was ever in love with anyone, that happened afterward. When he jumped down from Isolde's carriage, he was smiling like a boy with a lax governess, and he looked so… I suppose you might say beautiful. But in a moment the look was gone. He caught sight of the man in the next carriage: von Arden, von Allen, something like that. Tall man, very dark, not entirely unlike Désiré, though it was very clear which of the two was better favored.             AM: Not von Arden.             Rowley: [Laughs.] Oh, no. Maggie von Banks used to call Désiré her angel, and he could have passed for one, but von what's-his-face was very much a man. Désiré didn't seem to notice. He stood there on the path in Brecht's park, staring like… well, like one of those girls who flocked to his operas.             AM: Staring at this man?             Rowley: Yes. And after kissing Isolde von Bisswurm, who let me tell you was quite the lovely lady in those days. [Laughs softly.] Whoever would have suspected Désiré of bad taste? But that was his way, I suppose.             AM: What was his way? [Prompting:] Did you ever suspect Désiré of unnatural desires?             Rowley: No, never. No desire in him could be unnatural.     From the pages of Der Sentinel: May 15, 2897             At dawn on May 14, the composer Désiré was joined by Royal Opera conductor Isidor Ursler and over fifty representatives of the Südlichesburg music 'scene' to break ground in Umerfeld, two miles south of the city, for Désiré's ambitious new opera house.             The plans for Galatea – which Désiré cheerfully warns the public are liable to change – show a stage the size of a race track, half a mile of lighting catwalks, and no less than four labyrinthine sub-basements for prop and scenery storage. For a first foray into architecture, Désiré's design shows several highly ambitious features, including three-storey lobby and central rotunda. The rehearsal rooms will face onto a garden, Désiré says, featuring a miniature forest and a wading pool teeming with fish. When asked why this is necessary, he replied with characteristic 'charm': "It isn't. Art isn't about what is necessary. Art decides what is necessary."   VII. From a review of Désiré's Brunhilde in Der Sentinel: February 2899             For once, the most talked-about thing at the opera was not Désiré's choice of jewel but his choice of setting. Südlichesburg's public has loved Galatea from the moment we saw her emerging from the green marble in Ulmerfeld, and, at last, she has come alive and repaid our devotion with an embrace. At last, said more than one operagoer at last night's premier of Brunhilde, Désiré's music has a setting worthy of it.             Of course Galatea is not Désiré's gift to Südlichesburg, but a gift to himself. The plush-and-velvet comfort of the auditorium is designed first and foremost to echo the swells of his music, and the marble statues in the lobby are not pandering to their aristocratic models but suggestions to the audience of what it is about to witness; beauty, dignity, power. However we grovel at the feet of Désiré the composer, we must also bow to Désiré the consummate showman.             As to the jewel in this magnificent setting, let us not pretend that anyone will be content with the word of Richard Stele, operagoer. Everyone in Südlichesburg will see Brunhilde, and all will love it. The only question is if they will love it as much as Désiré clearly loves his Galatea.             Finally, as a courtesy to the ladies and interested gentlemen, Désiré's choice of jewel for last night's performance came from the lovely Beatrix Altberg. He wore her pearl-and-garnet string around his left wrist, and it could be seen sparkling in the houselights as he stood at the end of each act and applauded wildly.   VIII. From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: They say that Désiré's real decline began with Galatea.             Rowley: Whoever "they" are. [Haltingly:] 2899, it was finished. I remember because that was the year Vande Frust opened her office in Südlichesburg. She was an odd one, Dr. Frust – but brilliant, I'll give her that.             AM: Désiré made an appointment with Dr. Frust that June.             Rowley: Yes. I don't know what they talked about, though. Désiré never said.             AM: But you can guess, yes?             Rowley: Knowing Dr. Frust, I can guess.             AM: [A long pause.] As a courtesy to our readers who haven't read Vande Frust's work, could you please explain?             Rowley: She was fascinated by origins. Of course she didn't mean that the same way everyone else does – didn't give half a pence for your parents, did Vande Frust. She had a bit of… a bit of a fixation with how you were educated. How you formed your Ideals – your passions, your values. What books you read, whose music you played, that sort of thing.             AM: And how do you suppose Désiré formed his Ideals?             Rowley: I don't know. As I said, whatever Désiré discussed with Dr. Frust, he never told me. And he never went back to her.   From Chapter Eight of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele             Whether or not Désiré suffered a psychological breakdown during the building of Galatea is largely a matter of conjecture. He failed to produce any significant piece of music in 2897 or the year after. Brunhilde, which premiered at the grand opening of Galatea in 2899, is generally acknowledged to be one of his weakest works.             But any concrete evidence of psychological disturbance is nearly impossible to find. We know he met with famed Dr. Vende Frust in June 2899, but we have no records of what he said there. The details of an encounter with the law in February 2900 are equally sketchy.             Elise Koch, Dr. Frust's maid in 2899, offers an odd story about the aftermath of Désiré's appointment. She claims to have found a strange garment in Dr. Frust's office, a small and shapeless black dress of the sort women prisoners wear in Lysterre and its colonies. Unfortunately for the curious, Dr. Frust demanded that the thing be burned in her fireplace, and its significance to Désiré is still not understood.   From the report of Hans Frei, prostitute: February 12, 2900             Mr. Frei, nineteen years old, claims a man matching the description of the composer Désiré approached him near Rosen Platz late at night last Donnerstag. The man asked the price, which Mr. Frei gave him, and then offered twice that amount if Mr. Frei would accompany him to rooms "somewhere in the south" of Südlichesburg. Once in the rooms, Mr. Frei says the man sat beside him by the window and proceeded to cry into his shoulder. "He didn't hurt me none," Mr. Frei says. "Didn't touch me, as a matter of fact. I felt sorry for him, he seemed like such a mess."             No charges are being considered, as the man cannot properly be said to have contracted a prostitute for immoral purposes. The composer Désiré's housekeeper and staff could not be found to comment on the incident. One neighbor, a Miss Benjamin, whose nerves make her particularly susceptible to any irregularity, claims that on the night of last Donnerstag, her sleep was disturbed by a lamp kept burning in her neighbor’s foyer. Such a lamp, she states, is usually maintained by Désiré’s staff until the small hours, and extinguished upon his homecoming. She assumes that the persistence of this light on Donnerstag indicates that Désiré did not return home on the night in question.   From a review of Désiré's Hieronymus in Der Sentinel: December 2902             Any man who claims to have sat through Désiré's Hieronymus with a dry eye and handkerchief is either deaf or a damned liar. Personally, I hope he is the damned liar, as it would be infinitely more tragic if he missed Désiré's deep and tangled melodies. Be warned: Hieronymus bleeds, and the blood will be very hard to wash out of our consciousness.   XII. A letter from Margaret von Banks Stele to Beatrix Altberg: March 2903 Dearest Bea,             Richard says war is inevitable. His job with the newspapers lets him know these things, I suppose: he says Kaspar in the foreign relations room is trying to map Lysterrestre alliances with string and cards on the walls, and now he's run completely out of walls. That doesn't begin to include the colonies.             The way Richard talks about it, it sounds like a ball game. Bea, he jokes about placing bets on who will invade whom – as if it doesn't matter any more than a day at the races! I know he doesn't need to worry, that at worst the papers will send him out with a notepad and a pencil and set him scribbling. The Stele name still has some pull, after all – if he wants to make use of it.             I don't, Beatrix. If war breaks out with Lysterre, I want you to know that I am going to enlist.             Yours,            Margaret Stele   XIII. From Chapter Eleven of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele             It was inevitable that the War should to some extent be Désiré's. It was the natural result of men like him, in a world he had helped create. Dr. Vande Frust would say it was the result of our Ideals, and that Désiré had wrought those Ideals for us. I think Désiré would agree.             We – all of us, the artists and the critics with the aristocrats and cavalrymen – might meet in a coffee shop for breakfast one morning and lay some plans for dinner. The cavalrymen would ride off, perhaps as little as ten miles from Südlichesburg, where the Lysterrestre troops were gathered. There would be a skirmish, and more often than not an empty place at the supper table. Désiré took to marking these places with a spring of courtesan's lace: that, too, was a part of his Ideal.             In this war, in our war, there was a strange sense of decorum. This was more than a battle of armies for us, the artists. Hadn't Lysterrestre audiences applauded and wept at our music as much as our own countrymen? The woman whose earring Désiré had worn one night at the opera might be the same one who set fire to his beloved Galatea. The man who wrung Anton Fulke's hand so piteously at the Lysterrestre opening of Viridian might be the same man who severed that hand with a claw of shrapnel. How could we fight these men and women, whose adulating letters we kept pressed in our desk drawers? How could we kill them, who died singing our songs?   XIV. From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: Do you think Alexander was written as a response to the War?             Rowley: I know it was. [A pause.] Well, not to the War alone. A fair number of things emerged because of that – Fulke's last symphony, which he wrote one-handed, and Richard Stele's beautiful book of poems. Who knew the man had poetry in him, that old newspaper cynic?             AM: His wife died in the War, didn't she?             Rowley: Yes, poor Maggie. It seems strange to pity her – she wouldn't have wanted my pity – but, well, I'm an old man now. It's my prerogative to pity the young and dead.             AM: But to return to Désiré –             Rowley: Yes, to Désiré and Alexander. You must have seen it. All the world saw it when it premiered in 2908, even babes in arms…How old are you?             AM: [The interviewer gives her age.]             Rowley: Well, then, you must have seen it. It was brilliant, wasn't it? Terrible and brilliant. [A pause.] Terrible, terrible and brilliant.   A letter from Infantryman Leo Kirsch, printed in Raum: September 2907 Gentlemen,             I cannot make you understand what is happening here, less than a day's ride from your parks and offices and coffee houses. I can list, as others have, the small and innumerable tragedies: a headless soldier we had to walk on to cross through the trenches, a dead nurse frozen with her arms around a dead soldier, sheltering him from bullets. I can list these things, but I cannot make you understand them.             If it were tears I wanted from you, gentlemen of Südlichesburg, I could get them easily enough. You artists, you would cry to see the flowers trampled on our marches, the butterflies withering from poisonous air. You would cry to watch your opera houses burn like scraps of kindling. Me, I was happy to see Galatea burn. Happy to know it would hurt you, if only for a day.             But I don't want your weeping. If I want anything from you, it is for you to come down here to the battlefields, to see what your pride, your stupidity, your brainless worship of brainless courage has created. It is your poetry that told that nurse to shelter her soldier with her body, knowing it was useless, knowing she would die. Your music told her courage would make it beautiful. I want you to look down at the headless soldiers in the trenches and see how beautiful dumb courage really is.             The Lysterrestre have brought native soldiers from their colonies, dark men and women with large eyes and deep, harrowing voices. They wear Lysterrestre uniforms and speak the language, but they have no love for that country, no joy in dying for it. Yesterday I saw a woman walking through the battlefield, holding the hands of soldiers – her people, our people, and Lysterrestre alike – and singing to them as they died. That courage, the courage of the living in the face of death, could never come from your art. For us, and for Lysterre, courage of that kind is lost.             I tried to join her today. But I did not know what to sing, when all our music is lies.   XVI. From a review of Désiré's Alexander in Der Sentinel: August 2908             Richard Stele has refused the task of reviewing Alexander for Der Sentinel, and it is easy to see why. Stele is a friend of Désiré, and it takes a great deal of courage – courage which Désiré brutally mocks and slanders – to take a stand against one's friends. But sometimes it must be done. In this instance, standing with Désiré is not only cowardly; it is a betrayal of what all thinking, feeling men in this country hold dear.             Nine years ago, after the premier of Brunhilde, Stele famously refused to summarize its plot, saying we would all see it and love it regardless of what he said. Well, you will all see Alexander regardless of what I say. And you, my friends, will be horrified by the change in your idol.   XVII. From Chapter Twelve of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele             The War changed Désiré. Alexander changed us all.             It seems to be a piece of anti-Lysterre propaganda, at first. Alexander, a Lysterrestre commander, prepares for war against the native people of the Lysterrestre colonies. Shikoba, a native woman, rallies her people against him. The armies meet; but instead of the swelling music, the dignity and heroism Désiré's audience have come to expect, there is slaughter. The Lysterrestre fling themselves at the enemy and fall in hideous, cacophonous multitudes. At the end of the opera, Alexander is the last Lysterrestre standing. He goes to kill Shikoba; she stabs him brutally in the chest and he collapses, gasping. Shikoba kneels beside him and sings a quiet, subdued finale as he dies.             This is an opera about courage, about heroism. Its heroes turn to all the other operas that have ever been written and call them lies. When audiences leave the opera house, they do so in silence. I have heard of few people seeing it twice.             At some point during the writing of Alexander – in October 2907, I believe – Désiré announced at a dinner of some sort that he had native blood, and had been born in the Lysterrestre colonies. This did not matter much to the gathered assembly, and besides, it was something of an open secret. We took it, at the time, to be a sort of explanation, an excuse for the powerful hatred that boiled in him each time we mentioned the War. Not that we needed any explanations; my wife, Margaret von Banks Stele, had died at Elmerburg about a month before.             Now, of course, I wonder. Why did it matter to Désiré that the world he shaped so heavily was not his by blood? What exactly had the War made him realize – about himself, and about the rest of us?             It is significant, I think, that in Galatea's burning all the Lysterrestre army costumes were lost. "Fine," Désiré said. "Borrow the uniforms of our countrymen. They all look the same from where we'll be standing."   XVIII. From Albert Magazine's interview with Egon Rowley             AM: The War marked the end of an era.             Rowley: The death of an era, yes. Of Désiré's era. I suppose you could say Désiré killed it.   XIX. From the obituaries page of Raum: June 2911             The editors of Raum are saddened to report the death of the composer, architect, and respected gentleman Désiré. We realize his popularity has waned in recent years, following a number of small scandals and a disappointing opera. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge our debts to the earlier work of this great and fascinating man, whose music taught our age so much about pride, patriotism and courage.             Something of an enigma in life, Désiré seems determined to remain so hereafter. He directed his close friend Egon Rowley and famed doctor Vande Frust to burn all his papers and personal effects. He also expressed a desire to be cremated and to have his ashes spread over Umerfeld, site of both his destroyed Galatea and one of the bloodiest battles in the recent War.             No family is known, nor are Mr. Rowley and Dr. Frust releasing the cause of death. Désiré is leaving Südlichesburg, it seems, as mysteriously as he came to it.   From a report on Native Boarding Schools in the Lysterrestre Colonies: May 2937             Following almost twenty years of intense scrutiny and criticism from the outside world, Native Boarding Schools throughout the territories of the one-time Lysterrestre Empire are being terminated and their records released to the public.             Opened in the late 2870s, Native Boarding Schools professed to provide native-born children with the skills and understandings necessary to function in the colonial society. In the early years, the children learned the Lysterrestre language and farming techniques; over time, some of the schools added courses in machine operation. Criticism centers on both the wholesale repression of the students' culture and the absence of lessons in science or the fine arts.             "We went around in shapeless black dresses, like criminals in a prison," Zéphyrine Adam, born Calfunaya, says of her time in the Bonner Institute. "They say they taught us to speak their language, but they really taught us to be silent. They had rooms full of books, music sheets and phonographs, but we weren't allowed to use them. Not unless we were too clumsy to be trusted by the factory machines. They understood, as we do, that stories and music give us power. They were afraid of what we would do to them if they let us into their world."             In the face of such accusations, the majority of Native Boarding School instructors seem reluctant to speak, though some still defend the schools and their intentions.             "The goal was to construct a Lysterrestre Ideal for them, but not to hide their natural-born talents," says Madame Achille, from the Coralie Institute in what is now northern Arcadie. "We simply made sure they expressed them in the appropriate ways. I remember one girl, one of the first we processed back in 2879. An unhappy little thing most of the time, but a budding musician; she would run through the halls chanting and playing a wooden drum. Well, we set her down one day at the pianoforte, and she took to it like a fish to water. The things she played, so loud, so dignified! She had such talent, though I don't suppose anything ever came of it.             "A lot of them had such talent," she adds. "I wonder whatever became of them?" END   "Désiré” was originally published in Crossed Genres and is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2013. 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, leaving reviews on iTunes, or buying your own copy of the Autumn 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy. You can also support us by picking up a free audiobook at  www.audibletrial.com/glittership. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a GlitterShip original.

Watch the podcast on Facebook - www.facebook.com/BsidePodcasts/ Ep. 6 Taisce (The Mirror Dance) The second half of The Mirror Dance - Taisce comes up from Manchester with a bag of his favourite records to showcase tracks from the B-side. He plays a wide verity of tracks, starting with some real nice reggae, moving into tasteful jungle, some dub, world house and finishing on "one for the mums". Enjoy.

Watch the podcast on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/BsidePodcasts/ Ep. 5 Paddy D (The Mirror Dance) Paddy Dixon is warmly welcomed to the bedroom to show off some of his favourite tracks from the B-side of record he owns. Paddy has had numerous appearances with Capri Collective at the iconic Sub Club, and has brought the likes of Dan Shake and Hubbie Davisdon to Ediburgh clubs with the The Mirror Dance which he co-founded. The records he plays range from Ghanaian hip-hop, smooth jazzy snythy house, to the theme-track of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Enjoy.

Stories My Body Can Tell by Alina Sichevaya   My mama used to tell me I was born screaming, sticky, and uglier than every sin she’d ever known, which was all of them. I still like to remember that. Gives me a warm feeling in my stomach. Especially when it looks like I’m about to die the same way. I’m remembering it now. My throat feels skinned, but on the inside, and my lips stick to each other, the blood from my nose drying over them. It’s definitely broken, and one of my lips might be split. One of my eyes is swelling shut. I’ve had worse—I’m not exactly dying—but it hurts to breathe, and my ribs feel like they’re falling to pieces inside of me. They probably are.   [Full story after the cut.]     Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 62! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Stories My Body Can Tell" by Alina Sichevaya and a poem, "Daddy Death" by Jeana Jorgensen. This episode is part of the newest GlitterShip issue that is now available. The Spring 2018 issue of GlitterShip is available for purchase at glittership.com/buy and on Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. If you're a Patreon supporter, you should have access to the new issue waiting for you when you log in. The new issue is only $2.99 and all of our back issues are now $1.49. GlitterShip is also a part of the Audible Trial Program. This means that just by listening to GlitterShip, you are eligible for a free 30 day membership on Audible, and a free audiobook to keep. If you're looking for an excellent book to listen to, check out Hild by Nicola Griffith which is a historical fantasy about the youth of St. Hilda in 7th century Britain. The book is full of lush historical descriptions and the sometimes brutal life of a young woman with extraordinary gifts. To download Hild for free today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership — or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else.     Jeana Jorgensen is a folklorist, writer, dance, and sex educator. Her poetry has appeared at Strange Horizons, Liminality, Stone Telling, Enchanted Conversation, and Mirror Dance. She blogs at Patheos (https://www.patheos.com/blogs/foxyfolklorist/) and is constantly on Twitter (@foxyfolklorist).     Daddy Death by Jeana Jorgensen   Death is just.Death is fair.Death was ours firstand still he loves us best. I only had one father that mattered:Daddy Death, godfather to lost boys like mewho arrived alone and quaking, newborns at the gatesof the club, too new to know our language, our customs. I was Daddy Death’s favorite, strong and young,a pup lapping up rules and adoration and learning so quicklyto spot our kind in the waking world:the closeted businessman, father of four;the baker, the lawyer, the burly school bus driver;and more politicians than I could count.I eyed them all, a specter of Daddy Death in my visionnodding, as if to say, he is one of ours,he belongs to our underworld,if only he’d let himself. Daddy Death is fair and even-handed with all(even me; especially me)bears and pups and dykes and moremeting out punishment when deservedbut oh so tender, so gentle with aftercare. That was before the rumors,the slow illness preying on us;whispering grid, gay, go awayand the clubs closed as the body count rose. Aging monarch on shadowy throne:Daddy Death lasted longestbut stopped going out(except for the appointments)and I was his messenger boy.I, who passed well enough in the straight world;I, who charmed all the pharmacists;I, who could still see unerringlywhen I meet a man thathe is one of ours; he may yet escape the plaguethough Daddy Death looms over his bedeach night, an invitation, a warning,a man whose heart can hold us all. Love is a door, love is a dungeonwhere a tender man presses paininto your skin and shows you to yourself. Daddy Death waits for me in the next worldwhile I do his work in this one, shepherding boysso young to be in so much pain, but so was I at that ageand now we know so much more,and the medicine takes root in our bodiesand though decimated, we grow strong again.     Alina Sichevaya is a writer and student based in North Carolina. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop, was a finalist for the 2017 Dell Magazines Award, and her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons. In her spare time, Alina plays a lot of Overwatch and waves a string around for her very large orange cat. She can be found on Twitter at @alina_sichevaya and you can visit her website at https://sichevaya.wordpress.com. Our narrator is Kirby Marshall-Collins. Kirby is a Los Angeles-based writer and director with a hunger for authentic, hopeful storytelling. She got her start writing Disney spec scripts as a child before going on to gain a BA in Theater, Film, and Digital Production. She'd like to thank her high school English teacher for always volunteering her to read in class--if she can do "The Odyssey" solo, she can do anything.   Stories My Body Can Tell by Alina Sichevaya   My mama used to tell me I was born screaming, sticky, and uglier than every sin she’d ever known, which was all of them. I still like to remember that. Gives me a warm feeling in my stomach. Especially when it looks like I’m about to die the same way. I’m remembering it now. My throat feels skinned, but on the inside, and my lips stick to each other, the blood from my nose drying over them. It’s definitely broken, and one of my lips might be split. One of my eyes is swelling shut. I’ve had worse—I’m not exactly dying—but it hurts to breathe, and my ribs feel like they’re falling to pieces inside of me. They probably are. The girl doesn’t punch me again. She doesn’t have to. I feel like my insides are turning into soup as she hauls me upright by my hair. Somewhere in the parts of my head that aren’t full of feeling-like-shit, I think that I need a haircut. “Tell Craiden where she can shove her cheap fists next time,” she hisses in my ear. Then, she bites it. Just for good measure. It could be hot, if she doesn’t then pull away and take part of it with her. I don’t scream. Or, I do, but I don’t have the air in me to do it right and it comes out in a low, embarrassing wail. “I don’t think she can fit an entire grown woman up her ass, but I’m sure she’ll appreciate the message,” I hiss. Flecks of pink spittle land on the carpet in front of me. It’s satisfying to watch them soak into the plush surface, especially when they’re next to the bright red stains that got there when the kid shoved my face into the floor and held it there. “She can leave now,” says the man at the window, some official from bumfuck-nowhere with six lifetimes’ worth of gambling debts. How he can afford this kind of muscle is beyond me. How he can stand there, not even glancing over as I get the shit beaten out of me—that, I can understand. The kid hauls me back to my feet, meaty hand still fisted in my hair. Some of it comes out in her fingers as she pulls me out of the study, and she readjusts her grip. “Y’know, s’not,” I start, but forget my words. “S’not polite,” I say. “Beating your elders to a pulp, ‘s a dick move.” “I’ll remember that the next time a crusty hag like you shows up at the door,” she says before letting go of my hair. I turn around, raising my fist for a last punch. Before I can even get close, she plants a hand squarely between my tits and shoves me backwards out the door. I skip all three of the steps leading down to street and land on my ass, hard. I get up. I rub at the ache in my assbone. That makes it worse, so I stop. I want to fall down again, on something else, maybe something that doesn’t already hurt, but I walk. If I don’t tell Craiden that she’s not getting her money back anytime soon, I never will, and that will end badly for me. Even worse than it’s already turning out. All the way to Craiden’s building, the skin on my back aches, the same way it always does when I miss the woman who used to drag her nails down the name burned into it and curl up against me after. It’s a nagging, touch-hungry kind of ache, the kind that wants comforting. I do my best to ignore it. My best is pretty shit. Craiden runs a hand over her stubbly scalp, scowling down at me like I’m a stray dog she can’t afford to feed. “Give me one good reason to keep you, Jansse.” I don’t have one. I can’t tell if that’s because there isn’t one, or because my head has stopped working. “Well?” I shrug. “Can I…” I have to think for a minute or two. “Can I get back to you after I get my face fixed?” Craiden laughs. The stamps burned into her face, scars from her own extremely brief career as a fist-for-hire, wrinkle with it. “Honey, if you want your face fixed, you gotta go back to whenever it was you were young and decide to do something else with your life.” “Know it didn’ go well,” I say, breathing in that shallow way I know helps get air past my ribs. I shift from foot to foot in the alley. Her doorway opens onto the hidden refuse of the city, piled up in stinking heaps of wasted food and waste itself against the walls of buildings. I wonder if I’m more like the wasted food or the waste. “That’s not what I asked you for. One reason, Jansse.” “I don’ know righ’ now, a’right?” I say, letting myself sag against the frame. “I’ll do better. Next time.” Craiden sucks at the insides of her lips, drags her teeth over the top and bottom ones in succession. “Jansse, there’s not going to be a next time.” “Wha’ you mean?” The split lip and broken nose are making talking harder and harder. “You have to understand, at this point, I’m about to start sinking more money into keeping you alive than you’re bringing back to me,” said Craiden. “You get that, right?” “Wai’—“I lean forward, shaking my head quickly before getting dizzy and stopping. “No, you can’—” “I’m sorry, Jansse, I’d keep you if I could,” she says. It’s almost like she means it, her face folds in all the right ways, but I know better. What she says next hurts worse than the letting me go. “It’s just business,” she says. “You’ll still be a friend—” My breath comes faster, the spaces between my ribs filling with the ache of panic to complete all of me. “You can’t,” I say, forcing the consonant out as good as I can. “I got nowhere else to work, nobody else—” I try to breathe enough to keep talking. It takes me a good few moments. “You’re the only one hirin’ at my age,” I say. “’M only fifty, please—” “That’s the problem,” says Craiden, and she’s already closing the door. “You’re fifty, Jansse. You can’t do this forever. The fact that you’ve made it this long is impressive.” “Wai’,” I say, and it sounds like I’m yelling from really far away. “Lemme try agai—” The door clicks closed. The little sound it makes is louder than anything I can produce in response. Fuck, but everything hurts, and the marriage burned across my back hurts the most, maybe because there’s nothing like getting your ass handed to you by a someone at least two decades younger than you and losing your job for it to make you want pity from someone who’s been done with you for years. Even my bones hurt, the whole ones, with the shame of it—this is what I do, and besides, it’s not right, losing to someone when you’ve got thirty years of experience on them. I shouldn’t go, but focusing on where my feet take me and on staying conscious is too much work, so I choose consciousness and let my legs follow a familiar path of back alleys to a home that isn’t mine anymore. It’s a little unfair of me, but I never claimed to be a good person, and besides, we’re both used to it by now. Avne’s a better person than I am. She has to let me in if I’m hurt, and she does, though her graceful dark face is pinched with disapproval. My insides do the same warm thing they did when I met her, even though she’s not smiling this time. “There’s nobody following you, is there?” she asks as she pulls me through the door and settles me, oozing fleshy lump that I am, into a chair at her kitchen table. The faint light of her fire is more than I could see by outside. I don’t know how long it’s been since the last time, but there’s definitely more gray in her hair. What a pair of old crones, we are. “Well, Jansse? Is there?” she disappears behind me, and I can hear her pouring water. It takes me a moment to find my tongue. “Nah,” I say. My mouth feels thick, the words distant. “Craiden don’ need me anymore.” “She paid you like shit,” says Avne, and I almost smile, but my sticky mouth protests. Then I remember that she’s not paying me at all anymore, and I don’t want to smile after that. “Thought you didn’ care what I was makin’,”I say. This is old talk, warm talk. My insides do the thing again. “Arms up.” I obey, as much I can, and she pulls my shirt and wraps off. The weight of my tits falling free makes my ribs hurt, and I breathe in sharp and fast before I can remember not to. My middle is a bruising, swelling, scarred wreck. The only good stories my body has to tell are in the marks she’s left on me, the rounded twists of her name-letters burned into my back by the priest at our wedding, two decades ago, and in the stamps she sears into me every time I come crawling back to her for fixing-up. “I do care what you make,” says Avne, stiff, dabbing at my face with a warm, wet cloth. It comes away red when she stops to rinse it off. “Especially when you come back thinner than when you left.” I’ve got nothing to say to that, so I don’t answer, but after she puts the cloth down in the bowl of bloody water, she goes for my nose and I flinch away. “Don’t be a child,” she waves her hand for me to come closer, and I force myself to lean forward. “I can’t repair it without setting it first.” When she does push the bone back where it belongs, I let out a groan that squeezes my ribs. I’m too proud to scream. She keeps me talking, just about random bullshit, as she finds the right stamp and pulls it from the fireplace. It doesn’t hurt, even though the metal’s glowing bright orange when she presses it to a convenient clear spot on my cheek. My nose has been broken enough times that it’s hard to find good places on my face to stamp fixes onto, but she always manages to get to one. Stamp healing always leave me feeling softer, warmer. I don’t understand how it works, but all I need to know is that after the little circle with the right character inside gets burned into me I start feeling like life’s way easier than it really is. Names are different. They hurt going on and feel all kinds of ways after. She goes to work on my ribs next, and my split lip. My ear, she can’t do much about—“I can’t grow your flesh back,” she says, but the rest she patches up until I’m warm all over. It’s like sleep, but better. She lets me just sit there like that for a little while, come off that flood of calm nice and slow, and when my eyelids are light enough to lift she asks, “What went wrong this time?” I whisper it first, then say it louder when she asks me again. “I got beat by some kid bodyguard over money someone owed Craiden.” My body doesn’t hurt anymore, but I still have to look at the ceiling to keep my eyes dry. “She thought I was too expensive to keep fixing. And paying. I’m not useful anymore, not the way you are,” I whisper. I can barely hear myself say it. I clear my throat. “You got anything to drink?” Avne pulls a bottle of something clear and colorless off the shelf above the fireplace and opens it. I take a long pull that burns my throat in a way some would consider less than pleasant. I put it down on the table maybe a bit harder than I should, and it sloshes up the sides not unlike my innards probably did earlier. “You know how we’d used to talk about it sometimes, when we were still...” I try again. “You know how we’d talk about it when we were younger? Which one of us would still be working?” “That’s not really what was happening, and you know it,” says Avne, looking at the bottle for a second before deciding against it, instead shoving the cork back inside. “I told you you couldn’t keep it up for long. That’s what I meant.” This is an old argument, a well-worn one that fits between us nice and snug, but it’s deeper this time. “It was fine, back then,” I say, more to my hands in my lap to her. “She couldn’t have been more than twenty, that’s what really fucks with me, and she’s got nothing of the art of it in her. Just muscle, y’know?” Avne gives me a sad smile. She opens her mouth to say something, closes it again, and answers, “There’s an art to being a mercenary?” “There’s efficiency, and then there’s just throwing your weight around hoping it lands somewhere.” I’m not crying, I swear I’m not crying, but my voice catches like I might and it disgusts me. “So what are you going to do about it?” She sounds completely calm, collected, nothing like I’ve ever been. “Can I—” Avne stands so quickly it makes my head spin. “Don’t ask.” That’s when I start crying. “Why not?” “What do you think it’s like for me, when you ask to come back?” she returns, folding her arms around herself like she’s holding herself together by the force of it. “You say every time that it’s the last, that you’ll either stop breaking yourself for money or just stop coming back, and then you just leave in the mornings like nothing happened, and what am I supposed to do with that?” There’s no point defending yourself when you know it’s only going to get you hurt worse. I learned that today, if nothing else, so I say nothing. We sit like that, and I drink, not enough. She only looks at me like she wants a response that I don’t know how to give. “I get it,” I finally say, “but I’m outta work now. Craiden was the only one paying for someone my age.” “There’s a difference between understanding and not having a choice.” “That’s fair,” I say, because it is. “I won’t get very far with you tonight, will I?” I would agree, but that implies too much of a future for me to want to risk it by responding. Avne replaces the bottle on top of the mantlepiece. “I’m not letting you back out there until you’ve slept,” she says, glancing at the door. “Leave at dawn, or don’t, but do it when you’re not on your last legs. I don’t need to put you back together twice in as many nights. Take the bed.” “But—” “Jansse. Take the bed. You’re a terrible liar, and even worse when you try to fake humility.” This, too, is old territory, streets we’ve packed dustless with our footsteps. “Thanks,” I say. “If you stay, we’re talking,” she calls after me as I make my way to her bedroom. “In the morning, when you’re functional, we’re talking.” I drop myself on top of her covers and regret it—my insides were always slower to pull themselves back together than the rest of me—and watch her through the open door. She’s gone up in the world—the last time I was here, it was a curtain. Outside, things creak and slosh and rustle as she gets rid of the evidence that I was ever any less than whole. I just lie on my side and blink. She moves, sometimes, into the narrow field of vision afforded me by the door. She lets her hair down. The gray makes it even more beautiful, I decide. It means she’s been around long enough to get it in the first place. “Avne,” I ask, but it doesn’t feel like a question. “Y’know what?” My jaw feels heavier the more I try to talk, the comfortable exhaustion of the freshly stamped. “What?” she returns, tone neutral in that careful way of hers that she uses when she doesn’t want to take any more of my shit. The light of the fire dims, is squeezed out to a sliver as she closes the curtain most of the way. All that’s left is the faint light cast by the better parts of town, but that’s far away too, so the room looks like dusk. I keep myself awake with little pinches to the back of my thigh, where she won’t see. I never manage to stay awake this long, and I want this time to be different. “I never got you burned off of me,” I say. It slurs out of me. I let it. Avne pauses. Something rustles, and her dim outline moves like she’s pulling her clothes off. “I know,” she says. “I’ve seen you shirtless more times than I can count.” She doesn’t face me when she lays down on the spare folding cot set up against the wall. There’s something on her back, something whole and beautiful and not quite discernible in the barely-light on her skin. I pinch myself again, I want to see it right before I can sleep it out of my memory. It’s the curves of my name-letters, less intricate than hers, but still dark, the scar still raised against her skin, uninterrupted by the char of removal. When the light works its way through my eyes, she’s not there—she’s already awake, from the sound and smell of it. Her cooking’s always been good, and at the scent of it my stomach pulls me upright and commands my legs to swing over the side of the bed. The memory of last night almost forces me back down for a moment before deciding that out the window would be better, and I have the shutters open before I can even think about it. I pull my hand back. Names hurt going on and feel all kinds of ways after, but in the few seconds after the rod leaves your skin, it’s better than anything, even that soft wholeness you get after your insides have been stamped back together by someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s what makes me go to the door instead, and open it. “Good morning,” I say. Avne looks over her shoulder, her hair catching the light. Her smile is small, but it’s there. I want to keep it there forever.   END   “Daddy Death” is © Copyright Jeana Jorgensen 2018. “Stories My Body Can Tell” is © Copyright Alina Sichevaya 2018. 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. You can also support us by picking up a free audio book by going to www.audibletrial.com/glittership or buying your own copy of the Spring 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of "Gravedigging" by Sarah Goldman.

Hello, Rangers! This month, we're diving back into the Vorkosiverse with Mirror Dance! Our team of Rangers, Paul, Trish, and Kate, dig into one of the most life-altering books of the series:  a book which contains a major death, even more conversations on the ethics of cloning, some truly traumatic scenes, and much, much more. […]

@OVEOUS visits Carte Blanche for a guest mix and interview to discuss his forthcoming album Hypersoul, the 10 year anniversary of the iconic Mirror Dance release and more! Carte Blanche mixed live every Saturday 4-6pm PST at Save On Radio in Vancouver www.saveonradio.com/carteblanche www.djbeaubien.com Instagram + Twitter: @dj_beaubien

In the City of Kites and Crows By Megan Arkenberg   1. When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering. Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it.         Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 58 for August 25, 2018. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our episode today is a reprint "In the City of Kites and Crows" by Megan Arkenberg, read by A.J. Fitzwater. Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com. A.J. Fitzwater is a dragon wearing a human meat suit from Christchurch, New Zealand. A graduate of Clarion 2014, she’s had stories published in Shimmer Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and in Paper Road Press’s At The Edge anthology. She also has stories coming soon at Kaleidotrope and PodCastle. As a narrator, her voice has been heard across the Escape Artists Network, on Redstone SF, and Interzone. She tweets under her penname as @AJFitzwater Content warning for descriptions of police violence and suicide.   In the City of Kites and Crows By Megan Arkenberg   1. When you breathe deeply, really push the air from your lungs and let the cold valley wind fill you again, you can smell the city’s ghosts. They smell like burning. Not like fire but like everything that comes with it: smoke, scorched hair, wet carbon, ash. This is a city that burns spasmodically, a city of gas lines and rail cars, coal dust and arson, a city with wooden roofs and narrow alleys. A city that is always shivering. Forty or fifty years ago, this apartment building was the hotel where Senators kept their mistresses and boy-toys, all blue velvet and gilt. Then a fire gutted it. I tell this to Lisse, and she rubs at the burn scar on the back of her knee, at the tattoo that crawls up her thigh in a hatch of green and golden lines, like a map of a city, or a circuit board in fragments. Lisse just got out of Federal prison for smashing the rearview mirrors off a police car. She has new scars now, the white tracks of some riot officer’s baton, one of which slices across her left nipple and makes her breast look punctured, deflated. She sits in her flannel bathrobe at the table in her living room, in the apartment that was a hotel room and still smells like the arsonist’s match, and she shakes her head with a slow, sad smile. “Hythloday,” she says, as though my name were a dirge. “How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?” Outside the bay window behind her, three stories below us, a crush of posterboard and sweatshirted bodies is churning and chanting its way up 9th street, towards the West Gate of the Senate. Lisse snaps photos on her phone. She edits an antigovernment webzine, contributes information to two antisenatorial projects that I know of—both documenting police brutality and violations of prisoners’ rights—and surely several others that I don’t. Her thick hair is unoiled and still damp from the shower, smelling of grass and wood dust, smelling of her. “Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government,” I tell her. I’m spread out on her couch like the jammy sediment in the bottom of a wine glass, and I know that this observation, this trenchant précis of the last thirty-six months, is the closest that I will ever come to political analysis. Or to self-reflection. Lisse, who will not let me back into her bed until I’m sober, who still fucks me on the couch, does not look up from the photos of the protestors on her phone. “Well, Hythloday,” she says, half word and half sigh. “Why do you think that is?”   2. Some evenings, when I’m sober enough to pull on a pair of trousers and an old suit coat, tie my hair back and wash the traces of eyeliner from my cheeks, I take the train down to the university. It’s quiet and damp so close to the river, the trees whispering to themselves in the fog, and all the public spaces roped off with yellow lines of caution tape. If anyone were to ask me what I’m doing here tonight—anyone except for Lisse, who won’t ask me, who never asks—I’d say I came for the lecture on the Mnemosyne project, an answer both innocuous and vaguely suspect. Really, I’m here to see Jesse. They check IDs at the door of the auditorium. I don’t know if “they” are the Mnemosyne developers looking for allies or a Senatorial commission tallying enemies, or just the university, looking to cover its ass either way. Inside, the dim room flickers with tablet and laptop screens as people pull up the app. Mnemosyne, Jesse explained to me once as we lay on the floor of his bedroom, sipping coffee from wine glasses, is an augmented reality application. It checks your location with your device’s GPS and overlays your screen with location-sensitive news. Censored news, he meant, censored images, photographs you shouldn’t see, stories no one should be reporting. I know Lisse is providing data for the project, and Jesse helped with the programming. Everyone I’m fucking wants to overthrow the government. (Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?) A small gray woman in a gray suit reads off her PowerPoint slides at the front of the room, and I lean against the wall in back, scanning the crowd for Jesse. He’s sitting in the second-to-last row, the strands of silver in his dark brown hair showing dramatically in the liquid-crystal glow of his laptop. His face and lips look as blue as a drowning man’s. I like to watch him like this, when he doesn’t know I’m looking. When he knows he’s being watched, when he’s teaching or lecturing, he becomes brilliant, sparkling, animated. His dark eyes and his smile widen, light up, his gentle laugh drags parentheses around the corners of his mouth. But when he’s alone, when he thinks no one is watching, he shrinks into himself. The laugh lines settle. He looks lost, like a book that someone has misplaced. At the end of the lecture, he snaps his laptop shut, slings his bag over his shoulder. He catches sight of me on his way to the exit. He smiles too widely, looking exhausted. “You weren’t expecting me,” I say. “I know.” “No, it’s fine.” He licks his lips, which still look dry and blue. “Did you like the talk?” “Sure,” I lie. He turns abruptly and strides out of the lecture hall. I follow down the glossy corridor, out into the parking lot, where the mist rolls in from the river, smelling of rot. Jesse stops, leans against the wall of the auditorium, and his hair catches on the rough brick. He grabs me around the waist and drags me in for a kiss. (Nine people contributed material to the Mnemosyne project, he told me, leaning against the pillows. The marks of my teeth were pale and raised along his shoulders. Four of them are anonymous. Five of them are missing.) He clings to me like a drowning man, fingers digging into my back, bruising, his mouth opening beneath mine as though I could give him breath. He tastes like mint chewing gum and cigarette smoke. He winces when my tongue brushes against his teeth, but when I start to pull back, he whispers, “Don’t.” (He kicked a stack of books off the side of the bed, yanking off his jacket and tie, and he told me to fuck him. I took the harness and the strap-on from the nightstand. He spread out on the bed, watching impatiently over his shoulder as I adjusted the buckles and straps around my thighs. The headlights from a car across the street slipped through the slats in the window blinds, caught his eyes, flattened them to smooth disks of gold.) I weave my fingers through his, and he grunts in pain. “Jesse.” I pull back. His sleeve cuffs gap above the buttons, and I can see the shining red marks on his wrists, marks my hands could never have left. The neck of his undershirt has slipped down, damp with mist and sweat, and bruises show under his skin, black and yellow and blue. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Please. Just stay with me.” (We fucked, and even though I was sober, it was the disjointed, disappointing sex of people who are drunk, and angry, and afraid.) We take the train to his townhouse on the east side of the city. The streetlights around us glare like a hangover. Alone in the second-to-last compartment, he leans against my back, his cheek against my shoulder blade, his arms tight around my waist. “The dean wants to see me tomorrow,” he murmurs. I turn my head, looking for our reflection in the train window, but it’s too dark inside, too bright out. (Afterward, he asked me to hold him. He curled around me, his head resting in the crook between my bicep and my breast, his arms around my hips. He didn’t say my name again. After a few minutes, his breathing settled. I kissed his cheek and tasted salt.)   3. This city burns so often that every fire has a name. Ships burning, churches burning, schools and factories and luxury hotels. The S. S. Virgil fire, the St. John’s fire. On a windy day, you can still smell the smoke rising from St. John’s preparatory. And when you aim the camera of your phone down at the sidewalk in front of the West Gate, down at the cracked cement with its tarry traces of chewing gum and bird shit, you can still see the outline of Mark Labelle’s blood, the smooth puddle that it left as he died on a cold Sunday afternoon in April, beaten to death by riot officers. The stain that was still there the next morning, when the body was packed away in a city morgue and the police surveillance video had disappeared. Gone, as they say, without a trace—except for this palimpsested slab of sidewalk, which someone snapped on their phone, which someone else uploaded to the Mnemosyne project, which now trickles through this elegant little app to the eyes of anyone who stands here beneath the wrought iron gate. Your own private haunting, in the palms of your hands. There are dozens of places like this throughout the city, thanks to Lisse and Jesse and all the rest of them. Haunted places. Revolutions are made out of hauntings, out of missing bodies and ghosts. Did you know that? I can assure you that the government does.   4. Remedios and Gavin live above their gallery on Elliot Street, which has burned so many times that the new houses are all built out of concrete. Every surface north of 23rd is brightly painted: flag murals, forest scenes, mountain silhouettes, massive bare-breasted women with galaxies in their eyes. Walking up the sidewalks, listening to the cold reverberating echo of your footsteps, you get the feeling that this part of the city has transcended the organic. At least until you see the fast food wrappers caught in the grates of the pristine concrete sewers. Everything, even the wrappers, smells like stone and diesel. Gavin is a sculptor, and he doesn’t mind this sort of thing. Remedios, though, rebels. Their back yard is full of tomatoes and bright yellow-flowered squash, and two fat hens cluck in the chicken coop beside the rusted bike rack. The back stairs take you either into the gallery, through the second floor, or up to their apartment on the third. The gallery is always unlocked. I glance inside just long enough to see that Remedios’s Brutal exhibition is still on display, wall after wall of bare torsos with unspeakable scars. The gray, wine-stained carpet smells like dust, and there are fat black flies on the windowsills. A stray exhibition program flutters in the box by the fire escape, the title in red lower-case sans-serif: These are not the bodies we were born in. I let the door swing shut. Upstairs, in the kitchen, Remedios is standing barefoot at the sink, washing cherry tomatoes and crying. (You weren’t expecting to see me, I’d said, because none of them ever are. No, he said, it’s fine.) “Hythloday.” She drops the bowl into the sink, where it spins, clattering, spilling mottled red-and-yellow tomatoes across the gray ceramic. She flings her arms around my neck, stands on tiptoe, presses her flat chest against mine. Her hair is dark blue and shaved close to her head, and it smells like the gallery, like dry skin and abandonment. (Please, just stay with me.) She pulls me towards her on the bed, which is a low double-mattress in the front room, covered in shawls and old saris and stuffed animals. Her fingers are already undoing the buttons on my shirt. “Shouldn’t we wait for Gavin?” I ask, but she makes a sick squeaking sound. “He isn’t here,” she says. “What do you mean?” “He’s gone, Hythloday.” She tugs at my sleeves, and I ease myself down beside her on the mattress. “What do you mean?” She shakes her head, falls silent. I kiss her forehead, and she rolls me over, pushes me back against the pillows with the dead weight of her body. (Four of them were anonymous, Jesse had told me. Five of them are missing.) Afterward, she curls up with her back against my stomach, a little spoon, or a snail in its shell. It feels strange not to have Gavin’s arms crossing mine above her small body, Gavin’s heady juniper smell in my nostrils. Remedios’s breathing slows, hitches, then steadies, like a ship breaking into deep water. “We were marching up Tribunal,” she says. “There was a gathering at the West Gate. He thought we should be there, say a few words. The police arrived and we were separated.” Somewhere in the neighborhood, a siren begins to wail. I kiss the back of her neck, and she looks over her shoulder. “He’s dead, isn’t he?” (Everyone I’m fucking is trying to overthrow the government. Well, Hythloday, why do you think that is?) I kiss her nose, her eyelids. “I don’t know,” I lie.   5. “Hythloday?” Lisse crouches over me. Her fingers wind around the back of my neck, giving my hair a sharp tug. “In all seriousness. Why do all your lovers want to overthrow the government?” “Guess I have a thing for rebels.” “Seriously.” “Mm-hm,” I say. Her face is unreadable. I close my eyes, lean back into her grip. “You’re all so electric, and so secretive. Meetings in dark alleys and warehouses, throwing bricks through Senate windows. It’s so sexy. And don’t get me started on the posters and the pamphlets and those long, lonely nights with a busted stapler in the back of the copy shop—” She cuts me off with a kiss, dragging my head up to hers. Her mouth tastes like orange juice and almond chapstick, her lips bruisingly firm, her teeth sharp. “Just for once,” she whispers, “I wish you would think.” Think. As though I weren’t always thinking, too much for my own good. Thinking of her body, the scars I can see and the ones I can’t, the hipbones that jut prominently against my hands where they were once buried in flesh. Thinking of the marks shining on Jesse’s wrists and chest, of Remedios crying at her kitchen sink. Thinking about protestors and fire hoses, pepper spray, gunshots. Thinking of the history of this city, this apartment building and the fire that gutted it. Thinking of being gutted. Being burned. “All right, Lisse.” I rub my eyelids, smudging what’s left of yesterday’s liner. “Everyone I’m fucking realizes that this country is going to shit, and unlike me, they have the courage and integrity to do something about it. Fair?” She doesn’t answer. I open my eyes. A flood of sunlight pours through the windows, sharp with afternoon. The living room is empty. When I look towards 9th and Tribunal, I see that the crowd of protestors has dispersed, leaving a single piece of wet posterboard in their wake.   6. Hythloday. I suppose you caught the reference. A traveler in no-place, a stranger in Nowhere. My mother kicked me out when I was fifteen, and ever since, my only reliable roof has been the sky. The city of kites and crows. It doesn’t burn as easily as the city of flesh and blood, I’ll give it that. And there have been friends’ couches, lovers’ bedrooms: roosts for a night, or for a season. I have this image of myself flying across the city, from nest to nest, like something from a children’s story. Where do the birds go during a revolution? I read somewhere that every pigeon in Paris flew away during the summer of 1793. It was so hot, and every street in the city stank of blood. I have no idea if any of that is true. I have this recurring dream of a guillotine blade falling, the thud of it scattering crows, like a spray of embers from a collapsing roof. They don’t settle again. Whatever died wasn’t to their taste. The fire at St. John’s preparatory school began because a little girl stuck a match into a bird’s nest outside her dormitory window. Little girls are cruel, crueler far than ravens or guillotine blades, and flames in a wooden building travel faster than cruelty. Within seven minutes, everyone who was going to make it out alive had already left the building. They stood on 23rd street clutching their books, their dolls. Everyone else died. And some who got out died, too, later on, from the smoke. I tell this story to Lisse, and she frowns. It is a story about all the things she loves: a story about home, about violence and brutality and revenge, about innocent bystanders. But it is not a story about justice. “Only ghost stories are about justice,” I say, and she shakes her head. (How can you, of all people, believe in ghosts?)   7. When I return to the gallery, there are flies everywhere. (Where did the bruises come from? I asked Jesse. But they weren’t just bruises, not merely bruises, although the purple stain on his chest showed the treads of a military boot. The white and red marks on his arms, the stiffness in his fingers came from being cuffed, being tied, and tightly. I knew the signs.) Remedios and I go into the bedroom and fuck and don’t say word about Gavin. She moves so stiffly that I’m afraid I’ve hurt her, but when I slow down, she twines her legs around me and hisses in my ear: “Don’t stop.” We fall asleep afterward, sore and exhausted. Later still, I wake alone to the buzzing of the flies. (The dean wants to see me tomorrow, he’d said, resting his cheek against my shoulder blade. And I couldn’t see our reflection in the window.) And although it’s the last thing on earth that I want to do, although I can already smell the sour stink in the dusty carpet, I go down to the gallery. Down to the first floor, where the flies are thickest. Down to the back room. (Jesse’s things are scattered across the bedroom floor. His books, cracked along the spine. His ties and jackets and dress shirts, torn from their hangers and crumpled, dirtied with the muddy prints of boots. The contents of the nightstand, small and obscene in the light of day.) I see the folding chair first, collapsed in the center of the room beneath the light fixture. And she sways at the end of something that shows bright orange against her blue hair: an electric cord. She’s been here for a while now. Her limbs have gone stiff, her tongue black against her pale chin. I stand on the chair to cut her down. When she lands in my arms, I lose my balance, fall to the floor with a solid, bruising thud.   8. On the train back to 9th street, the woman in the seat across from me is reading something on her tablet. She looks up at me, suddenly. Without saying a word, she cries, and cries, and cries.   9. None of us has the body we were born in. Life leaves its traces, its teeth marks on our throats, its maps across our thighs and in our fingertips, its footprints on our chests. The body that I was born in didn’t have breasts, didn’t have hips, and I didn’t know it had a cunt until I was nine years old. Love leaves its traces on us, and hate. I fill the antique tub in Lisse’s bathroom until the frigid water flows over the edge, splashing across the dark green tile floor. I close my eyes, plug my nose, plunge to the bottom. Even under water, I smell burning. I’ve stopped binding recently, stood in front of the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and cupped my breasts the way I used to cup Lisse’s. It felt alien. Not wrong, just not mine. I think of Lisse’s tattoo, the marks on Jesse’s wrists and neck and chest. I think of the slight weight of Remedios, dangling from an electric cord noose. And I think damage is what teaches us to inhabit our bodies, and everyone I love has learned that long before me. At last, I come up for air, and Lisse is waiting for me, sitting on the edge of the tub in her flannel robe. “What’s wrong, Hythloday?” she asks. But nothing’s wrong. I’m unscathed. “It’s my gift,” I say softly. “My own special talent. I don’t follow the crowd, and I never have. I don’t get caught up in things. The world is on fire and I don’t even feel the heat.” I reach for her, and she isn’t there. I get out of the tub, wrap a fraying towel around my waist, go into the hallway. The door to her room is on my right. I put my fingertips on the handle, hoping it will be locked, but it isn’t, it swings soundlessly open. The smell of smoke and scorched hair and wet carbon rushes out. Inside, everything is covered in a layer of dust. END   "The City of Kites and Crows" is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2016, and was originally published in Kaleidotrope. 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 "Never Alone, Never Unarmed," an original story by Bobby Sun.  

Download This month on the Vorkosicast, Robin and Nanci discuss Mirror Dance. This podcast has been brought to you in part by your support on Patreon!  If you like what you hear, you can subscribe to the Tosche Station Book Club on iTunes or you can subscribe to the Tosche Station Radio Megafeed for all of our great […]

AFEFE IKUKU - MIRROR DANCE HORATIO EDIT

Greetings brothers and sisters, this one should have been the first in the Producer Series, but the track listing kept changing as the my favorites kept changing, and then there was Pyrography. I’ve only put one from Pyrography on here, quite intentionally though, Ser El Santisimo, good Latin vibes, and Osunlade smashes this one. The rest will be sprinkled here and there. Really and truly, Osunlade drew me into house music. I was strictly roots reggae (I owe you a roots cd by the way, trust me its building) and then the Director introduced me to Osunlade touch on Tortured Soul’s Might Do Something Wrong, and have been hooked ever since. These are some of my favorites, not a comp of his best tracks. I’m sure the real Yoruba Soul heads out there would like to strangle me for not using an Erro, or a Tortured Soul etc… there will be another Yoruba Cd, trust me. Track listing: 01 - Andre Torquato Project - Niente (Yoruba Soul Mix) 02 - Osunlade Pres. Nadirah Shakoor - Pride (Osunlade'S Back To Africa Mix) 03 - Magnetic Man Ft. John Legend - Getting Nowhere (Yoruba Soul Mix) 04 - Osunlade - Ser Al Santisimo 05 - Afefe Iku – Mirror Dance featuring Oveous Maximus (Yoruba Soul Remix) 06 - Roy Ayers - Tarzan (Osunlade Yoruba Soul Mix) 07 - Jazztronik - Dentro Mi Alma (Yoruba Soul Mix) 08 - Michelle Amador - Because Of You (Yoruba Soul Remix) 09 - Bah Samba w/Alice Russel - Tired Little One (Yoruba Soul Vocal) 10 - Ben Westbeech - So Good Today ((Yoruba Soul Remix) 11 - Soul Central feat. Abigail Bailey - Time After Time (Yoruba Soul Mix) 12 - Shazz - All I Wanna Give U (Yoruba Soul Remix) 13 - United Future Organization - Listen Love (Yoruba Soul Mix) So there you have it. Let me know what you think please. I'm certainly not choosing a favorite, although if you read the fine print, I'm sure you would read something about Jazztronik, but you didn’t hear that from me. Let me know what you think please. Stay Blessed. KAS

YES PEOPLE, WARMING UP TO THOSE SUMMER VIBES WITH THIS SOULFUL DEEP HOUSE MIX. ENJOY 1.UNDER MY SKIN – HEATHER JOHN (MUTHAFUNKAZ REBIRTH VOX) 2.BUTTERFLIES - KAJE feat SACHA WILL (GUY ROBIN MIX) 3.CIRCLES – NATHAN ADAMS & ZEPHARIN SAINT 4.COME GET MY LOVE – WILL MILTON feat MISS PATTY 5.GOD CREATED WOMAN – TERRY DOUGLAS feat MARGARET GRACE 6.PRIVATE LIFE – GUY ROBIN feat ANTHONY MORIAH (TERRY HUNTER MIX) 7.SOMETHING BETTER – MARTIN SOLVEIG (JULIAN JABRE MIX) 8.MARY MARY – GRAND HIGH PRIEST 9.MIRROR DANCE – AFEFE IKU feat ANANE & MR.V (RICARDO SILVIO BUMPS IT) 10.GIMME THAT MUSIC – PETER TYRONE feat LADY ALMA 11.COLOURS ARE FOREVER – ALFRED AZZETTO (VOCAL MIX) 12.TREAT ME RIGHT – KIM ENGLISH (JON CUTLER MIX)

Come join me for a sensual mirror work dance class where we will dance to the sensual sounds of konpa/kompa that come from Haiti