Podcasts about nightmare magazine

Another Goddamn Horror Podcast Presents: Bloody Book – Chapter 2 w/ Daniel J. VolpeWe dive headfirst into blood, grime, and guts with Daniel J. Volpe, the extreme horror author behind the savage and unforgettable Billy Silver — the brutal opening chapter of his infamous Talia Trilogy.In this episode of Bloody Book, we sit down with Volpe to talk about how Billy Silver blends splatterpunk, body horror, and a gritty underground vibe to create a visceral reading experience unlike anything else. From its punk rock roots to its demonic overtones, we break down what makes Billy Silver a must-read in the extreme horror fiction scene.From there, we dive deeper into the full Talia Trilogy — including Talia: Blood Moon and Talia: Ashes & Echoes — exploring its complex mythology, unforgettable violence, and the emotional core that keeps readers coming back for more. Plus, Daniel gives us a sneak peek into his upcoming novel Runts, a violent coming-of-age nightmare soaked in feral rage and survival horror.This episode is a must-listen for fans of:Splatterpunk horrorExtreme horror booksIndie horror authorsHorror fiction podcastsGrindhouse storytellingWriters like Kristopher Triana, Aaron Beauregard, Wrath James White, Chandler MorrisonPodcasts like The Horror Show with Brian Keene, Books in the Freezer, Nightmare Magazine, and The KingcastSubscribe now and join us as we tear through pages dripping with madness. It's horror lit with bite, bark, and brains. This is Another Goddamn Horror Podcast.

Main fiction: "When Dessa Danced"Donyae Coles is the author of Midnight Rooms, has a variety of puffy princess dresses and one cat but she wants more of both. She has traveled the world four times over and may do so again. Her short work has been published in a variety of horror and other speculative fiction anthologies and magazines such as Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, and All These Sunken Souls. When she's not writing, she's telling her stories with a paintbrush. Her website is www.donyaecoles.com.This story originally appeared in The Future Fire, #2018.45Narrated by: Stacey HartStacey Hart lives in Southern Arizona. She is the creator of EDICO Designs—a design and web development firm specializing in donating websites, graphic designs, social media content, branding, and video editing services to non-profits and small businesses. When away from the computer, Stacey is a drummer for the band The Liquid Centers with her bandmate Will Stagl, and adores spoiling her black chow chow, Billie. This is her first podcast narration for StarShipSofa.Fact: Looking Back At Genre History by Amy H SturgisSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/starshipsofa. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Let's join the abyss crew on vacation!!!! They found this cool little house in Hawaii, Marc Laidlaw suggested it in his story Paradise Retouched. Before they check out the pictures on the wall, they discuss My Favorite Thing is Monsters vol 2 by Emil Ferris, Ryo Hanada's Betwixt: A Horror Manga Anthology, and The Acolyte. Now listen in as we try to figure out who's whistling outside...   Read Paradise Retouched 

From the Minotaur to xenomorphs to the undead, monsters and their ilk have long been a staple of the sci-fi and fantasy genres. But what exactly is it that makes a monster? Guest John Wiswell joins us to discuss how monsters in fiction often reflect not only our primal fears, but also the people that society seeks to Other. When monsters reflect what a real or fictitious society values and doesn't value, what sorts of things do writers need to consider when placing monsters in their world? In this episode, we explore how, while monsters can sometimes just be plot obstacles for Our Heroes to overcome, they can also be coded -- intentionally or as a matter of unconscious bias -- in the same ways that disability, poverty, non-heteronormative sexuality, and other marginalized populations get coded. We also pull apart the idea of recontextualizing monsters: As is often said of Frankenstein and his creation -- who's really the monster? Who's the true beast? [Transcript TK] Our Guest: John Wiswell is an American science fiction and fantasy author whose short fiction has won the Locus and Nebula Awards and been a finalist for the Hugo, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards. His debut fantasy novel, Someone You Can Build a Nest In, will be released in spring 2024 by DAW Books. John's work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, LeVar Burton Reads, Nature Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Weird Tales, the No Sleep podcast, Nightmare Magazine, Cast of Wonders, Podcastle, Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and other fine venues. His fiction has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Polish, Hungarian, Turkish, Hebrew, and Romanian. He graduated Bennington College in 2005, and attended the Viable Paradise 17 workshop in 2013. He has multiple disabilities including a neuromuscular syndrome, and thinks healthy people's capacity to complain is very funny. He finds a lot of things very funny and would like to keep it that way. He is frequently available for interview and for talks at conferences. He has done panels at places such as Worldcon, the Nebula Awards, and the World Fantasy Convention. He posted fiction daily on this blog for six straight years, and has left every embarrassing and inspiring word of it up to read for free. If you'd like to see a writer develop style, it's all there. You can point and laugh. He probably can't hear you.

Today, we are doing things a little differently. Since this is our first episode in October–the best month of the year if you ask us–we thought we'd do an extended recommendations episode, all with the intent of getting you ready for spooky season. UP NEXT: “Lacrimosa” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia  Read it here at Nightmare Magazine   Buy Toil and Trouble here!  

Jake and Ron are honored to have the legendary Lucy A. Snyder as a guest for the podcast! We chat with her about her latest novel. Sister, Maiden, Monster published by Tor Nightfire. Lucy A. SnyderLucy A. Snyder is the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated and five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of 15 books and over 100 published short stories. Her most recent books are the collection Halloween Season, the Tor Nightfire novel Sister, Maiden, Monster, and the forthcoming novel The Star-Stained Soul. She also wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer's Survival Guide, and the collections Garden of Eldritch Delights, While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov's Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives near Columbus, Ohio. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyderThe Wrath of the iOtiansEmail: thewrathoftheiotians@gmail.comInstagram: thewrathoftheiotiansTwitter:  @OfiOtiansWebsite: https://thewrathoftheiotians.buzzsprout.com/MusicLand Of The Me-me by Aleksandar Dimitrijevic (TONO)Licensed under the NEO Sounds Music License Agreement

We are joined by the a brilliant new name on the horror scene, Rae Knowles, to talk about narcissistic love interests, the tragedy of plot butterflies fluttering away the second you have the ability to write, and taco bell erotica. We also get a sneak preview of The Stradivarius, talk about her nonfiction piece in Nightmare Magazine, and more accurate definitions of the word "gaslighting." Also be sure to submit for the Scissor Sisters: Sapphic Villains Anthology - open through May 31. Rae Knowles (she/her) is a queer woman with multiple works forthcoming from Brigids Gate Press. Her debut novel, The Stradivarius, debuted May '23, her sapphic horror novella, Merciless Waters, is due out November '23, and her collaboration with April Yates, Lies That Bind, in early '24. A number of her short stories have been published or are forthcoming from publications like Dark Matter Ink, Nightmare, Seize the Press, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Nosetouch Press. Recent updates on her work can be found on her website and you can follow her on Twitter. Want to submit your writing? Email darkwaterspodcast@gmail.com Intro/Outro music: www.bensound.com Disclaimer: Any and all opinions expressed are the opinions of the participants and not of the organizations or institutions with which they are affiliated. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/darkwaters/support

Wendy N. Wagner joins us to discuss her novella The Secret Skin from Neon Hemlock, her novel The Deer Kings, and her recently announced upcoming novel The Creek Girl. Co-hosted by special guest host Maria Dong, this episode covers Wendy's impressive editing and writing career, getting into all the twists and turns and how to learn from your mistakes. Wendy also talks about making a living as a creative, what they are looking for as an editor of Nightmare Magazine, what AI might mean for writers, and so much more. Learn more about Wendy N. Wagner: winniewoohoo.com Follow Wendy on Twitter: @wnwagner and Instagram @wendy.n.wagner Learn more about Nightmare Magazine at: nightmare-magazine.com Follow guest host Maria Dong on Twitter: @MariaDongWrites and Instagram: @maria_dong_writes Tune into Episode 145: Out of one genre and into another featuring Maria Dong You can follow Bitches on Comics on Instagram and Twitter @BitchesOnComics and you can follow our hosts: Sara Century: @saracentury (Instagram and Twitter), S.E. Fleenor: @se_fleenor (Instagram and Twitter), and Monika Estrella Negra: Instagram and Twitter. Follow our Sound Editor Kate on Twitter. Show us some love by giving us a 5-star Review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, PodChaser, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support us by joining our Patreon Community. Keep in touch with us and see what we're up to by visiting our website: BitchesOnComics.com And check out our new narrative horror podcast Decoded Horror Channel which includes Graveyard Orbit, Tales of the Sapphire Bay Hotel, and more! Bitches on Comics is a Queer Spec project. Check out our other projects! Learn more about Queer Spec at: QueerSpec.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh hey! You're here! The Abyss crew has something to talk to you about, it's this killer story from Chesya Burke called I Make People Do Bad Things that's up on Nightmare Magazine. But wait, there's more! They also want to squeeze in some recommendations! Such as Pearl, The Outwaters, Skinimarink, Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House, Jackal by Erin E. Adams, Tananarive Due's Ghost Summer, and Josh Malerman's Decorum at the Deathbed. I do hope you enjoy it!   Read I Make People Do Bad Things

We talk to Eric Raglin, author of the short story collections Nightmare Yearnings and Extinction Hymns and the creator of Cursed Morsels Press, about keeping horror weird, the immaculate Midwestern vibes in his work, anti-capitalist fiction, and what's next for Cursed Morsels. Eric also treats us to a reading of Heirlooms, a story from Extinction Hymns.Purchase Extinction Hymns on Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, or through the Brigids Gate Press website Visit Eric's author website - https://ericraglin.comCheck out ANTIFA SPLATTERPUNK, Shredded, and ProleSCARYet in the Cursed Morsels Press store - https://www.cursedmorselspress.comSupport the No Trouble at All anthology Kickstarter campaign - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cursedmorsels/no-trouble-at-allRead Eric's essay A Celebration of Sonic Horror, originally published in Nightmare Magazine - https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-a-celebration-of-sonic-horror/Find Eric on Twitter - @ericraglin1992Podcast intro - Music by The_Mountain from PixabayPodcast outro - Music by ComaStudio from PixabayTwitter - @HorrorMarginsFacebook - @HorrorInTheMarginsPodcastInstagram - @horrorinthemarginsTikTok - @horrorinthemarginsIf there's a movie you'd like us to review or a creator you'd like us to interview, send us an email at horrorinthemargins@gmail.com. We're happy to consider your suggestions. Stay spooky, Pod People. Podcast intro - Music by The_Mountain from PixabayPodcast outro - Music by ComaStudio from Pixabay

Valerie Valdes's work has been featured in Uncanny Magazine, Time Travel Short Stories and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel Chilling Effect was published by Harper Voyager in September 2019 and Orbit UK in February 2020, with starred reviews in Kirkus Reviews and Library Journal. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was also named one of Library Journal's best SF/fantasy novels of 2019. The trilogy is now complete with Prime Deceptions and Fault Tolerance. Her next novel, Where Peace Is Lost, is forthcoming in 2023. Valerie is co-editor of Escape Pod, and currently works as a freelance writer and copy editor. She is a graduate of the University of Miami and the Viable Paradise workshop and has taught classes and given lectures for Clarion West and Georgia State University. She has also served as a Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month since 2005. She lives in Georgia with her husband, children and cats. You can find her online at the links below. Website Twitter Instagram

L. Marie Wood is an award-winning dark fiction author, screenwriter, and poet with novels in the psychological horror, mystery, and dark romance genres. She won the Golden Stake Award for her novel The Promise Keeper. She is a MICO Award nominated screenwriter and has won Best Horror, Best Action, Best Afrofuturism/Horror/Sci-Fi, and Best Short Screenplay awards in both national and international film festivals. Wood's short fiction has been published in groundbreaking works, including the Bram Stoker Award Finalist anthology, Sycorax's Daughters and Slay: Stories of the Vampire Noire. Her academic writing has been published by Nightmare Magazine and the cross-curricular text, Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook. She is the founder of the Speculative Fiction Academy, an English and Creative Writing professor, a horror scholar, and a frequent speaker in the genre convention space. Learn more about L. Marie Wood at www.lmariewood.com SOREN LIT Podcast Producer and Founding Editor: Melodie J. Rodgers, MFA Website: sorenlit.com Email: sorenlit4women@gmail.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/melodie-rodgers/message

Books That Make You Dive into Dark Poetry October makes us want to revel in the spooky season, to think back to some of the more memorable dark poems, like Edgar Allen Poe's “The Raven”. Horror poetry can spark our imagination in the best ways, invigorate our love for things going bump in the night. Author and poet Stephanie M. Wytovich of the HWA (or, the Horror Writers Association), now celebrates a poetry showcase featuring poems from a variety of writers: the ideal read for this time of year, and beyond. The Horror Writers Associations' 9th Annual Poetry Showcase features the best in dark, never-before-published verse. Edited by Angela Yuriko Smith, this year's featured poets are Stephanie M. Wytovich, Geneve Flynn, and Naomi Simone Borwein, plus dozens of contributions from other talented members of the Horror Writers Association. Stephanie M. Wytovich is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her work has been published in multiple magazines and anthologies, such as “Nightmare Magazine”, “Weird Tales”, “Southwest Review”, “Year's Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 2”, “The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 8”, and others. Wytovich is the Poetry Editor for Raw Dog Screaming Press, and an adjunct at Southern New Hampshire University, Western Connecticut State University and Point Park University. She is a recipient of the 2021 Ladies of Horror Fiction Writers Grant, the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award, and has received the Rocky Wood Memorial Scholarship for non-fiction writing. Find out more on Books That Make You. You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Philip Fracassi is an award-winning author and screenwriter. His debut collection of stories, BEHOLD THE VOID, was named "Story Collection of the Year" by both This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine. LOCUS Magazine said it "...recalls the work of writers such as McCammon, King, and Bradbury." His second collection, BENEATH A PALE SKY, received a starred review from Library Journal, and Booklist called it a "must read collection."  His debut novel, BOYS IN THE VALLEY, premiered on Halloween, 2021, from Earthling Publications. His upcoming novels include A CHILD ALONE WITH STRANGERS (August 2022, Talos Press) and GOTHIC (February 2023, Cemetery Dance). His stories have appeared in multiple magazines and anthologies, including BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, BLACK STATIC, CEMETERY DANCE, and NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE. His work has been favorably reviewed by The New York Times, Rue Morgue Magazine, LOCUS Magazine and many others. His produced screenplays have been distributed by Lifetime Television and Disney Entertainment. Philip lives with his family in Los Angeles, California. You can follow Philip on Facebook, Instagram (pfracassi) and Twitter (@philipfracassi), or at his official website at www.pfracassi.com And for more about our host Lisa Kessler visit http://Lisa-Kessler.com Book Lights - shining a light on good books!

Episode 108 Philip Fracassi is an award-winning author and screenwriter. His debut collection of stories, BEHOLD THE VOID, was named "Story Collection of the Year" by both This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine. LOCUS Magazine said it "...recalls the work of writers such as McCammon, King, and Bradbury." His second collection, BENEATH A PALE SKY, received a starred review from Library Journal, and Booklist called it a "must read collection." In his introduction, Josh Malerman calls it "a book for the ages." It was named "Best Story Collection of the Year" by Rue Morgue Magazine. His debut novel, BOYS IN THE VALLEY, premiered on Halloween, 2021, from Earthling Publications. His upcoming novels include A CHILD ALONE WITH STRANGERS (August 2022, Talos Press) and GOTHIC (February 2023, Cemetery Dance). His stories have appeared in multiple magazines and anthologies, including BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR, BLACK STATIC, CEMETERY DANCE, and NIGHTMARE MAGAZINE. His work has been favorably reviewed by The New York Times, Rue Morgue Magazine, LOCUS Magazine and many others. His produced screenplays have been distributed by Lifetime Television and Disney Entertainment. Philip lives with his family in Los Angeles, California. You can follow Philip on Facebook, Instagram (pfracassi) and Twitter (@philipfracassi), or at his official website at www.pfracassi.com. https://pfracassi.com VOX VOMITUS: Sometimes, it's not what goes right in the writing process, it's what goes horribly wrong. And VOX VOMITUS has been going “horribly wrong” in the best way possible for the past TWO YEARS! Host Jennifer Anne Gordon, award-winning gothic horror novelist and Co-Host Allison Martine, award-winning contemporary romance novelist have taken on the top and emerging new authors of the day, including Josh Malerman (BIRDBOX, PEARL), Paul Tremblay (THE PALLBEARERS CLUB, SURVIVOR SONG), May Cobb (MY SUMMER DARLINGS, THE HUNTING WIVES), Amanda Jayatissa (MY SWEET GIRL), Carol Goodman (THE STRANGER BEHIND YOU), Meghan Collins (THE FAMILY PLOT), and dozens more in the last year alone. Pantsers, plotters, and those in between have talked everything from the “vomit draft” to the publishing process, dream-cast movies that are already getting made, and celebrated wins as the author-guests continue to shine all over the globe. www.jenniferannegordon.com www.afictionalhubbard.com https://www.facebook.com/VoxVomituspodcast https://twitter.com/VoxVomitus #voxvomitus #voxvomituspodcast #authorswhopodcast #authors #authorlife #authorsoninstagram #authorsinterviewingauthors #livevideopodcast #livepodcast #bookstagram #Jenniferannegordon #allisonmartinehubbard #allisonmartine #allisonhubbard #liveauthorinterview #livepodcast #books #voxvomituslivevideopodcast #Jennifergordon #SimonStephenson #PhillipFracassi #ChildAlonewithStrangers --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/voxvomitus/support

Teatime with Miss Liz coming to the table to share his T-E-A and his journey with his screenwriting horror stories and so much more is the one and only Philip Fracassi. A teatime you don't want to miss. Philip Fracassi - Screenwriter / Author September 29th, 7 pm EST LIVE SHOW Miss Liz's YouTube Channel Podcasting Stations around the Globe Philip Fracassi is the author of the award-winning story collection, Behold the Void, which won “Best Collection of the Year” from This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine. His newest collection, Beneath a Pale Sky, was published in 2021 by Lethe Press. It received a starred review from Library Journal, was named “Best Collection of the Year” by Rue Morgue Magazine, and was nominated for a Bram Stoker award. His novels include A Child Alone with Strangers, Gothic, and Boys in the Valley. Philip's books have been translated into multiple languages and his stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Dark Discoveries, and Cemetery Dance. The New York Times calls his work “terrifically scary.” As a screenwriter, his feature films have been distributed by Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Television. He currently has several stories under option for film/tv adaptation. Philip lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Elizabeth Copps at Copps Literary Services. Social Media Links: https://www.facebook.com/philipfracassi https://twitter.com/PhilipFracassi https://www.instagram.com/pfracassi Website: www.pfracassi.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/misslizsteatimes/message

Get your bell bottoms, your peace sign, your tie dye and your … crucifix!This week's guest is Gwendolyn Kiste and her new novel, Reluctant Immortals, transports us to San Francisco in 1968, the summer after the Summer of Love, when the sun is setting on the hippie movement. Into this chaos comes a quarter of iconic Gothic characters, ready to fight it out all over again.Like the book, the surface of this conversation belies its inner darkness. Yes we talk hippies. Yes we talk Haunted Hollywood. Yes we talk cheesy movies. But we also get into the horrific implications of vampires for sexual consent, the true hideous power of the patriarchy, and how women are weaponised against women.There is substantial conversation about domestic and sexual abuse in the second half of the conversation. Just a warning in case this is a problem for you. It's a tough conversation, but a good one.Enjoy!Reluctant Immortals is released in North America on August 23rd by and in the UK on November 22nd by Titan.Other books discussed in this episode include:Something Borrowed, Something Blood-soaked (2018), by Christa CarmenTo Be Devoured (2019), by Sarah TantlingerThe Rust Maidens (2018), by Gwendolyn Kiste“The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra's Diary)”, by Gwendolyn Kiste, Nightmare Magazine, issue 86, (2019)“The Woman Out of the Attic, by Gwendolyn Kiste, in Haunted House Short Stories (2019)Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998), by Peter BiskindSupport Talking Scared on PatreonCome talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com Support the show

Gwendolyn Kiste is the three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, Boneset & Feathers, And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and The Invention of Ghosts. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor's Nightfire, Black Static, The Dark, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, and LampLight, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com.  BUY Reluctant Immortals (OUT NOW!) Link to "The Eight People Who Murdered Me" by Gwendolyn Kiste at Nightmare Magazine Recommended in this episode: Le Femme Grotesque Up Next: A special episode dedicated to Nichelle Nichols    Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.    Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission.

A man is haunted by malevolent ghosts of his family's past. Part 2 of 2. “Wet Pain” by Terence Taylor originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine. Support Afflicted at http://bit.ly/supportafflicted (bit.ly/supportafflicted). Listen to Someone Dies in This Elevator: https://someone-dies-in-this-elevator.pinecast.co/ (someone-dies-in-this-elevator.pinecast.co) A transcript is available on the NIGHTLIGHT website. Narrated by Matt Peters. Produced by Tonia Ransom. Executive Producer and Host: http://toniaransom.com/ (Tonia Ransom) ***** All episodes are brought to you by the NIGHTLIGHT Legion. Join us on https://www.patreon.com/nightlightpod (Patreon) for as little as $1 per month to help us produce more stories for you to enjoy. ******

A man is haunted by malevolent ghosts of his family's past. Part 2 of 2. “Wet Pain” by Terence Taylor originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine. Support Afflicted at bit.ly/supportafflicted. Listen to Someone Dies in This Elevator: someone-dies-in-this-elevator.pinecast.co A transcript is available on the NIGHTLIGHT website. Narrated by Matt Peters. Produced by Tonia Ransom. Executive Producer and Host: Tonia Ransom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A man is haunted by malevolent ghosts of his family's past. Part 1 of 2. “Wet Pain” by Terence Taylor originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine. A transcript is available on the NIGHTLIGHT website. Narrated by Matt Peters. Produced by Jen Zink and Tonia Ransom. Executive Producer and Host: http://toniaransom.com/ (Tonia Ransom) ***** All episodes are brought to you by the NIGHTLIGHT Legion. Join us onhttps://www.patreon.com/nightlightpod ( )https://www.patreon.com/nightlightpod (Patreon) for as little as $1 per month to help us produce more stories for you to enjoy. ******

A man is haunted by malevolent ghosts of his family's past. Part 1 of 2. “Wet Pain” by Terence Taylor originally appeared in Nightmare Magazine. A transcript is available on the NIGHTLIGHT website. Narrated by Matt Peters. Produced by Jen Zink and Tonia Ransom. Executive Producer and Host: Tonia Ransom Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Words of Power by Wendy N. Wagner. Narrated by J.S. Arquin. Featuring an afterword by Wendy N. Wagner.    Kádár scrutinized the flake of clay on the blade of the screwdriver. "He's just getting too old to be a war truck," she said. "Look at this clay. The logos barely flickers in it." Zugsführer Warren spat on the packed earthen floor of the machine house. "You know I can't see that magic shit," he growled. "And it wouldn't matter if I did. An order is an order, Gefreiter Kádár, and the Oberst needs every last golem out on the field." The small woman wiped the screwdriver clean on her shirt tail and restrained a sigh. There was no point arguing with the big American; if anyone was a stickler for following orders, it was the Zugsführer. They'd butted heads before, and Kádár had come away with a headache. She stroked the pitted side of the golem. Even the Amero-Hungarian state seal, painted on each of its shoulders, looked worn out. "Poor old Benchley." "You name them?" She didn't bother glancing at Warren. Instead, she studied the dull gray places where the field operators had patched the injured clay. She narrowed her eyes. "This patch clay is shit," she growled. "Even the clay I used to convert him from a fighting man to a war truck was better than this, and I wouldn't have used that crap to make a singing tea pot."   Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of Nightmare Magazine and the managing/senior editor of Lightspeed. Her short stories, essays, and poems run the gamut from horror to environmental literature. Her longer work includes the novella The Secret Skin, the horror novel The Deer Kings,  the Locus bestselling SF eco-thriller An Oath of Dogs,  and two novels for the Pathfinder role-playing game. She lives in Oregon with her very understanding family, two large cats, and a Muppet disguised as a dog. https://winniewoohoo.com/ Twitter: @wnwager facebook.com/wendynwagner   This is the final episode of The Overcast. Thank you so much for listening and for all of your support over the past 7 years!    Until we meet again... Keep dreaming,                                 J.S. Arquin  

On this episode we are thrilled to have author Jo Kaplan aka Joanna Parypinski. Jo is the author of more than twenty short stories and several novels, co-chair of the LA chapter of the Horror Writers Association, and an English professor. She also writes under the name Joanna Parypinski. Her fiction has appeared in Fireside Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Vastarien, Nightscript, Haunted Nights (ed. Ellen Datlow & Lisa Morton), and Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthology Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors. She lives with her husband and cats in Los Angeles.We ask Jo the reason for the two names and chat about the general use of pseudonyms by women in the horror genre. This moves us on to the topic of the exciting rise of diverse prospectives in horror.We talk about the writing and enjoyment of Horror Poetry; how it creates an excellent venue to plumb the darkness in ways different and maybe more effective than a short story or novel. Particularly, the power of imagery and symbolism to create pieces that literally haunt the reader.We talk about her short story, In Dark Corner and Neglected Places which appears in Three Crows Year Two: Anthology of Weird Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the broader topic of folklore and diverse cultural viewpoints in horror.Jo tells us about the reoccurring theme that has prevalent in most of her writing and gives us some deep things to consider. In discussing her soon-to-be-released novel, When the Night Bells Ring, we explore the responsibility of the horror genre to address existential horrors such as climate change and deadly pandemics.Jo reads to us from her short story, Her. House. that can be found in Horror Library 7.Jo Kaplan can be found at: https://jo-kaplan.com/When the Night Bells Ring can be preordered here. https://jo-kaplan.com/2021/11/20/when-the-night-bells-ring/Her. House. can be found here: http://www.darkmoonbooks.com/Horror_Library_7.htmlBrenda is here: https://brendatolian.com/Brenda's new book Blood Mountain is available here: https://rawdogscreaming.com/cover-reveal-blood-mountain/Joy is here: https://www.joyyehle.com/Other Links:Thirteen Nocturnes by Oliver Sheppard  https://amzn.to/3GQn7XSUnicorn: the poetry of Angela Carter https://amzn.to/3zeCPdHExposed Nerves by Lucy A Snyder https://amzn.to/3MoujLP**When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission that will be used to continue to bring our audience great horror content. *Disclaimer: Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by the Podcasters. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an **When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.*Disclaimer: Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by the Podcasters. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the podcast does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the podcasters.

Ahoy-hoy Abyss listners! Join the gang as they learn the secrets of basket weaving and poetry when discussing Eden Royce's Sweetgrass Blood, which can be found in Nightmare Magazine. Before that, they dive into the Brian Keene universe with Terminal and The Seven, check out Steve Stred's Incarnate, The Night Trade by Barry Eisler, finish up Nightmare Alley from William Lindsay Gresham, and Impact Winter by Travis Beacham. https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/sweetgrass-blood/

Authors : Donyae Coles, Mary Berman and Kat Day Narrators : Cherrae L. Stuart, Suna Dasi and Katherine Inskip Host : M. M. Schill Audio Producer : Marty Perrett Discuss on Forums “Sometimes Boys Don’t Know” was originally published in the July 2021 issue of Nightmare Magazine. “Human Body as Compendium” is a PseudoPod original. […]

I know it's the middle of winter but this week the book in question is taking us back to summer. And not our current plague-summer – but the halcyon days of 1989. Think kids on bikes, running wild, fights and first loves, demonic deer gods … wait … what?Our guest, Wendy N. Wagner is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Nightmare Magazine, and the author of epic coming-of-age horror The Deer Kings, as well as the ‘Sawmill Gothic', The Secret Skin. We talk about both books and how Wendy has transposed both the classic British Gothic and the traditional New England small-town horror story to a Pacific Northwest setting.Bigfoot doesn't even show his face.We talk about the fervid popularity of coming-of-age horror right now, we plumb the dark, seamy underbelly of rural Oregon, we compare notes on the small towns of our childhoods, and I have the temerity to ask Wendy the best way to get published in Nightmare. There is even doughnut chat. Enjoy!Books discussed in this episode include: The Shadow Year (2008), by Jeffrey FordIT, by Stephen King (1986)Boy's Life, by Robert McCammon (1991)Summer of Night, by Dan Simmons (1991)Harvest Home (1973), by Thomas TryonFriday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (1990), by H.G. BissingerSupport Talking Scared on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/TalkingScaredPodCome talk books on Twitter @talkscaredpod, on Instagram, and TikTok Or email direct to talkingscaredpod@gmail.com Download Novellic on Google Play or Apple Store.

This week in the Abyss, we're discussing Greater Ventriloquist Jon Padgett's recently published short story, "Flight 389," from Nightmare Magazine Issue 109, and its larger connections to Padgett's work, particularly "20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism." Before we get into all, though, we talk a bit about Catriona Ward's Last House on Needless Street, The Ghosts of Who You Were by Christopher Golden, Joseph Fink's middle grade horror book, The Halloween Moon, Dune, the Shudder Exclusive V/H/S/94, and the debut issue of the ComiXology Original We Have Demons by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo. (Recorded Oct. 10, 2021) Follow Staring Into The Abyss on Twitter: @intostaring Read or listen to "Flight 389" online at Nightmare Magazine: https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/flight-389/

Ben has spent the month of October doing a deep dive into literary horror fiction magazines. He presents his findings to a disinterested Nate.Featuring: Unnerving Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Dark Magazine, and Boneyard Soup.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/WABPod)

"“Please help . . .” His voice was faint, but it was there."   Avoid the roads at night and keep your wits about you for "58 Rules to Ensure Your Husband Loves You Forever" (2019) by Rafeeat Aliyu. It's a deep dark story that asks: what are you willing to do (to someone else) for love? And it's a little gross.    Read the story at Nightmare Magazine: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/58-rules-to-ensure-your-husband-loves-you-forever/ Read more from Rafeeat Aliyu: https://www.rafeeataliyu.com/publications/ -- * Theme: Magical Transition by Kevin McLeod * Additional music and sound effects from zapsplat.com

Johan Wanloo och Magnus Dahl har läst Rhianna "Terry Pratchetts dotter" Pratchetts soloäventyr "Crystal of Storms". Var den bra? Är det ens kul att spela bokrollspel? Skriver hon som sin farsa? Hur coolt är det med flygande öar? Hade huvudpersonen en cykel eller en ryggsäck? Lyssna så får du veta. I nästa LÄS HÅRT... ... tar Magnus och Johan tempen på Gregory Kerns "Cap Kennedy"-böcker. Brittisk scifi från 70-talet! Magnus läser "Vansinnesdrogen" och Johan "Fientlig värld". Tack på förhand till Måns Malm! Annat som nämns T. Kingfisher "Paladin's Strength", Magnus twittertråd om böcker han inte köpt, Science Fiction-bokhandeln, Marie Kondo, "Blueberry", Peter Bagge, "Sex and the City", Lee Child, Martin Luuk, Catherine Burns "The Visitors", Iain Reid, George RR Martin, Robert Jordan, Katherine Addison "The Goblin Emperor", Don Maitz, Jody Lee, "King Ralph", vårt avsnitt om "The Haunting of Tram Car 015", SA Chakraborty "City of Brass", EA Petricone "We, the Girls Who Did Not Make It", Nightmare Magazine, Mark Lawrence "The Liar's Key", Stephen King, HP Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq, iOS-appen Fighting Fantasy Classics, Ian Livingstone "Island of the Lizard King", Terry Pratchett, Joe Hill, Magnus recension av Peter Glas "Bärstenskyssen", Lotta Lotass, Johan Wanloos "Domedagsvikingen", Mattias Lejbrink, LÄS HÅRTs avsnitt om "Domedagsvikingen", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", BBC Radio-dokumentär om Fighting Fantasy, forumtråd om Scholastics nyutgivning av Fighting Fantasy

Author Jessica Guess (Cirque Berserk) joins us in the Abyss to discuss Gwendolyn Kiste's feminist recontextualization of Dracula's first victim in the short story, "The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra's Diary)." We also discuss Brandon Cronenberg's feature film Possessor and why Matt is so afraid of Cool Whip, Ronald Malfi's latest novella Mr. Cables, the works of Christopher Pike and RL Stine, and the folk horror novel The Five Turns of the Wheel by Stephanie Ellis. (Recorded Nov. 15, 2020) "The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra's Diary)" can be read online at Nightmare Magazine. The theme music, "Insidious," was created by Purple Planet Music and is used here under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com Follow Staring Into The Abyss on Twitter: @intostaring 

Eric Shapiro is just one of those guys I could sit down at a bar with and converse about anything. Our conversation stared with Red Dennis then shifted to several other topics, including gun rights and creating films. Eric also co-owns and writes for The Milpitas Beat, the local newspaper in Milpitas California.   Eric Shapiro is a writer and filmmaker. Called "the next Philip K. Dick" by author Kealan Patrick Burke, Shapiro is the author of six critically acclaimed fiction books, among them the novella "It's Only Temporary" (2005), which appeared on Nightmare Magazine's list of the Top 100 Horror Books, and numerous short stories published in anthologies alongside work by H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, and many others. His nonfiction articles have been published on The Daily Dot, Ravishly, and The Good Men Project. His first feature film, "Rule of 3" (2010), won awards at the Fantasia International Film Festival and Shriekfest, and had its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest. His second feature film, "Living Things" (2014), was endorsed by PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals) and distributed by Cinema Libre Studio. In 2015, he won the 19th Annual Fade In Award for Thriller Screenplays. He was a founding partner of Ghostwriters Central, a writing and editing firm which has received positive notices from The Wall Street Journal, Consumers Digest, and the TV program "Intelligence For Your Life." Eric has edited works published on The Huffington Post and Forbes, as well as two Bram Stoker Award-nominated novels. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Rhoda, and their two sons. https://www.diywriter.com/post/episode-46-politics-gun-control-violence-and-solving-the-world-s-problems-with-eric-shapiro   https://milpitasbeat.com/author/eric-shapiro/ https://www.amazon.com/Eric-Shapiro/e/B007167ZP4

This week, we discussing killing Scott Kemper, the Shudder Exclusive films Impetigore and Host, Laurel Hightower's novella Crossroads, The Patience of a Dead Man by Michael Clark, the recently re-released '80s classic cinema horror anthology Silver Scream, and the latest release in John F.D. Taff's The Fearing! Then, we take a deep dive into Alyssa Wong's short story, "Hunger Daughters of Starving Mothers." (Recorded Aug. 9, 2020) You can read Wong's story for free online at Nightmare Magazine: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/hungry-daughters-of-starving-mothers/ The theme music, "Insidious," was created by Purple Planet Music and is used here under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com Follow Staring Into The Abyss on Twitter: @intostaring 

This week on Staring Into the Abyss, we're talking about Willem Dafoe, The House that Jack Built, Hunter Shea's Misfits, Star Wars books, and Ju-On: Origins. Then, it's on to our spoiler-filled discussion of our story of the week as we take a deep dive into "Houses Under the Sea," by Caitlin R. Kiernan. (Recorded June 28, 2020.) You can read "Houses Under the Sea" online at Nightmare Magazine! http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/houses-under-the-sea/ The theme music, "Insidious," was created by Purple Planet Music and is used here under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. Music: https://www.purple-planet.com Follow Staring Into The Abyss on Twitter: @intostaring 

Eric Shapiro is a writer and filmmaker. Called "the next Philip K. Dick" by author Kealan Patrick Burke, Shapiro is the author of six critically acclaimed fiction books, among them the novella "It's Only Temporary" (2005), which appeared on Nightmare Magazine's list of the Top 100 Horror Books, and numerous short stories published in anthologies alongside work by H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, and many others. His nonfiction articles have been published on The Daily Dot, Ravishly, and The Good Men Project. His first feature film, "Rule of 3" (2010), won awards at the Fantasia International Film Festival and Shriekfest, and had its U.S. premiere at Fantastic Fest. His second feature film, "Living Things" (2014), was endorsed by PETA (People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals) and distributed by Cinema Libre Studio. In 2015, he won the 19th Annual Fade In Award for Thriller Screenplays. He was a founding partner of Ghostwriters Central, a writing and editing firm which has received positive notices from The Wall Street Journal, Consumers Digest, and the TV program "Intelligence For Your Life." Eric has edited works published on The Huffington Post and Forbes, as well as two Bram Stoker Award-nominated novels. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Rhoda, and their two sons. His latest release, Red Dennis, can be found at: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53528309-red-dennis

Ever wondered who Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" about? Have you ever noticed LGBTQ+ coding (positive or negative) in your favorite science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories? What do the past and future look like for LGBTQ+ genre writers? We talk about it with author & publisher at Queen of Swords Press, Catherine Lundoff. There's a LOT to unpack here, but we got a good start! Might need a part 2 on this one... or part 3... check the notes below for contact info & links to Catherine Lundoff's excellent articles on the history of LGBTQ+ speculative fiction.CATHERINE LUNDOFF: https://catherinelundoff.net/ QUEEN OF SWORDS PRESS: https://queenofswordspress.com/ + @QoSPress on TwitterCatherine's article on Queer SFF/F/H pre-1970: https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/11/guest-post-catherine-lundoff-on-lgbt-science-fiction-and-fantasy-before-1970/Catherine's article on Queer SFF/F/H 1970-2010: https://www.queerscifi.com/tag/out-of-the-past/Catherine's piece on Queer Horror from Nightmare Magazine: http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Nightmare_37_October_2015.pdfFollow GlitchyPancakes on Twitter @GlitchyPancakes. Send email suggestions to CakesPod@gmail.com. Thanks for listening!

Hey Class.  This week we have John Langan on to talk about the 1996 Larry Fessenden directed flick Habit.  John and Tyler talk really smart about the movie in relation to Mark Fisher and many of the concepts that he pioneered. Mike just tries to keep up! Connect with Tyler and Mike at: The Horror Pod Class Facebook Group Signal Horizon on Facebook and Twitter Mike D on Goodreads The Signal Horizon Patreon Page Find John Langan on Facebook and his website, Mr. Gaunt.  Before we started our discussion Tyler talked about another Fessenden directed movie Depraved which comes out September 13th.  Here is his review.   John discussed Memento Mori which we reviewed and The Spectacle of the Void.     The Dark Corner of the Web is John's short story The Underground Economy published in Nightmare Magazine   We then discuss the work of Mark Fisher in relationship to the movie Habit. We discuss his concepts of Hauntology, The Weird, and The Eerie.   We didn't get to it but there is a great audio essay on the eerie that you can listen to.   Ghost Dog has some stuff to say about the movie.  

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.

This week, Arm Cast: Dead Sexy Podcast host Armand Rosamilia chats with Gwendolyn Kiste She's the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe, the dark fantasy novella Pretty Marys All in a Row and her debut novel The Rust Maidens. Her short fiction has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Shimmer, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Interzone, LampLight, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye as well as Flame Tree Publishing’s Chilling Horror Short Stories anthology, among others. Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, two cats, and not nearly enough ghosts.

Unstrap Your Feet by Emma Osborne     The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles. I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door. You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage. “Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?” You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down.   [Full story after the cut.]     Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 60! This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original, "Unstrap Your Feet" by Emma Osborne and a poem, "The Librarian" by Rae White. Both pieces are part of the new 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 with queer characters, Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts is an amazing listen. The story features a colony ship having power problems and some internal unrest. Our protagonist, Aster, is a brilliant scientist and doctor trapped in an extremely socially and racially segregated society. The book also deals with non-neurotypicality, intersex, and fluid/questioning gender identity. An Unkindness of Ghosts is part mystery, part colony ship drama, and part coming of age story (though it is not YA). Rivers has amazing prose, and the narration in this audio book sets it off wonderfully. To download An Unkindness of Ghosts for free today, go to www.audibletrial.com/glittership — or choose another book if you're in the mood for something else. There are content warnings on this episode for a very, very sexy poem and descriptions of domestic emotional abuse in "Unstrap Your Feet."     Rae White is a non-binary poet, writer, and zinester living in Brisbane. Their poetry collection Milk Teeth won the 2017 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize and is published by the University of Queensland Press. Rae’s poem ‘what even r u?’ placed second in the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Rae’s poetry has been published in Meanjin Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, Overland, Rabbit, and others.     The Librarian by Rae White     locked in ∞ nostalgia after dark ∞ thumb throughfavourites: nin-like erotica ∞ with storms simulatinghunger, flirting & fireworks, cruise shipkisses ∞ here, every heel click is echo-church, like the ruckus I make atfunerals ∞ every movement casts my shadow: spellsspilling over bookshelves ∞ I’m not trapped, I havea key ∞ but I stay curled in the wickerchair ∞ waiting for echo-click of ribs and what remains ∞ the flossedfragments of my midnight ghost with her yawn-widekiss & skinless skull ∞ her cartilage grip & gasp & pelvicbone clasped tight to my thigh ∞ her shiver-glitches, eachmore grating & copper-tasting than the last ∞ her brittlepushes as she groans ∞ against my knuckled hand ∞ I tastesoot & swordfish later ∞ I press herbetween folds of wildflower books & singtimidly of the moon as she sleeps       Emma Osborne is a queer fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Emma’s writing has appeared in Shock Totem, Apex Magazine, Queers Destroy Science Fiction, Pseudopod, the Review of Australian Fiction and the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror, and has fiction forthcoming at Nightmare Magazine. A proud member of Team Arsenic, Emma is a graduate of the 2016 Clarion West Writers Workshop. Emma is a former first reader at Clarkesworld Magazine, and current first reader at Arsenika. Emma currently lives in Melbourne, drinking all of the coffee and eating all of the food, but has a giant crush on Seattle and turns up under the shadow of the mountain at every opportunity. You can find Emma on Twitter at @redscribe.     Unstrap Your Feet by Emma Osborne     The mud on your legs covers you from knees to toes so I can’t quite tell where the soft leather of your boots meets your flesh until blood blooms from your ankles. I offer you wine. You take a long sip and hand me back the glass as you unstrap your feet. Your hooves shine as you toss your humanity into a pile by the door. You sniff the air. You take in the saffron, the lemon, the scorch of sage. “Darling,” you say. “I thought I told you I was sick of fish?” You did, but that was a year ago and I thought we’d come around to it again. My eyes linger on your slim patterns. They’re thin like a doe’s legs; one good crack with a cricket bat would bring you down. “I want to eat something warm-blooded,” you say, as you divest yourself of your coat, your scarf. “Ribs. A steak. Liver.” You smell of honey and rosemary; honey for sweetness and rosemary for fidelity, remembrance and luck. I wonder how long it’ll take to re-make dinner. Too long. My fingers tangle in my pocket, deep down where you shouldn’t be able to see. Maybe I can talk you around. Your eyes sketch over my shoulder, my elbow. You can see the tension in my muscles, can map my posture and my heart rate and you know that my nails are digging into my palms nearly before I feel the skin split. “We’ll order something,” I say, but it’s risky to have something delivered to the door when you’ve taken off your feet. Once, somebody saw, and then they didn’t ever see anything again. There’s still a stain in the laundry that I can’t scrub away.  You pause for a moment, just for the pulse of a few seconds, but it’s enough for my stomach to plunge and my mind to spin out infinite possibilities. The end of each thread is a broken finger or a pair of shattered wine glasses or just a cool, detached look that I’ll turn over and over in my head at night, knowing that despite our vows, sealed with blood and smoke and iron, you’ve decided that you’re going to have to kill me after all. “Fine,” you say, “anything but pizza.” These are the kinds of conversations that normal people have, every night, every month, with wrinkled brows and hunched shoulders and with a creased blazer hung up for another weary tomorrow. You take your time in the shower while I call for dinner. With any luck you’ll stay there, or in the bedroom, until the delivery comes. I’ve decided on BBQ from the place three streets away. They don’t ask questions if we order mostly meat, although I add a couple of sides—mac and cheese and some fries—for show. When the food arrives, I take care to open the door only a few inches, to take the bags and construct a “Thanks!” and to give a reassuring smile. I can hear you clattering around in the kitchen. I can nearly hear you scowling at the unwanted fish, scraped into a bowl for me to eat tomorrow. I plate up dinner and you join me at the table with your canines glinting. I would have thought you’d have dull herbivore teeth, what with the hooves, but you have your father’s jawline, his bite. Sometimes I run my tongue over my own teeth, fearful that they’re sharpening and wondering what it would mean if they did. The food smells glorious, though I’m the only one who eats the sides. The mac and cheese is chewy and rich and creamy and I savor every bite after a diet so heavy in meat. “Tell me about your day,” I say, nibbling on a forkful of pulled pork. I don’t care, not really, but it’s one of the only ways I can get news of the outside world on an ordinary, everyday level. The news is good for broad strokes, but I don’t get to hear about the lavender blooming in Mrs. Dancy’s yard or the color of the sky in midwinter dusk. You’re in a good mood from the food so you appease me with small stories whilst you tear rich, fatty meat from a rib-bone. You’ve got a smear of sauce on your chin. The scent of hickory smoke has soaked into your skin. When I remember the days I had dared to drag my fingers through your hair, I tamp down a shudder and wonder if your budding horns rasp more like bones or fingernails. Our wedding feast was nothing like this, but I suppose I’d always known you had secrets. Still, the feast was glorious and fine, a celebration for the ages. Oh, that night. We’d hoisted my mother’s crystal and downed the finest champagne after the ceremony under the oak tree. My father was in charge of speeches and keeping cups full. Your mother roasted us a pair of swans. We ate them with silver forks and our fingers. There were charred potatoes and glass jars full of honey and red apples baked into pies. Bowls of cherries as bright as blood dotted the groaning tables and the air was heavy with the scent of roasted figs. I hadn’t known then that your feet came off. I’d only known that your smile made my heart bloom like a blushing rose and that your kisses tasted of jasmine. Your father was in charge of the music, and soon enough everyone was spinning, dancing, stamping to his wild fiddle, all red-faced and heaving, their legs shaking as they gasped for breath. I was happy that night. Sometimes I think I can still smell it, as if happiness is a hint of perfume saved in a handkerchief that I’ve tucked into the pocket of an old coat. You’re finished with your food so I load the dishwasher. I used to like washing the dishes by hand and carefully wiping them clean with my favorite faded red dishtowel, but we both agreed that the dishwasher is better for the environment. It’s curious, the things you care about. I try not to make any unnecessary noise as we wind down the hours before bed. Sometimes I can get away with reading on the couch for a few hours. If I’m almost entirely still, your eyes skip over me when you’re restlessly roaming the house, your hooves clacking on the floorboards. I tried to get out once. I still have the scars on my ribs from your teeth. I try not to care what you are doing, but tonight in the basement it involves knives and the squeal of metal on metal. I can’t help but look up when you walk past the lounge room, your muscled arms popping with excited veins, your face flushed, your hair a mess. Our eyes meet. I’m usually more careful than that, and look away, but this time I smile in my panic. You smile back, delighted. All I can see is your teeth. I used to be so much bigger, so much more. I had dreams and loves and fancies; my heart was spun sugar and grace. That me is dead now, my delicate heart crushed. You have eroded me like a hard rain erodes a mountain: bit by bit; thousands of tiny strikes. You’re cooking something in the kitchen that smells like apples and roasted flesh. It’s rare enough for you to do so, and anxiety tightens my chest as I wonder what it means. I try to tune it out, to hold my breath, but the house is full of the smell. When you finally call me to bed, I slide a marker into my book. The pages are sharp on my fingertips. “Goodnight, darling,” you breathe into my ear after you’ve kissed me. “Goodnight,” I say, my eyes squeezed shut in the dark. You know the catch of my breath when it hitches; you know the sound of my tears as they track down my cheeks. I’ve learned to lie flat and still under the smoke-gray blankets, to move only when necessary, to not roll. When I was young, I’d sleep carelessly, roaming about the bed like a slumbering explorer, one leg out at an angle and with an open palm up to the sky. These days it’s all straight lines and aching bones from a lack of shift. Most nights, I don’t sleep. Not until you’ve gotten up and strapped your feet back on and gone into the world. When the sun peeps through the curtains and I’m sure you’ve gotten clear of the house I collapse onto the couch, tuck a blanket around me. The bed reminds me of nothing but cold misery. Soon you’ll be home again, and we’ll feast again, smile carefully at each other over bone-white plates and French cutlery with scarlet handles. I spend the rest of the day cleaning with vinegar and lemons. I square your sharpened tools away, grant symmetry to the house. I listen to news radio as I tidy, desperate for the sound of another human voice. Sometimes I write on scraps of paper, on anything that will take my mark. I write about me and you, and I am sure that it reads like a fairy tale, or a biblical nightmare, or perhaps something stitched together from their forgotten parts. I can’t risk you finding my words. When I have covered every scrap of surface with truths I place the paper on my tongue, pulp it with my dull human teeth, and devour us. I check my body over in the shower when I make it under the hot water in the sun-bright afternoon. My scars are days old, weeks old, a hundred years old. There’s nothing poking through my scalp yet, and my feet are just feet. You are the one who changed. This evening when you come home you’re carrying something in a leather satchel that smells of blood and beeswax. You hold my eye with a wild smile as you snap it open. Inside is a new pair of feet. I know them because they’re my feet, right down to the cracked heels and the crooked little toes. “These are for you,” you say, measuring my calves with your eyes and squinting at my shoes. “Now that you’re ready.” Your eyes are sharp, loving, sparking like struck flint. What did I do to make you think that this is what I wanted? My face twists into a grimace that you mistake for a smile. I take the feet. You grin like the sun coming up and slip past me into the kitchen. I merely stand, horrified but absently holding the feet that I could use to walk outside. When you return, you’re holding a small plate heavy with warmed-up dark meat and pale apple flesh. “Baked apples, lungs, and liver, with plenty of butter,” you say. The fruit of temptation. Organs of the breath and soul. Milk and meat. So that’s what you were cooking. I know my legends well enough to know that eating from this plate will change me forever. I gently place my new feet near the door next to yours and take up the silver fork. “Let me,” you say. The last time I saw your face this bright was under the light of a thousand fireflies on our wedding day. Refusing you has always been an impossibility. You ease a slice of liver into my mouth. As I chew I feel my calves split like an inseam. I thought it would hurt when my old feet slid off, but you kneel before me and tug my ankles and look, they’re free and loose and bloody. It smells like a slaughterhouse in here. Blood and sharpness. You must hold me upright as I kick out of my old feet. My new hooves haven’t hardened yet; they’re still feathery and glistening from their birth. There’s bile in my throat and I can only hope you put my wild pulse down to excitement. You ease me onto the couch with your strong arms and kiss my forehead. I’m panicking, but I hold myself as still as I can. What have I become? What will I become? I am nauseous but suddenly terribly hungry, for meat and flowers and fresh air. I scuff my hooves on the floor. You trace the rubbery feathers with a loving fingertip. In an hour, maybe two, my hooves will be firm and ready to encase in their disguise of flesh, and the two of us will leave the house, together. “Darling,” you say, “What do you feel like eating?” You clasp my fingers, too tight. “Whatever you want,” I whisper, trying desperately to keep my voice steady. You look so happy. I’ve gotten everything wrong, everything. Yes, I will walk outside, and yes I will lift a neighbor’s rose to my eager inhale, but you will be there beside me every single second. I laugh, unable to contain my tears. Now it’s the whole world. The whole world is my cage. We go.   END   “The Librarian” is copyright Rae White 2018. “Unstrap Your Feet” is copyright Emma Osborne 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 pick 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 "To Touch the Sun Before it Fades" by Aimee Ogden.

Hey Class This one is gonna be a fun one.  Strap in and get ready for Gendered Violence and The Autopsy of Jane Doe What are we Reading Tyler is reading Best Horror of the Year Volume 8 (Specifically in a Canyon in a Cavern).  He is also watching Tag a Japanese horror film.  He also discusses this article from Kotaku about NPCs. Mike is reading Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado Review.  Check out our review.  He is also really excited about A Peoples Future of the United States.  Both guys talk about Tananrive Due and how awesome she is.  Which also leads them to discuss Levar Burton's retweets about Roots and Star Trek.   Also Mike hates Manifest.  Our TV critic is lukewarm about it.   Dark Corners of the Web comes from Nightmare Magazine and really cool take on the La Llorona myth by SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA called Lacrimosa.  Read it here.     Bell Rings.   Watch these series of shorts by Innuendo Studios about Gendered Violence and Mad Max Fury Road.  They are truly awesome and a must for the conversation we are about to have.   Tyler discusses Carol J. Clover's seminal work about the Final Girl,  Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.  

Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author. She wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, the nonfiction book Shooting Yourself in the Head for Fun and Profit: A Writer’s Survival Guide, and the collections While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Scary Out There, Seize the Night, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. Snyder is featured in the newest anthology Tales From The Lake Volume 5 from Crystal Lake Publishing.  Theme music for Madame Perry's Salon composed and performed by Denton Perry. Authors! Need to promote your book but can't afford a publicist? Get Sell Your Books Todayright now!  As a seasoned entertainment publicist I know exactly what insider info you need to get your books to the world!

This week is a short but exciting episode as Arm Cast: Dead Sexy Podcast host Armand Rosamilia talks with Lucy A. Snyder She is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning writer and is the author of a dozen books. Her work has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives in Columbus, Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. 

Hope you like jokes about Willy Denzey, because this week we're talking about the short story "Horror Story" by Carmen Maria Machado and the 2017 Belgian film "The Mansion". Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Carmen Maria Machado - Horror Story (via Nightmare Magazine)

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.  

This week, we chat about serial killer memorabilia and discuss Caspian Gray's short story "Kylie Land" and the 2016 film "Train to Busan". Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Caspian Gray - Kylie Land (via Nightmare Magazine)

Empty your caskets and put on your smiles - this week, we talk about the short story "Sleep Paralysis" by Dale Bailey and the 1994 film "Cemetery Man". Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Dale Bailey - Sleep Paralysis (via Nightmare Magazine)

No dads allowed this week, as we cover two tales of anti-dad rural horror - "Different Angels" by Lynda E. Rucker, and the 1984 film "Children of the Corn". Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Lynda E. Rucker - Different Angels (via Nightmare Magazine

Nino is a queer and nonbinary/transgender writer. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has written fiction, essays, plays, screenplays, comics, radio features, and many rabble-rousing emails. They have also performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nightmare Magazine, Tor.com,Cicada, Fireside Fiction, Liminal Stories, and other fine venues. One time, an angry person on the internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty cool. You can find them online at ninocipri.com

In this podcast Livia Llewellyn talks about long vs short fiction, bad writing advice, horror misconceptions, and much more. About Livia Llewellyn Livia Llewellyn is an award-winning writer of horror, dark fantasy and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Engines of Desire: Tales … Continue reading

In this podcast Livia Llewellyn talks about Furnace, childhood dreams, managing distractions, and much more. About Livia Llewellyn Livia Llewellyn is an award-winning writer of horror, dark fantasy and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Subterranean, Apex Magazine, Postscripts, Nightmare Magazine, as well as numerous anthologies. Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other … Continue reading

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 43 for August 20, 2017. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. It's a little bit late (oops!) but we finally have the Summer 2017 issue of GlitterShip available for you to read and enjoy! As before, all of the stories will be podcast and posted on the website over the next couple of months. However, if you'd like to get a head start reading the stories and support GlitterShip, you can purchase copies of the Summer 2017 issue on Amazon, Nook, or right here at GlitterShip.com. Looking forward, the GlitterShip Year One anthology is now available via Amazon, and Barnes & Noble in both print and electronic editions, as well as for direct purchase CreateSpace(print) and GlitterShip.com/buy (electronic)—which also means that copies will FINALLY go out to the people who so generously supported the GlitterShip Kickstarter way back in 2015. Today, we have a GlitterShip original short story by Matthew Bright, as well as a poem by Charles Payseur. Content warning for "In Search of Stars" - some sex and mild domestic violence.   Charles Payseur is an avid reader, writer, and reviewer of all things speculative. His fiction and poetry have appeared at Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, The Book Smugglers, and many more. He runs Quick Sip Reviews, contributes as short fiction specialist at Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together and can be found drunkenly reviewing Goosebumps on his Patreon. You can find him gushing about short fiction (and occasionally his cats) on Twitter as @ClowderofTwo.     becoming, c.a. 2000 by Charles Payseur   he gives himself to the internet a piece at a time, in chatrooms and message boards and fandom pages, like burning prayers for the next life. he finds himself there as cronus must have found his children, a terrifying future fully formed and armored that he is desperate to consume.   every day he leans into his screen, close enough to brush his lips against the humming glass, feels the snap of static on skin, and pulls away diminished, the sum of his parts no longer quite equaling the whole. he asks friends what they think but all of them are online now, scattered like ghosts, a great ocean of scared boys in nice houses and with each question, each reassurance, each word of a language they build to map their desires, they all find themselves that much more gone.   he is barely a whisper when he puts the last piece of himself into a comment on a garak/bashir slashfic                                 more plz     Matthew Bright is a writer, editor and designer who constantly debates which order those should come. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tor.com, Nightmare Magazine, Harlot, Steampunk Universe amongst others, and he is the editor of anthologies including Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, Myriad Carnival: Queer and Weird Tales from Under the Big Top and the upcoming A Scandal in Gomorrah: Queering Sherlock Holmes. He pays the bills as a book cover designer in Manchester, England, and you can find him on twitter @mbrightwriter or online at matthew-bright.com.       In Search of Stars by Matthew Bright     It starts with a secret place, as many stories do. On the outside, it is a laundrette. The printed letters on the plate glass are peeling, but still legible: Whites. Below it, a list of numbers is scraped away, leaving the cost of a wash a mystery. Occasionally, I pass it in daylight. During the day, the door is propped open by a rickety stool, and I peer inside. It is filled by graying women with rumpled, dishcloth skin who talk quietly amongst themselves about their children and their husbands. Once, I dare to take my clothes there to wash. An innocent errand, I reason; no shadow of suspicion could fall on a man simply doing his laundry. This does not prevent the women from eyeing me as if the mere presence of a man amongst them is suspect. To compound this, I am unprepared, and am forced to swap a nickel for a palmful of powder, a foolish error met with sad tuts. As I empty the powder into the drum, I study the door in the corner. It takes me several weeks to get the courage to return at night. The front door is no longer propped open advertising itself, but it hangs ajar, distinctly not closed. Inside it is dark, and quiet—none of the machines are awake. But men pass in and out of the doorway with regularity, briefly spilling light from the door in the back across the machines; they are not carrying clothes. I do not know whatever password it is that would grant me access, and neither do I have the will to ask. Perhaps were I to be bold—simply walk up to the door in the back of the laundrette and go in—I might be able to talk my way upstairs. But when my foot breaks the curb to cross the street, my stomach churns, noxious with fear, and I step back. Tonight, it is cold, and so I cross the alley to the diner. The waitress there—a pretty girl, like the small-town ones from back home—knows me by name now. “Usual, Albert?” she says, and I enjoy being someone who has a “usual.” I imagine that perhaps she does too—this is not the sort of diner with regulars. I sit in a booth by the window and drink coffee, covertly watch the laundrette, and the men that come and go. I don’t know what I imagine is on the other side of the door, but I know I want to find out. Perhaps the waitress knows—it seems unlikely that she works here night after night and doesn’t have some idea what is going on opposite. The thought makes me uncomfortable, but I remind myself there is nothing wrong with a man drinking coffee—or a man washing his clothes. There is someone waiting outside the laundrette. He leans against the window-frame, making insolent eye-contact with any man who enters. His boldness—starkly opposite to my own reticence—tugs at me; I dowse the feeling with coffee and look at the chipped table-top. The jukebox is playing music—rock and roll, tinny and weak. It clanks and whirs when the records are changed. After a while, I can feel—in that skin-pricking way that comes from a sense other than sight or hearing—that the man is looking at me. I chance a look, and meet his eyes. The waitress is serving an old man in the corner, her back turned. I gather my coat, and step out into the cold. At the end of the road the city exhales a blare of cars, distant music, police whistles, but its cacophony falters at the corner. Our street is still like midwinter, and the man waits for me in the middle. We exchange words. It doesn’t matter what they are. Suffice it to say, I have spoken similar words before; I am a man who knows their real meanings, just as he. The walk is a few wet streets away. He talks, and I interject enough answers into the conversation to keep it from stagnating. I keep a proprietary distance from him, glance nervously at the darkened windows around us, any one of which might contain a watcher who knows my face—I saw that scientist from round the corner, they might say, and you’ll never guess what? He tells me he is a musician—saxophone, because all the other boys in this city are playing guitar, he says. I picture the pads of his fingers stroking the keys, and the cold reed leeching the moisture from his bottom lip. I ask him if he’s ever played inside, meaning the secret place above the laundrette, hoping he’ll say yes so he can describe it to me. He shakes his head. “I’ve never been in,” he says. We are at the foot of my building, and I fumble in my pocket for keys. He leans in close to me. “Have you?” “I don’t know the password.” A second, then he laughs. “Password? You don’t need a password.” He looks me up and down. He is mentally reconfiguring me from a man of experience to a naïf who imagines cloak-and-dagger, film-noir secrecy. He hesitates. “Come in,” I say. I let him climb the stairs first. With the door closed, my stomach spins in anticipation, as if permission is granted by the cloak of privacy—nobody to see us now, not even if I were to pull his clothes off right here on the stairs. But I don’t—I jam my hands in my pockets and follow his shadow upwards. At the top, he looks around the detritus of my apartment, and asks me what I do. “I’m an artist,” I say, which is not exactly a lie. He looks for a light-switch, but I point him through the door to the bedroom. I pull dustclothes over my work, then follow him. He is already naked on the bed, his clothes a gray pool by the nightstand. He tastes of something I can’t describe. Afterwards he rolls to the cold side of the bed, pulling the damp sheets with him. He looks appraisingly at me, and he is re-evaluating me all over again—perhaps tallying up the number of men that added up to the expertise I had displayed. He looks at me for some time.  An endless parade, he must conclude—all those other men. My chest congeals into a thick, black, furtive shame, soul-deep. I offer him a cigarette, but he refuses, rolls onto his back and closes his eyes. At first the lids are tense, like a child pretending to be asleep after curfew, and then they relax. He breathes slowly. I place the cigarette between my lips, but leave it unlit. Tentative dawn is creeping over the horizon, silvering the rooftops. I left the curtains undrawn when I left earlier, the window fully open—not a conscious choice, but it's fortuitous: the window grates on opening, loud enough to wake someone sleeping. I arise quietly, pad into the other room, and pull aside the dustclothes. The paint is where I left it, viscous and silver in its vat. Its clean, sterile smell stings my eyes. I open a drawer, select the right brush—hog bristle, which is soft and delicate, and will not wake him. On the bed, I kneel, apply the paint gently. I cover him in reverse order of the skin touched by my tongue and fingers, turning it warm pink to cold blue. By the time I have covered his chest and thighs, he is lighter, rising up from the bed. When I cover his arms, they rise above him, as if he is reaching for an embrace. I run the brush to his feet. When I am finished, he floats a foot above the bed, rising. When I lay my hand on his belly, he is light as a feather, and my touch guides him across the room as if he were a leaf on a still pond. He passes below the lintel soundlessly, not waking even when his steady ascendance nudges his shoulder against the frame. My hands on his cheeks anchor him, like a child clutching a balloon that tugs against its string. His feet lift, inverting him. His eyes open when I kiss him gently on the lips. He smiles, and I release him. He turns as he floats up, alternating blue then pink in the watery dawn, and then is higher than I can see any longer, beyond my sight with all the others. I lie down on the bed, pull the still-warm bedsheets around me, and light my cigarette. The smoke rises in clouds, and vanishes as if it was never there.     The story continues with the morning after, as many stories do. Firm block capitals in my diary prevent from lying abed long into the afternoon: I have an appointment to make. I meet Eugene in the foyer of the Mayfair. I wonder exactly how much Eugene has been told about my present circumstances, and whether his choice of venue is a deliberate statement of his success. It would be just like Eugene, though it would be intended without malice. He presses whiskey into my hand, and greets me as if we have never been apart. “Such a surprise when old Selwyn told me you were in LA!” he says. He ushers me to an armchair, and gestures for the discretely hovering waiter to refill our glasses. Eugene has aged well—with a thin, fashionable moustache that I am pained to admit suits him well. I briefly wonder if our mutual acquaintance—Selwyn Cavor, the starchily British professor who pushed us through five years of boarding school—is pushing for something other than the reunion of old school friends; it is he, after all, who told me about the laundrette. But then Eugene tells me about his wife—an ice-queen blonde, so he says, by the name of Marilyn, though aren’t all the blondes called Marilyn these days? Perhaps Selwyn is not as calculated as I imagine. “So, how are you ticking, Mister C?” he asks—habitually, for this was how Eugene had opened nearly every conversation between us since we were both eleven and meeting for the first time in a draughty dormitory. “Finally cracked and come out chasing stars in the city of angels, have we?” I try to smile warmly, and shake my head. “Not exactly,” I say, and try to explain something about my work. I tell him about the two publications that took my reports. I fail to mention that my laboratory consists of a worktop hauled from a garbage tip, and basins purloined from the ruins of a barbers that had burnt down. Those particular details do not jibe well with the foyer of the Mayfair, or the two-hundred-dollar whiskey. “And what is it you’re trying to build?” he asks, though his attention is on the whiskey bottle as he tops it up. “Space travel,” I say, though this hardly covers it. “Smart boy!” Eugene says. “Space—they’re all at it. Give it ten years, and we’ll get there ourselves. But I tell you what though—Hollywood is damn well going to get there first.” I think of my saxophonist, turning lazily on the edge of the atmosphere. Out loud, I point out that Hollywood has been going to space for some time. I remind him of the Saturday afternoons we would sneak from school to the nearest town, and the showing in particular of Woman in the Moon, sucking down ice cream floats and salted caramels. He waves it away. “Oh, Hollywood has moved on since then. Special effects!” He is practically shouting, and heads are turning. I shrink in my seat. “That’s what the studios are excited about. And they want everything to be two hundred per cent accurate at all times. Suspension of disbelief, and all that. That’s why they hired me—an ‘expert consultant,’ that’s me.” He leans forward. I realize he is already a little drunk. “Do you know what one of the directors asked me—he asks, ‘What does space smell like?’” “Goodness,” I say. “Why would they need to know that? It’s only film.” “Some new technology they’re working on—a full experience, you know? Squirt the audience with water, shake the seats, all that lot. And they want to use scent. It’s what we’ve all been waiting for—not only can you watch cinema, you’ll be able to smell it.” He looks pleased with himself. The ice clinks in his glass as he waves it. “What does space smell like?” I ask. He considers. “Gunpowder,” he says. “By all accounts.”     Later, I go to the laundrette. The gray women look at me once when I enter, then disregard me. I am an insignificant little man encroaching on their world, and not worth the energy of observation when there are hampers of clothes to be washed. I run a finger along the grimy edge of a washer, and my fingertip comes away blackened. It satisfies me; in a perverse way, the laundrette, with its washed-out women and secret doorways, makes me feel scrubbed clean of all the gilt decadence Eugene has subjected me to that day. I do not look at the door in the back, although I itch to go through it. This visit is an inoculation: a brief sojourn in the laundrette during the day and then I will not be tempted to return after dark. I will remain in my apartment for the night hours; a small amount of exposure that defends against a greater illness. I empty the bag of clothing into the drum. At the bottom are the saxophonist’s discarded clothes. Turning away so as to go unobserved by the women, I press his undergarments to my face and inhale. I half expect the smell of gunpowder but of course that is absurd—his clothes remained with me. I smell only cotton, soap, and the faint linger of sweat. I drop them in the drum, and pay my cents. The machine starts up, spiralling our clothes together in a wet rush. In the Lucky Seven diner, I order coffee. By the time it has arrived, I know the inoculation is not enough; I will be returning tonight. The waitress squeezes into the booth opposite me. “I have a half-hour break,” she says. “Right,” I say, not quite sure why she’s telling me this. She bites her lip; I recognize this from movies, the coquettish seduction. Only hers is awkward, as if she isn’t used to being this forward. Perhaps she isn’t: she works amongst bottom-squeezes and drawled darlin’s all day; I doubt she ever has to ask. “I have half an hour,” she says. “I was thinking you could take me home and fuck me.” I notice a grease-spot on her lapel, just a few inches above her bare breast. It is just to the left of the name-tag: ‘Marilyn’ in uncertain capitals. It makes me think of Eugene’s ice-blonde wife, and his big job up amongst the stars. Eugene would say yes without hesitation. I could just say no, I tell myself, and then, inoculation. Afterwards, she looks around the detritus of my room and asks what I do. “I’m an engineer,” I tell her, which is not exactly a lie, and go to wash myself in the dirty sink. She remains on the bed, smoking the cigarette I offer her. Naked, I had been able to feel a week of diner grease on her skin. She tasted of the bitter coffee at the bottom of a pot, and my usual expertise had deserted me. I wonder if she washes her clothes at the laundrette. I feel the usual nausea arising, though it is a different kind; this is a physical nausea in the pit of my stomach, as if I have swallowed something rotten. “Good old American filth,” Eugene said to me earlier, as we were leaving the Mayfair, him paused on the curb to hail a cab, me turning my coat collar up for the long walk home. “I’m tired of all the glamour. You know—mansions, cars and movie stars. The whole city’s coming down with a case of shallow—even my Marilyn’s picking it up; won’t fuck without doing her makeup first.” He wanted me to take him out in my parts of the city, with all the implications of what my part of the city entailed. “Well—you’re here amongst it all, aren’t you? Think it’s about time you and I went out on the town. I want some squalor, you know what I’m saying?” I imagine he’d be pleased with me right now. I walk her back to the laundrette with five minutes of her break to spare. On the way, she tells me that she picked me because I didn’t ask. All day long, men suggest things, demand things of her. But I never did, and she liked that. I ignore the bitter irony. We part in the middle of the street, her kissing me quickly on the cheek. In the washing machine drum, I find my white clothes stained blue. I hold up a once-pale vest and wring pastel water from it. One of the gray women looks at me and shakes her head. I bundle my clothing back into my knapsack, and leave the saxophone player’s articles—dark blue shirt, pants, underwear—in a sopping pool at the bottom of the lost and found basket.     Two weeks until the itch to visit the laundrette again outweighs awkwardly encountering Marilyn in the Lucky Seven.. Sitting at my work-bench, listlessly tracing paint along a series of pencils so that they float and turn in the air, I reason with myself. If I am to risk facing the woman with whom I have had less than satisfactory relations with—and not seen since—then it must be for a greater gain than watching from afar. The queasy light of the diner is an oasis that beckons—but tonight I ignore it, although I look long enough to realize that Marilyn is not to be seen. It does nothing to calm me; my hair, still damp from the cold shower I took before leaving, hangs in clammy lumps against my forehead. I feel unwashed—wrapped up tight against the night, I am immediately overheated, sweat springing up in the folds of my body. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to touch me. “There is no password,” the saxophonist told me. No secret or phrase: just the confidence to walk through the door. I end up in the diner, breathing heavily to calm my pulse. There is a stinging pain in the palms of my hands that spreads up my arms and worms its way into my ribcage. The laundrette stares balefully at me across the street. An older waitress materializes beside me. She is dumpy and string-haired. Her name-tag says Marilyn. Eugene was right—every woman in Los Angeles… She fills my cup and putters on to the next booth to serve a hulk of a man who I think I faintly recognize. He is looking down at a newspaper spread on the table, his face lost in a tangle of beard, but when Marilyn the Second departs, he looks up at me. He is round faced, and despite the beard, oddly boyish. “Not brave enough, huh?” he says to me. “Excuse me?” He nods over at Whites. “You go in, you come out,” he says. “Been there, done that.” The itch in my palm redoubles. “Have you?”     He is more discreet than the saxophonist; he maintains a respectful distance from me as we pass through the streets, hangs back as I open the door, and remains three steps behind me as I climb the stairs. As soon as we cross the threshold, the gentleman vanishes—his hands are on me, yanking away my coat and scrabbling at the clothes beneath. With my shirt tangled over my head he is already moving to touch my body before I am free; his fingertips are rough on my skin, and as his mouth skates down my body, his beard scratches like the wire wool I use to scrub away paint. His teeth nip at my belly. I back away, lead him to the bedroom. He disrobes as he follows, revealing a heavy-set body swathed in hair, and a stubby penis peeking from the shadow cast by his bulk. The pale light from the window sweeps around the heavy sphere of his stomach, and I am struck by an absurd image of a fast-motion film of light’s passage around the moon that I dimly remembered from a visit to the planetarium with Selwyn. He pushes me onto the bed and straddles me. He is commanding, guiding my hands where he wants them, tangling my fingers in the hair on his chest and thighs, and then as he pins my shoulders with his knees, thrusts my hand behind him where my fingers slide, sweat-slicked, into him. I open my mouth to receive him and for a second I picture myself outside my own body looking down on us—the same position as the watchers I imagine at my windows. The image is clear: this beast of a man, crouched ursine on his haunches over me, my head and shoulders lost in the dark shadow between his legs. Afterwards, he kisses me.     He does not go as easily as the saxophonist. Firstly, he awakens. None of the others have ever done this. His legs are already several inches off the bed, the room suffused with the anodyne hospital smell of the paint. My mistake is in selecting my brush; still sore and tender, I find poetic justice in selecting the largest, roughest of them. Secondly, he struggles. I doubt he comprehends what I am doing to him, but he has awoken in a panic to sensations he doesn’t understand, and so he lashes out like the animal I pictured. He strikes a blow across my face, and I fall to the floor, tasting blood in my mouth. The time for gentle artistry is past: I upend the tub. It coats his chest, tiny bubbles bursting amongst the strands of my hirsute canvas. There is blind panic in his eyes as he rises, spittle at the corner of his mouth turning blue where it mixes with the paint. He flails, claws at my sheets, but they can’t prevent his ascent and simply rise with him, a useless tether. I jostle him out of the window, which stands open as always. He clings to my bed-sheet and we reach an impasse—him upside down, fist wrapped tight around the cotton and me at the other end, pulling back with all my strength. For a minute, we remain connected. Then his fingers open, and he soars up, up to where the air smells of gunpowder.     “Pineapple!” says Eugene. “Goddamn pineapple. Can you believe it?” Six weeks pass—six weeks in which my frantic scuffle squashes the itch to visit the laundrette, though the image of a door opening to a crowd of men waiting for me slowly recurs nightly in my dreams. Six weeks in which I bury myself in work, in which I dodge the landlord knocking for rent, and in which I write three-quarters of a paper on the gravity-negating properties of an as-yet-unnamed viscous solution of my own devising. Six weeks, and then Eugene. “Gunpowder is too hard to synthesize, apparently, and anyway—it’s not like anyone’s going to know. So according to the head honchos of Paramount Pictures, space will smell of pineapple.” Eugene is on his third Singapore Sling, and already blurring into intoxication. He speaks at great length about his Hollywood consultation business. He tells me I should come advise on engineering, build robots for the flicks. He doesn’t understand why I’m mouldering away in a poxy flat in the cheap end of town. I try to explain what I’m working on—tell him about my three-quarters-written paper—but he doesn’t listen. He starts talking about space flight again. In each bar we go to a pattern repeats: the girls flock at first to his expensive suit, gold watch and big tips, and then, when his generosity has dried up and he has done little beyond leerily grope a behind or two, they ghost away to search for more forthcoming targets. And at each bar, he complains that the place is ‘too swanky’ or ‘too bogus’ and demands I take him somewhere real. Deep in a whiskey glass in a honky-tonk bar that still carried more than a whiff of speakeasy about it, I watch Eugene flirt with a sour-faced woman leaning against the bar. She is lit by neon, and has a look similar to his: rich, but slumming it for the night. He won’t pick her, I know, but flirtation is a habit of his. Even in a single-sex boarding school, he had never had much trouble finding women where he needed them—a couple of the maids, girls from the town. Sneaking back into the dormitory at night, he would describe his latest sexual exploit to me in a low whisper, and I would stiffen under the covers. One night he claimed to have conquered one of the schoolmistresses—new to the school, and on temporary assignment. One of those long evenings in his study I relayed Eugene’s story to Selwyn who laughed quietly, and said, “I don’t doubt. Frightful, really—students and teachers.” We laughed together, conspiratorial. Not for the first time, I wonder why Selwyn has thrust Eugene and I back into each other’s lives. If I focus, I begin to wonder if Eugene’s heart is really in it tonight. He’s effusive with everyone we meet, expounding upon his personal theories of life, love and pleasure, and the opportunity to sneak off and spend himself in a furtive tumble has presented itself on multiple occasions. And yet he seems to be dodging every offer, returning to me with freshly charged glasses. As we descend into that strata of intoxication in which profundity insists itself in half-complete sentences, I wonder if perhaps Eugene fears the same as I: that in the post-orgasmic chill the squalor of a back-alley screw loses its grimy glamour and becomes something furtive and shameful instead. And so he postpones it as long as possible—perhaps indefinitely. Eventually, there are no more bars to go to—or none that will allow two such stumbling fools entry. Early dawn is pricking the horizon, and, like a magnet, I draw us to the Lucky Seven. My waitress is there—Marilyn the First—glimpsed through the kitchen hatch but I am too drunk to care. Besides—it has been two months. We collapse into a booth. Eugene rests his head on the table. I lean against the glass; it is cool and soothing. Across the road, I cannot tell if the laundrette is open or closed—I am too unfocused to make out if the door stands open or not. I suppose even such a place as Whites closes. “Usual?” I squint up at her. She doesn’t sound upset. This is good. Eugene, hearing a female voice, rears up. He strikes what I imagine he believes is a charming smile. “Darla!” he says. “How pleas—pleas—pleasant to meet you.” I blink. “Darla?” She taps her name-badge. “I thought your name was Marilyn?” She leans in close, ruffles my hair, matronly. “No, darling. I forgot my badge, had to borrow one. But at least you remembered my name—I’m flattered.” Darla. Somehow the name changes her. Marilyn is a girl daintily upset when a man does not call her the morning after. Darla takes a man home to screw because she wants to. She leaves to serve the only other customer in the diner, down the opposite end of the window. I lean into Eugene, and tell him—in a whisper that is almost certainly not really a whisper at all—about what Darla and I did in my bed. I don’t know why I did it: I have never been one to brag, but recasting our limp splutter of an encounter as erotic exploit gives me a fraternal thrill I have rarely felt. Eugene grips my wrists and shakes them victoriously. “Albert, my man,” he says. “I knew you had it in you.” For a second I see me as he does now: earthy man of the people, slipping it to waitresses on a nightly basis. And then the image bursts like over-inflated bubble-gum as I look past Darla. She is bending over, pouring coffee, and behind her is a noticeboard. Protest march, singing lessons, artist seeking model, poetry reading and MISSING. Below it a photo of a hulking man, round-faced and boyish despite the beard. Darla sways past us again. “You boys had a good night, then?” Eugene reaches out a hand to her, pulls her back to sit on his knee. His fingers snag on her sash. “Darlin’, not nearly good enough. Not yet…” For the poster to be here in the Lucky Seven, he must be a regular. We’ve all been there, he said, as if he too had sat for long hours in this diner, getting up the nerve to cross the road. And then there is Marilyn and Darla, who see every man and every face. Darla looks at me. It isn’t a look asking for help, to rescue her from my lairy friend, just a calmly assessing look. Eugene’s fingers make it clear what he wants. I do not ask. I know what she likes. “I get off in half an hour,” she says.     The story ends with a decision, as many do. Darla leaves, and I return to the bed as if she is still there, a cold ghost between Eugene and I. Her female presence granted permission: for our naked bodies to share the same space, for my fingers to touch him, provided mine were not the only ones. I wonder if this is where he wanted the night to go: his life, so drearily decadent, that the only thing to jolt him out of his drudgery is the taboo touch of a man. Perhaps he had marked me out as an easy target—the sexless boy from school, the one who spent a bit too much time with Professor Cavor. I realize the room is silent. His snoring has stopped. When I look at him, his eyes are open. Afterwards, I anchor us both to the bed with the sheets, wrapped around our wrists and fixed loosely to the bedpost. I paint him first, until he has risen, tipped on his side, free of gravity but strung by one rebellious limb to the ground. The alcohol in his veins that deadens him to the feeling of my awkward brush-strokes. He hovers above me, eyes closed, like a statue. Then, disjointed with my off-hand, I coat myself. I float to meet him, the front of our bodies pressed together, lips close enough to kiss. I wrestle the knot loose, and we are released. I wrap my arms around him, and press my face into his chest. It is difficult to guide him across the room to the window—I have to kick off against the walls and the ceiling, as one does in deep water. My feet alight on the windowsill. I push away. Light breaks across the city. If my phantom watchers in the windows opposite are looking, they will see us as we rise into the sky, one man clinging tight to another as they ascend like balloons that have slipped from your grasp, until the atmosphere becomes rarefied and thin, and breath freezes before our faces. I catch a glimpse of the sun rising over the edge of the world before I close my eyes and rise up, to where the air smells of gunpowder, and men are waiting for me.   END “becoming, c.a. 2000” is copyright Charles Payseur 2017. “In Search of Stars” is copyright Matthew Bright 2017. This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library. You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with a reprint of “The Need for Overwhelming Sensation” by Bogi Takács.

Lessons From A Clockwork Queen by Megan Arkenberg I. It was Bethany's job to wind the queen. Every morning she woke in the blue-pink dawn before the birds sang, slipped out from under her quilt and took down the great silver winding key that hung over her bed. Then she wrapped herself in her dressing gown and padded up the long, cold tower stair to the room where the queen was kept. She pulled back the sheets and found the little hole in the queen's throat where the winding key fit like a kiss, and she turned and turned the key until her shoulders ached and she couldn’t turn it anymore. Then the queen sat up in bed and asked for a pot of tea. The queen (whose name happened to be Violet) was very well cared for. She had girls to polish her brass skin until it shone, and girls to oil the delicate labyrinth of her gears until she could move as silently as a moth, and girls to curl her shining wire hair tightly around tubes of glass. She had a lady to sew her dresses and a lady to shine her shoes and a whole department of ladies to design her hats and make sure she never wore the same one twice. But Violet only had one girl whose job it was to wind her every morning, and only Bethany had the winding key. [Full transcript after the cut] ----more---- Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 38. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to be sharing this story with you. This week, we have a reprint by Megan Arkenberg, "Lessons From a Clockwork Queen" with guest reader Sunny Moraine. 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. Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, among other places. Their debut short fiction collection Singing With All My Skin and Bone is available from Undertow Publications. They unfortunately live just outside Washington, DC, in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband. Lessons From A Clockwork Queen by Megan Arkenberg   I. It was Bethany's job to wind the queen. Every morning she woke in the blue-pink dawn before the birds sang, slipped out from under her quilt and took down the great silver winding key that hung over her bed. Then she wrapped herself in her dressing gown and padded up the long, cold tower stair to the room where the queen was kept. She pulled back the sheets and found the little hole in the queen's throat where the winding key fit like a kiss, and she turned and turned the key until her shoulders ached and she couldn’t turn it anymore. Then the queen sat up in bed and asked for a pot of tea. The queen (whose name happened to be Violet) was very well cared for. She had girls to polish her brass skin until it shone, and girls to oil the delicate labyrinth of her gears until she could move as silently as a moth, and girls to curl her shining wire hair tightly around tubes of glass. She had a lady to sew her dresses and a lady to shine her shoes and a whole department of ladies to design her hats and make sure she never wore the same one twice. But Violet only had one girl whose job it was to wind her every morning, and only Bethany had the winding key. Having a clockwork queen was very convenient for Her Majesty's councilors. Once a month, they would meet over tea and shortbread cookies and decide what needed to be done; and then they sent for a clockmaker to arrange Violet's brass-and-ivory gears. If she needed to sign a treaty or a death warrant or a new law regulating the fines for overdue library books, the clockmaker would tighten the gears in her fingers so that she could hold a pen. If her councilors thought it was time to host a ball, the clockwork queen had a special set of gears for dancing. The king of a neighboring kingdom, who was not clockwork and understood very little of the theory involved, decided one day that he should like very much to marry the clockwork queen. Violet's councilors thought this was a thoroughly awful idea and rejected his advances in no uncertain terms. The politics of courtship being what they are, the king took the rejection very much—perhaps too much, if we may say that a king does anything too much—to heart, and he hired an assassin to murder the queen. The assassin (whose name happened to be Brutus) tried everything. He poisoned Violet's tea, but she—being clockwork and lacking a digestive tract—didn't notice at all. He released a noxious vapor into her chambers while she was bathing in a vat of oil, but she—being clockwork and lacking a respiratory system—didn't care in the slightest. He slipped a poisonous spider into her bed, but she—being made of brass and lacking the sagacity of an arachnophobe—made a nest for it in one of her old hats, and named it Mephistopheles. Being a clever sort, and no longer quite ignorant of the properties of clockworks, Brutus lay in wait one night on the cold tower stair, and he thrust a knife into Bethany's heart when she came to wind the queen. He took the great silver key and flung in into a very, very deep well. And that is why a wise clockwork queen owns more than one winding key. II. When Bethany died, and the winding key disappeared, and poor Violet ground to a halt like a dead man's watch, her councilors declared a frantic meeting, without even the officious comfort of tea and shortbread cookies. "We must build a new winding key!" declared the eldest councilor, who liked things just so and was not afraid to leave Opportunity out in the cold. "We must declare ourselves regents in the queen's absence and wield the full power of the monarchy!" declared the richest councilor, who had never understood the point of a clockwork queen in the first place. "We must abolish the monarchy and declare a government of liberty, equality and brotherhood!" shouted the youngest councilor, but at just that moment a servant arrived with a tray of cookies, and he was ignored. "We must," said the quietest councilor when everyone had settled down again, "declare a contest among all the clockmakers in the land to see who is worthy to build our new queen." And since no one had any better ideas, that is what they did. Over the next months, thousands of designs appeared in crisp white envelopes on the castle's doorstep. Some of the proposed queens had no eyes; the eldest councilor preferred these, so that he could pinch coins from the palace treasury unobserved. Some queens had no tongue; the richest councilor preferred these, so that he could ignore the queen's commands. And one queen had no hands, which all the councilors agreed was quite disturbing and could not, absolutely could not be permitted. On the last day of the contest, only one envelope appeared at the castle door. It was small and shriveled and yellow, with brown stains at the corners that could have been coffee or blood, and it smelled like bruised violets. When it was opened in the council chamber, everyone fell silent in amazement, and one councilor even dropped his tea. They agreed that this was the queen that must be built, for it was made of iron, and had no heart. And that is why you should put off making difficult decisions for as long as possible. III. When the strange clockmaker, whose name was Isaac, had completed the heartless iron queen—whom, as they did not wish to go against established precedent, the councilors named Iris—the citizens were overjoyed. Not that they cared much for queens, clockwork or otherwise, but they were an optimistic, philosophical people, and Iris was very beautiful. The city became a riot of banners and colorful ribbons and candy vendors on every street, and the stationer's guild declared a holiday, and children bought pastel paper to fold into boats, which they launched on the river. But as for the clockwork queen herself, she was very beautiful, and there is only one thing to be done with a beautiful queen; she must be married off. Once again, the councilors gathered over tea and shortbread and, because it was a holiday, a slice or two of rum-cake. There are several proven, efficient ways to marry off a queen, but experts agree that the best way is for her councilors to throw open the palace for a ball and invite every eligible young man in the kingdom to attend. The council spent days drawing up a guest list, excluding only those who were known to be ugly or vulgar or habitually dressed in a particular shade of orange, and when at last everyone was satisfied, they sent out the invitations on scraps of pink lace. It snowed the night of the ball, great white drifts like cream poured over coffee, with gusts of wind that shook the tower where old Violet had been packed for safekeeping. Very few of the eligible young men were able to make an appearance, and of those, only one in three had a mother who was not completely objectionable and thus unsuitable to be the royal mother-in-law. One of the young men, a very handsome one who smelled faintly of ash and glassblowing, would have been perfect if not for his obnoxious stepmother, but, as it happened, he had never really been interested in queens, clockwork or otherwise, and he settled down quite happily with the head of stationer's guild. There was one boy who, though his mother was dead and thus not at all objectionable, had nevertheless managed to trouble Iris's councilors. Perhaps it was his hair, in desperate need of cutting, or his threadbare velvet coat, dangerously approaching a certain shade of orange. Perhaps it was the fact that he had come in from the snow and, instead of clustering devotedly around Iris with all the other young men, had sat down by the fire in the great hearth and rubbed color back into his fingertips. Whatever it was, the councilors were quite keen that he should not be permitted, not even be considered, to marry their clockwork queen. No sooner had they agreed this than Iris began elbowing her iron way through the crowd, pursuing the threadbare coat like a cat bounding after a mouse. The boy poured himself wine at the table in the western alcove, and the queen hurtled after him, upsetting the drinks of those too slow to move out of her path. He stood for a moment on the balcony overlooking the snow-mounded garden, and Iris glided after him into the cold. As he turned to go back into the flame-brightened ballroom, he found his way blocked by the iron queen. Since, unlike the eldest councilor, he was a wonderfully opportunistic man, he dropped to his knees right there in the snow and asked her to marry him. Iris clicked her iron eyelids at him and assented, and that is how Henry Milton, a bookbinder's son, became a king. And that is why, if you are ever invited to a ball for a heartless iron queen, you should always carry a lodestone in your pocket. IV. Henry Milton learned very quickly that it is hard to love a heartless clockwork queen, no matter how beautiful she is. She creaks and whirls in odd ways when you are trying to sleep; she has very few topics of conversation; she knows exactly how long it takes you to do everything. She only follows you when you draw her with a lodestone, and lodestones can feel very heavy after a while, not to mention how they wreak havoc with the lines of a coat. However, clockwork queens are very good at learning from one another's mistakes, and Iris—instead of having only one winding key and one girl to wind her—had three keys and a set of triplets. Sadly, even clockwork queens are not immune from the woeful ignorance that assumes that siblings who share birthdates must also share skill sets. Abigail, the youngest triplet, was very good at winding the queen; her hands were soft and gentle, and she wasn't afraid to give the key and extra turn now and then. Monica, the middle triplet, was very bad at winding the queen; she was slow and clumsy and much preferred dictating monographs on economic history and philosophy of education. Elsa, the eldest triplet, was an excellent winder when she remembered—which at first was not often, and became less and less frequent as she fell in love with the king. All three girls were in love with the king, of course. He was a bookbinder's son with long hair and a lodestone in his pocket and a heartless clockwork wife, and he occasionally wrote poetry, and he harbored a secret and terrible passion for postage stamps—what girl could resist? But Elsa, tall and dark and fluent in three languages, with a good head for maps and a gift for calculus, was the one Henry Milton loved back. Unless you are afflicted with the woeful ignorance that assumes that sisters who share birthdates must also be immune to romantic jealousy, you can see where this is going. It was Abigail's idea to put the poison in the queen's oil. Iris would, of course, be immune; only her husband, who kissed her dutifully every morning, and the girl who turned her winding key would feel the poison burning on their skin. And die, of course, but it was not Elsa's death that Abigail and Monica wanted; it was the burning. Siblings, even those who share birthdates, can be very cruel to each other. But the morning Elsa was to wind the queen, she slept past the cock-crow, and she slept past the dove-song, and she slept past the soft rays of sunlight creeping across her pillow. Henry awoke, saw that his wife had not been wound, and raced down to the sister's rooms. Monica was only half-awake, and if a handsome man with a terrible passion for postage stamps asks you to do something when you are only half-awake, you will probably say yes. Monica stumbled up the stairs and wound the clockwork queen, and by the time she felt the burning in her fingers, it was too late. She died before nightfall. Henry, as it happened, was saved by his intimate and longstanding friendship with old Mephistopheles, who still lived in Violet's hat, and happened to secrete antidotes to most animal poisons. He and Elsa ran away together and opened a little bookbinding shop in a city no one had ever heard of, though it soon became famous for the quality of its books. Abigail, consumed with guilt, locked herself away in the bowels of the castle, where she grew old and eccentric and developed a keen interest in arachnids. Mephistopheles visited her sometimes, and she is rumored to have stood godmother for all his twelve thousand children. And that is why you ought to befriend spiders, and anyone else who lives in old hats. V. Clearly, if the girls responsible for winding the clockwork queen were so keen on being assassinated or running off to become bookbinders, a more reliable method would have to be devised. The youngest councilor, no longer naive enough to propose abolition of the monarchy before his fellow councilors finished their tea, struck upon the elegant notion of building clockwork girls to wind the clockwork queen. The same clockmaker who had done such excellent work on Violet's treaty-hands and parade-smiles could set the winding girls to perform their function automatically, not a moment too soon or a moment too late. Clockworks cannot be murdered, cannot fall in love, cannot feel jealousy, cannot captivate kings with a talent for tongues and maps and calculus. "But who," said the eldest councilor, "will wind the clockwork winding girls?" "Why, more clockworks," said the youngest councilor—who, though no longer naive, was not a superb critical thinker. "And who will wind those?" "Still more clockworks." "And how will those be wound?" "By still more clockworks." "All right, you've had your fun," grumbled a councilor who never spoke much, except to complain. "Clockworks wind clockworks who wind clockworks, and so on for as many iterations as you care. But who winds the first clockworks? Answer me that," he said, and sat back in his chair. "Why, that's simple," said the youngest councilor. "They don't all wind each other at the same time. We stagger them, like so"—he made a hand gesture that demonstrated his woeful ignorance of the accepted methods of staggered scheduling—"and the last shall wind the first. It can be managed, I'm sure." He looked so earnest, his eyes wide and blue behind his thick glasses, that all the councilors agreed to give his proposal a trial run. Despite his ignorance of staggered scheduling, he managed to form a functioning timetable, and the winding of the winders went off as smoothly as buttermilk. And that is how the clockwork queen came to rule a clockwork court, and why clockmakers became the richest men in the kingdom. VI. You, being a very rational and astute kind of reader, might be forgiven for thinking that Iris could tolerate her clockwork court, perhaps even love it. However, she could do neither. Clockworks queens are no more liberal over strange whirlings and creakings than their bookbinder husbands are, and they are no more pleased with limited conversation, and they no more wish to be told how long precisely it takes them to do anything. Though they will never admit it, every once in a while, a clockwork queen likes to be late for her appointments. So one day, Iris opened the great wardrobe in Violet's old rooms and pulled out a beautiful robe of ruby silk and sable, and a pair of sleek leather boots, and a three-cornered hat with a net veil and a spring of dried amaranth blossoms hanging from the front. She powdered her shining skin until it was pale and dull and oiled her gears until they were silent as a mouse's whispers. So disguised, she went out into the city in search of someone to love. There were many people she did not like. There were merchants who tried to sell her strong-smelling spices, and artists who offered to paint her portrait in completely inappropriate colors, and poets who rhymed "love" and "dove" with no apparent shame. There were carriage drivers who cursed too much, and primly-aproned shopgirls who didn't curse enough. And as always, there were overly friendly people who insisted on wearing a certain shade of orange. By noon the streets were hot and dusty and crowded, and the amaranth blossoms on Iris's hat were scratching her high forehead, and she was no closer to loving anyone than she had been that morning. With a sigh like the groan of a ship being put out to sea, she sat on a cool marble bench in the center of a park, where the rose petals drooped and the fountain had been dry for decades. While she sat there, lamenting the short-sightedness of her council and the inadequacy of humanity, she smelled a bit of cinnamon on the breeze and saw a girl race past, red and small and sweet. If Iris had possessed a heart, we would say she lost it in that instant. Since she lacked that imperative piece of anatomy, whose loss would have been cliché and technically inaccurate in any case, we will say instead that a gear she had never known was loose slipped suddenly into joint as she watched Cassia, the perfumer's daughter, race through the park with a delivery for her mother's richest client. Iris followed Cassia as steadily as if the girl were carrying a lodestone—which, we hasten to assure you, was not the case. On the doorstep of the client's house, after setting the precious package in the mailbox screwed into the bricks, Cassia finally turned and met the gaze of the clockwork queen, who was, in case you have forgotten, most phenomenally beautiful. Please, said Iris, come to my palace, and I will give you my silver winding key. And that is why you should never hesitate to run your mother's errands. VII. Cassia was a very curious girl. Of course, anyone who accepts the winding key of a complete stranger in a public market is bound to have some small streak of curiosity, but Cassia's curiosity was broad as a boulevard, shaded with flowering trees. She was always very faithful about winding Iris, but when she was done she would sneak off into the cellars and the attics and the secret places in the castle. She found albums of postage stamps Henry Milton had long ago hidden away, and some old diagrams for building a queen with no eyes, and a box of twelve thousand baptismal certificates written in the smallest script imaginable. One day, she found a cold stone staircase winding up into the towers, and in the room at the top of the stairs, she found Violet. Of course the council hadn't just disposed of her when she ceased to run. Do you throw out your mother when she stops reading bedtime stories to you? Do you throw out your lover when he stops bringing you cherries dipped in chocolate? We should hope not; at the very least, you keep them for parts. And so Violet remained in her tower room standing precisely as she had been the moment her spring wound down. Violet was not as beautiful as Iris. But she had sharp cheekbones and a strong nose and a rather intelligent expression, considering that she had no control over how she looked when she finally stopped short. In some angles of light, she appeared positively charming. Of course, this was all irrelevant, because her winding key was still at the bottom of a very deep well, and she could not move or speak or love anyone until she was wound again. Every day for a year, Cassia climbed the long cold stairs to Violet's room and stared at the lifeless queen. She memorized the way the sunlight looked at noon, kissing the bronze forehead and the wire-fine eyelashes. She came to love the smell of dust and cold metal, the creak of the wooden floors beneath her feet. Finally, after a year of staring and wondering and hoping, quietly and desperately, Cassia raised herself on tiptoe and kissed Violet's clockwork lips. She felt the bronze mouth warming strangely beneath her own. She heard the ringing click of wire eyelashes against sharp metal cheekbones, and the click of gears in clockwork fingers as a gentle pair of hands folded around her waist. And Violet took a deep, shuddering breath. "You," she said, "are far too good to belong to a heartless queen." "You," Cassia said, "are far too charming to gather dust at the top of a tower." That night, they slipped from the castle while all the clockwork court was sleeping. Poor Iris, having dismissed her clockwork winding girls, was left alone and untended in her rooms. The court continued to wind each other on an ingenious schedule, never noting their queen's absence, and so the aristocracy slid ever closer to the precipice of decadence and anarchy, all because of one girl's curiosity. And that is why it is important to clean out your attic once or twice in a century. VIII. But even to love that begins in an attic, surrounded by sun-gilded dust motes and the creak of wooden floors, world enough and time are not promised. Cassia and Violet had barely crossed the kingdom's forest-shrouded eastern border when they came upon a stone bridge, and beneath it a rushing white-crested river, and beneath that—a troll. Trolls were not very common in the kingdom ruled by clockwork queens; as a rule, they dislike metal and shiny things and anything that requires winding keys, their fingers being terribly thick and clumsy. This left Cassia and Violet somewhat ignorant of the customs of trolls. In this particular case, the custom was a full bushel of apples and a yard of purple silk, and a brick or two for the house that the troll was resolutely building somewhere in the forest. Appleless, silkless, brickless, Cassia and Violet began to pick their way across the slippery bridge when there was a crash like the felling of a hundred trees, and a great cold wave swallowed the bridge before them. When the water receded, there was the troll, bumpy and green and heavy-handed, and standing right in their path. "Where is my toll?" she grumbled, her voice like wet gravel. Violet and Cassia, woefully ignorant of trolls and their curious pronunciation of voiceless alveolar plosives, stared in amazement. "My toll," the troll repeated. Confronted by the same blank stares, she tried the same phrase in the languages of the kingdom to the south, and the kingdom to the north, and the kingdoms of dragonflies and leopard-princes and Archaea. (She was an exceptionally well-educated troll.) It was not until she attempted the language of timepieces, all clicks and whirls and enjoinders to hasten, that Violet understood. "Your toll?" she repeated. "But we haven't got anything of the kind!" "Then you'll have to swim," the troll said, and seeing that there was no chance of enriching her stores of apples or silk or bricks, she plopped herself down in the middle of the bridge and would say nothing further. Violet and Cassia climbed down from the bridge and stood on the shingle of smooth and shining stones at the river's edge. Cassia shivered, and even Violet felt the water's chill in the spaces between her gears. But there was no crossing the bridge, not with the troll crouching on it like a tree growing out of a path, and there was certainly no returning to the kingdom and the court of the heartless queen. Cassia rolled the cuffs of her trousers to her knees and stepped into the frigid flow. The current tugged fiercely at her ankles, icy and quick. She felt the river's pebbly floor shifting beneath her bootheels and lost her balance with a tiny shriek. Violet splashed after her, brass arms spread for balance, and that was the last Cassia saw of her beloved before the river swallowed the clockwork queen. And that is why you should always, always pay the troll's custom, no matter how many apples she demands. IX. With Violet gone, there was nothing for Cassia to do but continue her journey east. The days were brief and quiet and the nights were cold and hollow, and the road dwindled until it was nothing but a few grains of gravel amid the twisted roots. As is the way of things in geography and enchanted forests, Cassia had soon walked so far east that she was going westward. And at the westernmost edge of the world, she found herself in the garden of a low-roofed cottage that smelled of coffee and bruised violets. Despite her terrible grief, Cassia could not help but be delighted by the tiny garden. There were daisies made of little ivory gears, and bluebells of jingling copper, and chrysanthemums so intricate that the flapping of a butterfly's wings could disrupt their mechanism and require them to be reset. There were roses that hummed like hives of bees, and lilies that wept tears of pale golden oil. And above all there were violets, branches and branches of violets, whose pounded petals could be added to any food, and convey upon it healing properties. "I am glad to see that my garden makes you smile," the clockmaker said from his window. It was Isaac, of course, that same clockmaker who had built heartless Iris—even within so strange a profession, there are few people whose houses smell of coffee and bruised violets. Cassia jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to him, the color high in her brown cheeks. The clockmaker, poor man, who had lived so lonely at the western edge of the world and had never seen a human being blush, fell instantly in love. Most people react very irrationally to their first taste of love. They form silly ideas about keeping the object of their affection near to them forever, and think of names for their children, and even dream of the days when they are both ancient and sitting on wicker chairs overlooking the sea. Or they chafe at the thought of being under their beloved's spell, and immediately think of a thousand ways to be rid of them—by accident, by cruelty, by hiding from them for years, all of which can become terribly impractical. Still others try to pretend that it never happened, and behave indifferently to the object of their affections, but of course something always gives them away—an accidental touch that becomes a caress, a too-gentle look, an extra teaspoon of sugar in the beloved's cup of tea. But clockmakers are by nature quite rational, and this particular clockmaker was even more rational than most. Isaac weighed the dangers of each possible response and in the same instant plucked three clockwork flowers from his garden: a rose, a lily, and a sprig of violets. Cassia gnawed her lip in curiosity as he held the flowers out to her, his hands shaking minutely like a wire too tightly wound, and bid her choose one. She took a long time to choose. The flowers were all so beautiful, and each one seemed to sing to her of the weight of her choice. But of course she could not know—the flowers could not know—only Isaac himself knew the true price of each stem. If Cassia had chosen the rose, singing and sweet-scented, Isaac would have knelt and asked her to marry him. If she had chosen the lily, weeping and pale, he would have strangled her with a purple silk scarf and buried her beneath the amaranth bush at his bedroom window. But since she choose the violets, quiet and dark, he swallowed his passion and his fear, and served her a cup of salty chicken soup, and sent her on her way. And that is why you must always remember the names of lost lovers. X. So Cassia found herself again on the borders of Iris's kingdom. This land was ruled, not by a clockwork queen, but by a mortal man, and everything was cold and covered in gray ash. The land lay under a curse, an apple-peddler warned Cassia when they sheltered for the night beneath the same lightning-wracked tree. The king was dying of consumption, and his daughter, who happened to be a very powerful witch, plunged the kingdom into drought and ice until someone came forth to cure her father. It was, the peddler said, a beautiful show of filial devotion, if ultimately quite useless. Cassia listened to the story and said nothing, chewing it over like a dusty bite of apple, and fingering the spring of violets in the pocket of her coat. Another day of walking brought her within the shadow of the dying king's castle. Cassia shuddered to see the coat of arms blazoned on the door, for this king was the same one who, many years before, had sent Brutus to assassinate Violet. Again, Cassia fingered the clockwork petals in her pocket. Then she went to the door and knocked. A tall woman answered, her face pale as a disk of bone. "What do you want?" she snarled. "I am here to cure the king," said Cassia. "But first, you must promise to give me whatever I ask for when he is returned to health." "If you can cure my father," said the princess, "I will give you this kingdom and everything in it." And she led Cassia through the winding hallways to the king's deathbed in the palace's heart. Cassia rolled up her sleeves and stoked the fire in the room's great hearth until it blazed like sunlight on apple skins. She sent the servants for a black iron kettle and a wooden spoon, and some chicken bones and a gallon of clean water. When she had boiled the bones to a clear golden broth, she added salt and carrots and soft white potatoes, and slivers of celery and sweet-smelling thyme. She used a silver ladle to dish the soup into a peasant's wooden bowl, which held in its splintered bottom one single petal from a clockwork violet. When the king had eaten the soup, color returned to his bone-pale cheeks and his lungs became clean and whole again. He leapt up from his bed and embraced his daughter, whose black eyes sparkled in the firelight. "The king is saved," the princess said. "What is it you wish from me?" "Bring me Brutus," said Cassia. The assassin was found and brought before her. He knelt at her feet and trembled, certain she had come to kill him for the loss of Violet's winding key—he was not ignorant, after all, of the properties of clockworks, though he knew precious little of lovers' first kisses. And so he was astounded to learn that Violet was no longer gathering dust in Iris's attic, but trapped beneath a river's icy foam. "I want you to bring me my clockwork queen," said Cassia, "and I want her alive." "You will have her," swore Brutus, who had never failed on a mission. And that is why you should learn the reason behind every pestilence, and never be afraid to call in favors. XI. Brutus, as you will surely recall, was both very clever and rather well-informed about the subtle machinations of clockwork. He also had an abnormally high tolerance for frigid water and the alveolar plosives of trolls. And so he fished poor Violet from the river with no more trouble than a child pulling sweet-fleshed shellfish from a tide pool. But water, particularly cold and muddy river-water, is vicious to clockwork, and no matter how he shook her or called to her or kissed her metal lips, Brutus could not bring Violet back to life. But he had never failed on a mission, and he was not about to begin failing when his mission was the reunion of true lovers. He wrapped Violet in his own cloak and sat her on the back of his own horse, and for nearly a year he wandered the land, looking for the woman or man or beast who could fix the clockwork queen. And, as is the way of things in geography and hopeless quests, Brutus soon found himself in a clockwork garden that smelled of coffee and bruised violets. Isaac was there—where would he have gone?—sitting now on his front porch, composing sonnets to Cassia's brown skin and sweet voice. He caught sight of sunlight glinting off of Violet's bronze forehead long before he could make out the shape of Brutus stumbling along beside her. He folded his legs up beneath him and leaned against the brick wall of his garden, sucking the ink-bitter tip of his pen, until his visitors were close enough to call to. "I suppose you want me to fix her," Isaac said. "Oh, not to worry, it can be done. In fact, there are three ways to wake a dead clockwork." And he plucked three clockwork flowers from the sweet-smelling soil and held them out to Brutus—a rose, a lily, and a sprig of violets. Brutus was desperately tired, and in no mood for making such a choice. Assassins, unlike perfumer's daughters, are well-versed in the more obscure avenues of flower symbolism, and he knew that a rose meant a trap, a lily meant strangling, and violets were a wildcard—they meant whatever the gardener wished them to mean. He did not know the three ways to wake a dead clockwork—in fact, no one but Isaac knew those, so you can hardly expect us to tell them to you—but his instinct told him quite accurately that all three required blood and sacrifice of some kind. In short, he knew he faced a very dire decision, and had no good way to make the choice. Then, quite suddenly, he remembered the sprig of violets he had seen peeking out of Cassia's coat pocket. Sighing in relief, he took the violets from Isaac's hand. The clockmaker smiled in the enigmatic way of men who were expecting as much, and set about repairing the queen with oil and wrenches and a fine steel screwdriver. And that is why you should always begin by trying what has worked before, especially with clockmakers, who as a rule are so terribly conventional. XII. The reunion between Cassia and Violet was perhaps too happy to be described here, for the only way to even approximate it is through an unlikely and wholly disagreeable string of paradoxes. Let it suffice to say that they were happy as few people have ever been, with or without the benefits of exotic wine or beautiful lovers or victory in impossible battles, or cold-skinned apples or soup recipes or an encyclopedic knowledge of flower symbolism. Isaac wrought a new winding key for Violet, and Violet gave it into Cassia's keeping, and Cassia lovingly wound her lover every morning until the day, many years later, she died in her clockwork arms. Very slowly—but not with too unseemly a sadness—Violet dug a grave in a forest beneath the dappled shadows of oak leaves. She lay Cassia on a bed of flower petals and cinnamon and climbed in beside her, and she pulled the earth down over both of them. Since there was no one left to wind her, Violet soon ran down in the cinnamon-scented darkness, and she and Cassia sleep peacefully in the same deep grave, as lovers always wish to. And that is why a wise clockwork queen has only one winding key. XIII. Of course, with or without a winding key, no clockwork is immortal. Iris and her court eventually ran down, and Isaac's garden withered, and the price of clockwork plummeted, ruining the kingdom's economy. And that is why you should invest in dependable things, like lodestones and assassins and bridges guarded by trolls, and steel screwdrivers and enchanted violets, and when you learn a good recipe for chicken soup you should write it down in detail, in case some day you fall in love.   END "Lessons From a Clockwork Queen" was originally published in Fantasy Magazine and is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2011. 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 I’ll be back soon with a poem by Joyce Chng, and an original story by Susan Jane Bigelow.

This week, we sit down to discuss Livia Llewellyn's short story "The Low, Dark Edge of Life" and the 1973 film "The Legend of Hell House." Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Livia Llewellyn - The Low, Dark Edge of Life (via Nightmare Magazine)

Crank your Slayer cassette & bring the lambs in from the pasture, 'cause we're talking about Carrie Vaughn's "Redcap" & the 2015 film Deathgasm. Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Carrie Vaughn - Redcap (via Nightmare Magazine)  

"Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix" by Jennifer Giesbrecht -- published in Apex Magazine issue 86, July 2016.   Read it here: http://www.apex-magazine.com/lazarus-and-the-amazing-kid-phoenix/ Enjoy our interview with the author here: http://www.apex-magazine.com/interview-with-author-jennifer-giesbrecht/ Jennifer Giesbrecht is a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia where she earned her degree in History and Methodology. She’s a freelance editor, multi-disciplinary nerd, and a graduate of Clarion West’s 2013 class. Her work has previously appeared in Nightmare Magazine, XIII: ‘Stories of Resurrection’, and Imaginarium 3. This Apex Magazine Podcast was performed and produced by Mahvesh Murad. Music used with kind permission of BenSound.com! Apex Magazine Podcast, Copyright Apex Publications. Apex Magazine is a monthly short fiction zine focused on dark science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Find us at http://www.apex-magazine.com.

Post Apocalyptic Week Special! Coming Up… Freebie – Get Vinay Gupta Hexayurt and make sure you survive! Interview: Vinay Gupta Main Fiction: “U for Umbrella” by Damien Angelica Walters Originally published in A is for Apocalypse. Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One, Cassilda’s Song, The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Apex Magazine. She was... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

“Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: The Elephant’s Tale” By Damien Angelica Walters -- published in Apex Magazine issue 75, August 2015. Damien Angelica Walters’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and magazines, including The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2015, Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One,The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu: New Lovecraftian Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static. She was a finalist for a Bram Stoker Award for “The Floating Girls: A Documentary,” originally published in Jamais Vu.Sing Me Your Scars, a collection of short fiction, is out now from Apex Publications, and Paper Tigers, a novel, is forthcoming in 2016 from Dark House Press. Find her on Twitter @DamienAWalters or on the web athttp://damienangelicawalters.com.   This Apex Magazine Podcast was performed and produced by Lisa Shininger. Music used with kind permission of Oh, Alchemy! Apex Magazine Podcast, Copyright Apex Publications.

Join Sean & Charles for a (slightly late) Valentine's Day Special! This week, they're talking about the short story "Rebecka" by Karin Tidbeck, as well as Takashi Miike's cult classic film "Audition". Music: Eyes Gone Wrong Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Show Notes: Karin Tidbeck - Rebecka (via Nightmare Magazine)

There is nothing more absurdly incongruous—ironic perhaps—than the burning fear found in the hearts of all men: the fear of death. Ironic, I say, for it is only those who have known death's euphoric touch who find their eyes opened to the truer horror of waking life. | Copyright 2014 by Nightmare Magazine. Narrated by Christopher M. Cevasco. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Self sacrifice may be noble, but so is knowing what you are getting out of the deal. This week, we review the horror flick Absentia, which is available on Netflix. It's a pretty damn grim movie, so the weak of heart should beware.   Also, we pimp several other podcasts, such as noted horror podcast The Drabblecast and Nightmare Magazine. Both of which can be found on iTunes and so on.   After that, Al and Tony drop into the distant past and talk about historical arson. We learn why you never kill one of Ghengis Khan's messengers, and what Julius Ceasar used to conquer the known world and finish off the waning republic.   Check out the podcast that has been described as "Oh, that one" and it here. Better yet, slap this link in your favorite RSS Feed reader and never miss another episode.   You can follow us on Twitter @tsouthcotte and @Albert_Berg, or you can subscribe to the podcast's twitter feed at @HEPodcast. Our blogs are also available to the right of this message on the sidebar.