Our 2025 Halloween story, Grant Collier’s “It Grows Back”, is featured on the Locus Recommended Reading List for Best Short Story. Congratulations, Grant! It’s a fantastic achievement to get this recognition.
You can read or listen to Grant’s story at either Episode 662 or its recent reissue as Episode 678 (our audio producer Jeremy Carter’s Staff Pick for 2025).
We’re thrilled to share that Matt Tighe’s “As Brittle as Granite” has been nominated for an Aurealis Award for Best YA Short Story. The Aurealis Awards are Australia’s premier speculative fiction awards, and we couldn’t be happier for Matt!
You can read or listen to Matt’s story at Cast of Wonders Episode 646 – and why not check out some of his other short fiction stories, too?
Genres: Horror
When Billy was four, a tall construction man’s arm broke beside the street. Billy was dog-walking with Mom, and the tall man was there, and the big block of cinder—it fell with a cronk, thudding onto the man’s arm, which was too-tall now, and pulsing, with an extra elbow that went the wrong way. The man screamed, and Billy screamed back—their voices touched, and that turned Billy’s arm to jelly, too, and made the butterflies inside him try to lick their way out with their little mouths. He looked away, but the tall man with the too-tall arm was still in his thoughts, and he couldn’t get him out.
It happened for years, mostly when Billy slept. There were long, dark hallways, and the too-tall arm man would be there, and he would shuffle at Billy. Not quickly: he knew Billy couldn’t get away. The hallways were too crooked (like an arm), and they never bent the way Billy expected. The man just shuffled slowly, until Billy turned a corner, and he was out of sight, and then he would scramble fast to get close, and coming around the corner he would have even more arms, with even more bends where there should be none. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Modern Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Urban Sci-Fi
The news is spreading. We try to keep working through our English tests, but it’s becoming impossible to focus. Laughter and drumming call us to join the crowds on the streets, as irresistible as Odysseus’ sirens. I imagine myself tied to my desk chair, ears plugged up with wax instead of noise-canceling headphones, and chuckle to myself.
Mr. Lanigan leans around his monitor. “Molly, did you just giggle?”
“Possibly?”
Two storeys down, the crowd erupts with cheering. The students nearest the windows peer out wistfully. So does Mr. Lanigan. He ought to be retired by now, but he’s still here, and we’re glad. He’s kept a lot of our secrets and we’ve kept his. At first it was weird to watch out for someone so much older than us, but he stood up for us every chance he got, and somehow, together, our ordinary classroom discussions became outlets for us to be ourselves: to give voice to the dreams and hopes that had miraculously survived not just high school, but high school under all this.
Genres: Fantasy, Rural Fantasy
The Great Plains can be disorientatingly flat, feeling more akin to the distant oceans than to the forests or mountains of neighboring states. In a tiny oasis anchored by a gnarled old bur oak, two friends lay on a plaid blanket, the ripening wheat spreading out from them as far as the eye could see. The tree once identified the border between two fields, before GPS, satellites and computer mapping rendered the old markers unnecessary.
“I thought sirens lived in the sea?” the farm boy asked his companion. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Horror, Horror Sci-Fi, Science Fiction
The orb appeared on a Friday. Just popped up in the northeast corner of the horse pasture, out where the grass grew thin and the ground was spotted with gopher holes. It was black and not a bit shiny despite the heat shimmers dancing around it. From a distance, as Cole and I rode along the dry creek bed, it looked more like the absence of something. A blank spot in the air.
It wasn’t until we got closer that we realized there was something there after all: a giant, dull marble suspended about three feet off the ground. The horses didn’t like it, rolling their eyes and snorting, but they were ranch-bred and broke and used to doing things they didn’t like.
Cole slid out of his saddle and passed his reins to me. I held his mare as she pawed and swished her tail while Cole walked over to the thing.
“It feels funny,” he said as he got closer. I wasn’t surprised to hear it since the hair on his head had begun to float upwards. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Post-Apocalypse
A small crew is waiting at the starting line. They’re all buzzing around the car, poking and prodding and talking amongst themselves. It won’t start, which is unsurprising. The car never starts on its own, but the young men with big ideas want to know why and the thrill-seekers are worried their team will get disqualified if this goes on any longer. A woman named after a forgotten god points towards a ruined gas station. A figure draped in feathers and marked with machine grease appears from behind the ARCO’s crumbling walls.
Finally, the witch is here. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
In Chloe Chew’s suffocating hometown, there’s only one place fit for necromancy: the parking lot outside Em’s motel, where summer heat wavers above cracked pavement, blurring the darkness on the horizon. Forest fires have driven away all the tourists, so Chloe’s safe to prepare her resurrection materials between the yellow lines.
She presses her hands to the torn-up canvas as it flaps in the wind off the highway, Asperthbell’s skyline rippling in its peeling acrylic. Her victim is a painting she found in the back of Miss Plent’s classroom, wedged between old answer keys, entirely forgotten. Perfect for a resurrection. She recognizes Asperthbell’s gas station in its streaks of red, but besides that the painting’s portrayal of her hometown is unrecognizable—no ash. No smoke.
The painting’s ghost trembles in her hands. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy, Mythology
What does one feed a hungry ancestor? Fish and chips, chicken parmi, or steak pie didn’t seem like something my recently deceased Popo would enjoy.
I’d just returned from my backyard swamp with a full trash bag, when the phone rang. The call bounced with around-the-world echoes and I’d barely said hello, when Ma started in on her visit to the medium.
“I asked your Popo if she was comfortable. Ai yah, Li-Li,” cried Ma, “she scolded me! She said: Twenty years my granddaughter doesn’t come home. I go all the way to Australia to visit and she doesn’t even offer me a meal.” The click of Ma’s tongue was like a slap. “You should respect your ancestors!” (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Monday, 1st of June
Dear Mama,
I am sorry to tell you that Fanny is out hunting Poets again. It’s such a bore. She’ll be tiresome when she gets back, obv. sans Poets. No good telling her we don’t have the right sort of climate, or that she’d be sorry indeed if she caught one. She’ll persist in calling that bit of meadow above the duck pond “the moor,” lying in the grass pretending she’s just been thrown from her horse. Papa won’t let her take the plow horse, so she pretends hers has run off.
Later: A bit of excitement. Fanny has contrived to twist her ankle out on “the moor.” It’s swollen to a frightful size. She’s mum on how she managed to walk home on it. (You mustn’t worry; she is perfectly well. Carrying on dreadfully, but you know how she is.)
Spoke to Papa after she retired, in re: something must be done. But as usual, No One Listens To Me. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Fantasy, Horror Fantasy, Post-Apocalypse
Episode art adapted from an image by Photorama from Pixabay
Christmas at Grandma Minerva’s was first published in Short and Twisted Christmas Tales, North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop, Fall 2017 and reprinted at Metastellar, Dec 2021
I’m hanging Great Aunty Jane on our tree by one pipe cleaner leg, while my sister Daisy places Great Uncle Richard.
“Careful with those ones,” Mama warns. “They’ve always been a bit flimsy.”
“They shoulda taken more care,” Daisy says.
Great Uncle Richard is just an old wooden clothes peg, the kind you hang out on the washing line, but with sticks for arms and legs. Every Christmas we end up hot-gluing those legs and arms back on, as they’re always falling off. There’s only a tuft of his hair left, but Mama says that don’t matter so much, as he was half-bald anyway. Great Aunty Jane is only slightly better; she’s an old piece of dowelling with small holes drilled into her body for where her pipe cleaner arms and legs fit. Those pipe cleaners are so worn through that you can see the metal, but Mama says that’s how Aunty made her, so that’s how she’ll stay. I’m also thinking Aunty must have been half-blind when she made her decoration because the bright red lips she painted on are huge.
“Some people don’t spend much time on their decoration,” Mama reminds us. “They ain’t got time or they don’t like to think of dying. Sometimes people gotta finish it for them.” (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Comedy, Comedy Sci-Fi, Science Fiction
Art created by Katherine Inskip from images by Gerd Altmann, Daniel Roberts, and Bianca Van Dijk from Pixabay
The ship was barely a million kilometres away from Earth when Commander Fowler heard a meow.
He stopped what he was doing and frowned. Spaceships did not normally meow. They’d been rocketing away from Earth for the best part of a week, and it hadn’t happened once. He wandered through into the main living room of the spaceship, where he found his crewmate, Munroe, reading the First Contact Manual. Munroe had his feet up on the table; one of them was tapping at a frantic pace.
“Did you hear that?” Fowler said. “I thought I heard a meow.”