Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 696: The Purpose of a Pyromaniac Descendent

First published in Tales & Feathers, February 2025
Episode art by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:21 — 23.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

The Purpose of a Pyromaniac Descendent

by Wen Wen Yang

I don’t know why I expected the afterlife to be different from my beforelife.

In fact, I hadn’t expected an afterlife at all. As the youngest person in dìfǔ, with no descendants, I certainly didn’t anticipate gifts. I was a first-generation American who had a vague idea of the Chinese holidays, but stopped paying attention as soon as I left home.

I woke up in my grandparents’ home. My chest felt hollow, and I realized I didn’t have a heartbeat. Congenital heart defects are bullshit, by the way.

Nǎinai and Yéye greeted me with much hand-holding. We didn’t hug while living. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 695: Goldenrod

Cast of Wonders 695: Goldenrod is a Cast of Wonders original.

Non-graphic body horror

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:55 — 23.2MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Goldenrod

by A. James

It was Krissy who loved the old McCarson house. I didn’t see the appeal. It had a frightening precarity to it. The house’s powder blue paint peeled and flaked in the front like lichen, and its front pillars were stripped back to the wood. Its steps crumbled like clumps of dry soil. During storms, the broken shutters thrashed and the rusted fence wailed.

It was also Krissy who concocted the plan to sneak over the orange-tinged chainlink fence. We went around to the back of the house so no one would see us. On this side it looked nicer. The back door swung open to our touch on screeching hinges. Inside, the walls and floors were cloaked in translucent sheets of plastic that crackled as we walked. Well, I walked. Krissy bounded and twirled, her mouth stretched in maddening glee. She scurried from one space to the next like an eager little mouse.

“Sid, come look at this!” Krissy cried from another room. The house groaned as I made my way across the hall. Krissy sat at a large piano. The translucent sheet of plastic that had protected the instrument lay in a crumpled heap on the ground. (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 694: Ready to be Seen

Cast of Wonders 694: Ready to be Seen is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:16 — 48.4MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

Image by 1234hadar from Pixabay

Ready to be Seen

by K. J. Isley

My Soul-Ripening ceremony is over at last. The cake has been eaten, though not by me. The last guest bids me harmony and my mother politely ushers them out the front door. Since I had no list of friends to offer up, she invited my whole age set. I begged her not to, but she swept away my objections like so much unwanted clutter.

“The revelation of adulthood only happens once, Firin. I’ve watched you grow. Known you better than you know yourself all these years. This day matters.”

Even so, my mother demurred when they asked if she’d be presenting my Soulpiece during the gathering.

“Firin has always been modest. She will decide for herself who she wishes to share her soul with, now that she is eighteen.”

That’s when my fears coalesced into certainty. Whatever my Piece reveals about me, it must be terrible. (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 691: Little Wonders 51 – Unusual Pets

Cast of Wonders 691: Little Wonders 51 – Unusual Pets is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

Episode art created from images by JL G from Pixabay

How to safely store your dragons was first published in Flash Fiction Online in December 2023

How to Safely Store Your Dragons

by Marisca Pichette

Never on the mantelpiece. Their love of fire will soon create a blaze not even your magic can subdue, climbing the ceiling in search of a chimney, chewing insulation and nibbling the rafters to nothing. By the time you return from the store, arms laden with spell candles and kale, of your cottage only smoke will remain. So please—never store your dragons on the mantlepiece. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 690: The Universe and Miss Debbie

Image by Mollyroselee from Pixabay

First published in khōréō magazine, Issue 4.3, September 2024

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:36 — 62.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

Content warning: non-graphic body horror

The Universe & Miss Debbie

by Cindy Phan

Her name was Deb (Miss Debbie to the staff), but everyone at SALON LA BELLE called her Clockwork, a covert nickname one of the children had coined one long, interminable afternoon while waiting in the backroom for the salon to close.

As nicknames went, it was a clever one. Every four weeks, on every Thursday of that fourth week, in walked the formidable and foreboding Miss Debbie.

3:45 p.m. Sharp.

Like clockwork. Just like Clockwork. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 688: Forestborn

First published in Gamut in February 2017.

Image by Jerzy from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:02 — 27.5MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Forestborn

by Sylvia Heike

“I am forestborn,” the girl with a wild bird’s nest for hair said to me. “I can’t live in houses.”

I thought she meant some houses, large houses, and not all of them. Houses with a room for shoes, houses with keepers in aprons looking after said houses, houses with wings. I didn’t want that kind of home either. That’s the kind of house that ends up owning you, not the other way around.

I found us the perfect cabin built out of weathered logs, hugged by the forest on all sides. The carpenter who built it had quiet, loving hands—I could tell from the craftsmanship alone. The back garden was but a hare’s leap of grass, a humble doorstep between my world and hers.

Though we weren’t wed, I carried her over the threshold. “We are in the forest. I would never try to take you away.” (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 687: Little Wonders 50 – Quest Tropes

Cast of Wonders 687: Little Wonders 50 – Quest Tropes is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:23 — 28.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

The Last Quest of Corbin the Coward was originally published in Factor Four Magazine, June 2022.

Incite

by Lisa Para

I’m sure of it. The universe thinks I’m destined to become a Main Character.

No way it’s because of my pink hair? But the day after I dyed it from my normal shiny black was when things started to get weird.

My public high school suddenly instituted school uniforms. When I walked in wearing my pleated skirt, a statistically unlikely number of boys got gushing nosebleeds and asked me to join their eclectic clubs. Um, no thank you.

The next afternoon, I had an honest-to-goodness meet-cute with a guy outside the library. I was so absorbed in my book I tripped on the water fountain’s edge. He snatched my novel from the air and folded me into his arms to steady me, but dropped his book in the water in the process. We laughed and our gazes met and it was like time stood still, with pink roses and shiny bubbles rising all around us.

Naturally, I punched him in the face and ran away before he could get the right idea. (Continue Reading…)

bones and a woodland backdrop

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 686: The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One

Cast of Wonders 686: The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One is a Cast of Wonders original.

Content warning: horror themes, gaslighting, gore, power asymmetries, pyrrhic victories.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:23 — 63.7MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

Image by biglinker from Pixabay

The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One

by Nichole L. Lightner

In a hollow under a dead tree, Clementine hummed an old song to honor the disciples. The song was a tradition passed down from her mother, and her mother’s mother, all the way back to the ones that named the celestial bodies blazing in the sky. Black stars burned in the afternoon’s amber sky, radiating hazy red and purple halos.

Around her, the strangled disciples’ bodies swayed from leafless tree branches, bramble thorns scratched against yellowed bones bulging up from the dirt, and scuttlers danced along the teeth in the trunks of the trees. Clementine sang to bring all the dead disciples peace. To beseech the Great Ones as they did was a cruel life to choose. The path to become an Idol, long-lived and educated in the deepest mysteries of the sky, was dangerous, and the disciples whose minds and bodies broke were brought here to the Starlit Woods, to Clementine’s trees. They died here, with Clementine and the Rotten One. This was also tradition, as ancient and revered as the Great Ones.

The dead disciples’ flesh belonged to the Rotten One, and their eyes belonged to the many-winged mavens. The bone-aphids made their nests in what remained, and Clementine, the marrow gatherer, burned the thin husks of the disciples’ bones in a small, sacred pyre and took the honey. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 683: Born of the Mountain’s Chill

First published in The Future Fire in May 2025

Image by Celio Nicoli from Pixabay

Colonialism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:22 — 34.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Born of the Mountain’s Chill

by Louise Hughes

I was born on a day of deepest cold, on a mountain wrapped in ice, and lived there without worry for the first fifteen years of my life. Then came the newcomers and their village, fires, and judgement.

They came up onto the high pasture in the thaw season and stood among our silk tents. They sat and shivered and said, “are you not cold?” a lot. They walked around making suggestions to my mother, who was our trader and went to market. She knew the most about talking to other people and she was used to shaking hands with them, which made the rest of us flush. (Continue Reading…)

sepia image of a bear and a woman

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 682: The Bear Wife

Episode art from an image by ImaArtist from Pixabay

First published in Metaphorosis in February 2019

This story can be read as a postpartum depression allegory

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:51 — 67.1MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

The Bear Wife

by Catherine George

The bear wife took the cub to mommy and me yoga. She didn’t look much like a bear without her fur, but somehow the other mothers seemed to sense it; when she came in carrying the cub they shifted away, drifting on their yoga mats closer to the windows, to each other. She was left alone in the middle like a stone dropped into a lake, each woman a wave rippling outward. In tree pose she was a lightning-struck pine at the center of a clearing.

It must be something primal, she thought, lifting the cub up in a sun salutation. A smell, maybe, or a musk that hadn’t gone away when the fur came off (worried now, she sniffed at her armpit as she twisted into warrior pose, but she smelled nothing but the plastic roses of her deodorant). Anyway, she didn’t blame them for staying away. The bear was still in there, just below the skin; if any of them threatened the cub she’d tear the heart from their chest.

As the mothers eased into downward dog — a ring of A-frame cabins, each sheltering a baby — the weathered blonde yoga teacher approached her mat and placed a gentle hand on the bear wife’s back, correcting her posture. “Like this,” she said. “Keep your back flat.” The hand pulled away, a bird taking flight, then settled again, on the hunch of her neck. “Focus on pulling the shoulder blades together behind you.”

The bear wife didn’t bother to tell her the hunch would never go away. No amount of focusing on her shoulder blades would remove the grizzly in her. (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , , ,

Cast of Wonders 681: Little Wonders 48 – Coping Mechanisms

Cast of Wonders 681: Little Wonders 48 – Coping Mechanisms is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:01 — 31.6MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Show Notes

Episode art adapted from an image by Hello Cdd20 from Pixabay

A Chest Full of Storm Clouds

by Elisabeth Ring

It’s Philip’s text that finally does it.

“Happy birthday!” it says. Just those two words. Not, “Happy birthday! I miss you!” Not, “Happy birthday! I’m sorry!” Not, “I was wrong. I love you. Please take me back.”

Happy. Birthday. Exclamation mark.

As if the long, emotionally fraught blocks of text above it, mostly from me, and un-responded to by him, don’t exist. As if he hadn’t broken my heart in a million pieces even before he left. As if we’re the kind of friends you remember to text on their birthday but not well enough to come up with anything more creative than just “Happy birthday!”

Reading that text, I feel something break loose deep inside. I maybe haven’t been handling the breakup well to begin with, plus work has been extra tough lately and I’m going to have to juggle credit cards to pay for everything this month. This text just unleashes everything I’ve been keeping locked up and I know I need to get to a storm chamber or I might actually explode. (Continue Reading…)

colourful rabbit silhouettes on a red background

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 680: Firecrackers on 28 Mott Street

First published in Worlds of Possibility in February 2024.

Image by Pfeilgiftfeder from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:15 — 16.8MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | RSS

Firecrackers on 28 Mott Street

by Angela Liu

The children wield firecrackers as they enter the old shop on Mott Street. Copper wind bells chime as the door closes behind them.
Inside, velvet curtains block all natural light. Here the glow of porcelain lamps and red paper lanterns light the space. Glass display cases line the walls like a dusty museum: enchanted ivory boxes carved with intricate beasts, voice-altering fox masks, curse paper, flutes for conjuring love songs. Behind the unmanned register, a grinning cat amulet dangles on the wall alongside framed photos of the neighborhood’s most decorated magicians and standing next to each of them, in her signature tiger-print vest, is Miss Lin, the proud owner of 28 Mott Street, the last General Alchemy Shop in Chinatown.

Dino’s the first one to walk up to the display cases.

“Is that it?” he says, pressing a finger to the glass.

Sally swats his hand away. “You know Miss Lin likes to keep everything spotless.” (Continue Reading…)