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Cast of Wonders 625: The Game of Mao (Staff Picks 2024)

First published as Cast of Wonders 587, May 2024

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:56 — 32.9MB)

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The Game of Mao

by Emma Victoria

The Game of Mao has only one rule: don’t explain the rules to the game of Mao.

It’s the only rule we may be told — the rest are clouded in secrecy and it is up to us to figure them out through trial and error. We must follow this set of ambiguous rules exactly, without knowing what they are. There are, in fact, so many rules that many times they go forgotten; it is impossible to memorize them all, so we only remember the common ones, the ones that carry the most serious implications, the ones we’ve decoded after years of experiments.

Today is a Tuesday, which means the rule of Tuesday applies: you cannot walk on sidewalks, all purchases must be made in dimes, and hats must be worn at all times.

(Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 624: My Mother’s Voice and the Shadow (Staff Picks 2024)

Colonialism; Generational Trauma

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:32 — 61.2MB)

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My Mother’s Voice and the Shadow

by A. W. Prihandita

I pressed my palm onto my chest and said, “Marie.”

I pointed at my mother, took a deep breath and braved her abyssal eyes, asking, “And you? What is your name, Mother?”

I shouldn’t have been in her room, but my father was away, and I was a curious child. I stood in quiet trepidation and waited to know her.

She towered over me, shadow-like in the dark, but by a sliver of moonlight I could see the empty, crooked smile on her lips. It made me shiver—it always did. It looked like the painted simper of a porcelain doll, with eyes too wide and skin too white—except my mother’s skin was dark and wrinkly like shrunken leather. Her pitch-black eyes were an echoing emptiness, a starless midnight sky to fall into, with no thoughts to catch you, only darkness.

My mother was mute and feeble-minded—or so my father said. I would’ve believed him until the end of my days, had the shadow not shown me otherwise. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 623: The Cat That Worked From Home (Staff Picks 2024)

First published as Cast of Wonders 583, April 2024

Image by Aleksandar Cvetanović from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:46 — 35.4MB)

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The Cat That Worked From Home

by Dan Peacock and Rachel Peacock

Macaroni’s workstation is set up just the way he likes it. He has a little laptop with little buttons for his little golden paws, adjusted to a comfortable height. His scratch post is within easy reach; all he has to do is lean over his mousepad and mouse and

Mouse!

Macaroni tackles the computer mouse and rolls around with it until he is sure it has been sufficiently killed. Satisfied, he returns to his work. It’s a good day to be working from home; the sun is coming through the window just right, and a warm rectangle of light is spreading across the carpet, ready for his lunch break.

Macaroni stops. There’s a noise from outside. He jumps up onto the windowsill and sees Gingerbread, his next-door nemesis, clambering over the garden fence.

Macaroni runs downstairs and out of the cat flap. The orange fur on Gingerbread’s back rises, but he quickly relaxes.

“Clear off,” Macaroni says. “This isn’t your garden. I’m trying to work from home here.” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 622: Open Skies and Hellfire (Staff Picks 2024)

First published as Cast of Wonders 582, April 2024

Bombs, terrorism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:04 — 28.9MB)

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Open Skies and Hellfire

by Olivia B. Chan

I liked to think of myself as a morally sound individual. It was easier to do when I wasn’t smuggling gunpowder to a teenager who may or may not have planned to blow up the caverns with it.

The smudgy teenager asked, “How much?”

I said, “An unreasonable amount. What are you going to do with all this, anyway?”

Caver kids had a certain look, and this one exemplified it. In the dark of the cramped tunnel, our two lanterns converging to cast multifaceted shadows, her skin clung to her bones. “How much do I pay?” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 621: Bodies of Sand and Blood (Staff Picks 2024)

First published in Cast of Wonders 580 in April 2024

Transphobia, abusive parents

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:03 — 41.3MB)

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Bodies of Sand and Blood

by Plangdi Neple

Sneaking into your father’s shrine is one of the most stupid things you have ever done, yet you feel entirely at home among the hanging masks and horsetails. Lanterns beside the doorway and at the opposite end of the shrine cast the faces of the other boys around you in an orange glow. The excitement on their dark, ruddy faces can’t match yours though, and your cheeks hurt from smiling too much.

You are seated on the bench furthest from your father’s big bone chair, hoping to be obscured by the shadowy darkness of the corner. The first three benches are crammed with boys jostling for a better seat yet unwilling to move to the empty benches behind. You scoff at their stupidity but pray they don’t stop clamoring for those seats. In your heart of hearts you belong with them, but you know the further away you are from them, the better. (Continue Reading…)

silhouetted horses against a backdrop of the starry sky

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Cast of Wonders 620: Fording the Milky Way (Staff Picks 2024)

First published as Cast of Wonders 577, February 2024

Abusive relationships, dysfunctional families

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:32 — 32.3MB)

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Fording the Milky Way

by Megan Ng

There’s a festival celebrated in China that’s dedicated to young lovers. It is not one celebrated here, but Ma tells me about it all the same. Storytelling is our way of killing time as she makes supper for the ranch hands or patches Pa’s shirts, and whenever she’s sitting comfortably with her hands full I know I’m about to hear something interesting. Ma’s stories aren’t like the ones in books– hers seem more thrilling and real, even though I know she’s making most of them up.

She tells me a story about a beautiful weaver girl who lives among the stars and falls in love with a human cowherd. She tells me about a vengeful mother goddess who rips the sky in two with a hairpin to keep the lovers apart forevermore.

On the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, the Jade Emperor takes pity on them, Ma says. He allows all the magpies of the world to form a bridge between the heavens, so that the weaver and her cowherd can see each other for a single night. (Continue Reading…)

a small gingerbread man in a bowl of gingerbread

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Cast of Wonders 619: A Properly Spiced Gingerbread

This story was originally published in DreamForge Magazine in March 2022 and later won the 2022 Critters Readers Choice Award for “Best Magical Realism Short Story.”

Image by Slava Sidorov from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 13:07 — 18.0MB)

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A Properly Spiced Gingerbread

by David Hankins

Run, run, as fast as you can. You can’t escape the Gingerbread Man. Granny had warned that magic could kill, but Lucy hadn’t expected to die at the hands of a cookie. (Continue Reading…)

stately home garden distorted by a kaleidoscope

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Cast of Wonders 618: Beneath the Unreal Gardens of the Virtual Villa

Cast of Wonders 618: Beneath the Unreal Gardens of the Virtual Villa is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:12 — 63.5MB)

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Beneath the Unreal Gardens of the Virtual Villa

By M.K. Hutchins

Self-defense class in the virtual reality sim is supposed to be safe. My green dummy-partner lumbers toward me like a particularly unthreatening zombie and grabs my throat. I clasp my hands together, crash down on those green elbow joints, then strike up at its nose with everything I have, just like Mrs. Rodriguez showed us.

Green blood sprays all over me.

I cough, splutter, stagger back. Who’d program a dummy that way? Several girls gape in horror. Two guys start laughing. No one else made their dummy gush blood.

Mrs. Rodriguez smells wounded social prey like a great white shark—Carcharodon carcharias. She hurries over with a plastic-fake, angelic smile. “As you can all see, Anne has gotten into the spirit of things! Excellent work, Anne!” (Continue Reading…)

creepy vintage doll

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Cast of Wonders 617: Emily

Cast of Wonders 617: Emily is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:51 — 27.3MB)

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Emily

by Alexander Hewitt

The bell jingled as we left the creepy little doll shop. The store owner smiled from behind the counter, one of those off-putting, ‘I know more than you do,’ kind of smiles. Her old, crackly voice didn’t help.

“Take care of her now, won’t you?”

She was a witch.

She was absolutely a witch. (Continue Reading…)

axe and chopped wood

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Cast of Wonders 616: Worse than a Wolf

Cast of Wonders 616: Worse than a Wolf is a Cast of Wonders original.

Content warning for implied past sexual assault

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:29 — 36.4MB)

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Worse than a Wolf

by Wen Wen Yang

The sound of the metal grinding against the whetstone reverberated up my arms. My father was sharpening his ax, preparing for the day’s work. “I invited Mu to dinner tonight,” he said.

I shuddered.

Mu was a woodsman whose family came from a neighboring village in China and had settled in the same rural town in Oregon a decade before my family. How happy my family was to hear our dialect! It almost made this foreign country feel safe. (Continue Reading…)

2024 at Cast of Wonders

2024 in review

  • Submissions window info: in addition to general submissions windows, we also opened to submissions for Halloween stories, our annual Banned Books Week event, and a limited-demographic window for Young Authors.
  • We published 48 stories over 45 episodes – a total of almost 150,000 words. 28 stories were original, and 20 were reprints.
  • We also produced seven re-issue episodes (6 Staff Pick stories, 1 Encore story)
  • This year we published five (and a half) stories by Young Authors, and were the first publication credit for a number of other authors. Our youngest author is a middle-grader who co-authored a story with her father!

You can access all our 2024 original fiction at this link. At the end of December, we’ll be releasing our Staff Picks from 2024.

We welcomed several new associate editors to the team: Rebecca Ahn and Becca Miles. We also wish Somto Ihezue all the best and a fond farewell as he moves on to bigger and better things.

 

Highlights

  • Award nominations: Cast of Wonders was nominated for the Outstanding Fiction Podcast Ignyte Award and the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio Work
  • Forbidden Voices by E J Delaney was nominated for the  2024 Woollahra Digital Literary Award
  • Park’s All-Night Ramyun and Snack Emporium by Seoung Kim was listed as one of the notable works of 2023 in the 2024 edition of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams
  • Milestones! We reached our 600th Episode in August this year, and celebrated with a story by a Young Author: Double Yellow Lines, by J. M. Bueno
  • Team Kudos: Associate Editor Somto Ihezue was nominated for a Nommo award for his short story Like Stars Daring to Shine. Somto is also involved in an exciting collaboration with Innocent Chizaram Ilo on a short film (“On our Skin”) based on Innocent’s story Our Skin Will Now Bear the Testimonies, which was published by Cast of Wonders during our 2019 Banned Books Week event.
  • Various Cast of Wonders crew represented the team at Worldcon in Glasgow – if you missed Associate Editor Samuel Poots’ academic presentation on Terry Pratchett in the Time of Steam-Engines: What Is Our Role in a Pre-determined Future? then you missed a treat!  Editor Katherine Inskip moderated one of two panels on Book Bans and Moral Fascism, and was a panelist on the topic of The Conventions and Cliches of YA Fiction. Editorial Assistant and Associate Editor Amy Brennan entered the Masquerade with a well crafted Outlander-themed costume.

 

Special Events

Cast of Wonders also ran a number of special events through the year

  • Banned Books Week – 3 stories selected for our annual event celebrating the freedom to read
  • Lodestar and Hugo Spotlight episodes – 6 stories highlighting the short fiction of Lodestar Award nominees and Astounding Award nominees
  • Halloween Special Event – 5 pieces of short fiction co-released with our sister shows
  • Young Author Stories – 5 stories accepted from our limited-demographic submissions windows for Young Authors

We are looking forward to a baking-themed Christmas episode this year. Following that, the team will present their Staff Pick episodes for 2024.