Posts Tagged ‘Andrew K. Hoe’

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Cast of Wonders 412: Eight to the Eighth

Cast of Wonders 412: Eight to the Eighth is a Cast of Wonders original.

Spiders

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:40 — 21.2MB)

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Eight, to the Eighth

by Liam Hogan

Spider was fed up. Fed up, and upside down. She hung from a web in the darkest corner of Witch’s cottage, swinging back and forth in the most fed up manner she could fashion.

Each time she swung she scowled with all eight eyes at the torn open envelope with the Royal crest on the side table below. Witch’s gilt-edged invitation to the Palace Ball, the social spectacular of the year, had arrived that very morning.

Spider knew exactly how things would go. How the annual event always went. Witch would not, of course, RSVP. If pressed, she would say how terribly busy she was, and how she definitely hoped to make it, but she really couldn’t say for certain until much closer to the date. But she wouldn’t RSVP later on, either. Instead, Witch would turn up at the Summer Palace of the King and Queen of Freyen-Noyen, on the night of the Ball, invitation in hand, and claim she’d found herself unexpectedly free of an evening and she trusted her gracious hosts wouldn’t mind her unannounced attendance?

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Cast of Wonders 411: Studies on the Impact of Homeschooling, or When Not to Wear a Tuxedo

Cast of Wonders 411: Studies on the Impact of Homeschooling, or When Not to Wear a Tuxedo is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:43 — 19.4MB)

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Studies on the Impact of Homeschooling, or When Not to Wear a Tuxedo

by R. Rozakis

“Daddy, can I use the atom scramblizer?” Hilde kicked her heels against the metal cabinet she was perched on.

“No, pumpkin.” All she could see of him were his feet sticking out from underneath the giant chassis.

“How about the temporal destabilizer?”

“No, pumpkin.”

“Can I at least graft some new wings onto Spuffy?”

Her father slid out from under the chassis, pushing his goggles up onto his forehead. Dr. Acheron von Phlogiston never went anywhere without his goggles. He’d even convinced them to let him keep them during his jail stints. Not that those ever lasted long before he’d craft an ingenious device from common cutlery and break his way free once more. “Sweet pea, we’re at a critical juncture in this plan and I need to concentrate. Can’t you find something to do in your room?” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 406: The Hammer-Royal Model For Making the Superhero A-List

Cast of Wonders 406: The Hammer-Royal Model For Making the Superhero A-List is a Cast of Wonders original.

Toxic Relationships

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:09 — 19.8MB)

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The Hammer-Royal Ten Step Model for Making the Superhero A-List

by Jason Kimble

1. Have super powers

Mom and Dad insist I’m too young to consider a career in the hero business, but I’m seventeen and I need to prepare. I figure if I pay attention, I can put it all together. I’ve only got the one piece for the list right now, but I know I’ll add more as we go.

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Cast of Wonders 400: Knitting in English (Staff Picks 2019)

Originally appeared in Cast of Wonders 371 (August 25, 2019)

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Knitting in English

by Brit E. B. Hvide

Looping the thread over her needle, Kari caught the sun in her knit. It was an old spell: warmth trapped in rows of neatly patterned wool to stave off the winter wind. The first spell her pappa taught her. The only one she knew.

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Cast of Wonders 399: Breaking (Staff Picks 2019)

Originally appeared in Cast of Wonders Episode 370, August 18, 2019.

Terminal Illness

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:10 — 20.7MB)

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Breaking

by Maya Chhabra

Mom’s kind of bizarrely happy for someone with a daughter about to croak, but I don’t mind. She saved my life. When I collapsed, I was still only fourteen: too young to have an imprint taken. If she hadn’t found me in time, I would be dead already, and gone. Now I’m safe, and they’ve pretty much stopped everything but palliative care. I’d like to be corporeal longer, and grow human-wise, but there’s nothing more they can do.

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Cast of Wonders 398: Take Heart (Staff Picks 2019)

Originally appearing in two parts in Cast of Wonders Episodes 373 and 374, September 2019.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:14 — 40.0MB)

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Take Heart

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

Magdalena perched on the edge of a flimsy folding chair, fingers knotted. The overseer’s office reverberated with the movement of the factory: a steady, pounding rhythm that made up the heartbeat of the city of Tammin. She focused on the way the inkwell trembled, rather than on the overseer behind the desk. The woman who held Magdalena’s past—and immediate future—in her hands.

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Cast of Wonders 397: Wordslinger, Wordwreaker (Staff Picks 2019)

Originally appeared in Cast of Wonders Episode 354 (Artemis Rising 5), March 28, 2019.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:14 — 36.4MB)

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Wordslinger, Wordwreaker

by Amanda Helms

The wordslinger first came into Lasthope on the back of a scarab the size of a large pony, during the worst flaying-wind storm in a generation.

Mind, we didn’t know then that she was a wordslinger, or even that she was a she. I didn’t witness it direct, but later one of our regulars told me of her, all bundled up in hat and gloves and too-big cloak, on account of them winds, you see. She climbed off her scarab with the stiffness of someone too long in the saddle. But like any rider worth her salt, she saw to her mount afore she came into the saloon, which is where I first saw her myself.

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Cast of Wonders 396: Bunny (Staff Picks 2019)

Previously appeared in Cast of Wonders 356: Little Wonders 20: 2018 Flash Fiction Contest Winners (April 8, 2019).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:59 — 9.6MB)

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Bunny

by Amy Brennan

You are crying.

Salty tears dripping into my fur and steaming off in the dry heat.

You hug me tightly, I feel your ragged breathing, your shivers as you hold in the sobs that want to be free.

I want to offer more comfort, but what am I? – Just bits of fabric with plush stuffing, a pink button nose and a pair of beaded eyes. I can do no more than be hugged, do no more than silently offer sympathy, wish to the legendary stuffed toys of the past – and to Veleveteen most of all – that I can do more.

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Cast of Wonders 395: Barter Queen (Staff Picks 2019)

Originally appeared in Cast of Wonders 352, March 10, 2019.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:46 — 31.4MB)

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Barter Queen

by Sarah Pauling

Soledad lets Gabe do the introductions because most strangers see him as the more respectable sibling. His attentive green eyes stare from under thick lashes, and his hair lies flat even when it’s desperately in need of a cut.

“We want Queen Mary’s protection,” he says, brazen as anything. Soledad tries not to stare at the ground. Gabe squeezes her hand.

“What can you give her?” the man at the door asks. Huge firearms dangle from his sides.

“We got guns, for one thing. And we’re mechanics. We can fix things. Bikes.”

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Cast of Wonders 380: Little Wonders 23: Comfort is Universal

Cast of Wonders 380: Little Wonders 23: Comfort is Universal is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:24 — 31.9MB)

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Taking the Nine to the Last Shop

by Craig Robert Saunders

I.

The last shop before the fog is my favourite shop of all. It has candy, which is best. It sells shrimp which never, ever goes off, krill, newspapers, mops and buckets, and air packets you can open that tickle your tentacles just like the popping candy, which Grandma lets me have even though she hates the sound of the air packs and the poppers. She likes the hardboiled sweets. They have what seems like endless rows of jars of those behind the counter. You can buy things for the house there, and things for dull days when the seas are hard and rough and you can’t go out, or when the fog’s so heavy it squashes you up so you can’t see above your parapet, and all you can do is draw yourself inside and listen to your mother muttering and feel the sway of Grandma moving underneath you both. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 376: The Ways of Walls and Words (Banned Books Week)

Originally published at Tor.com (April 15, 2015)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:57 — 57.2MB)

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The Ways of Walls and Words

by Sabrina Vourvoulias

Solitreo

“If it were not for Thee, what would become of me?”

She’s not speaking to me when she says this. Her poetry nests behind a prison’s walls. I am an unknown noise on the other side of her door—the only spot where sound enters or exits her world—a sweep of bristle against wood, some transitory trace of life that has nothing to do with her.

She and her people are in cells lined along a corridor in the deepest reaches of the convent. On occasion the mentally disturbed have been kept here, tended to and made safe by walls so thick they are more than an arm’s length. These people, however, are all one family: a mother; an adult son; four older daughters; and this one, who has spent nearly half her life in here.

That was all the information the Dominican Brothers shared with me the day I started. Except that I must not attempt to speak to the girl or her family through their doors. The Brothers made me swear this before I swept even one stone.

In the language I share with jailer and jailed, my name is Bienvenida, though my Nahuatl name is different. By the Brothers’ reckoning, it has been 1,562 years since the death of God. (Continue Reading…)