Posts Tagged ‘bereavement’

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Cast of Wonders 572: The Time Traveler’s Cookbook (Staff Picks 2023)

Originally published in Cast of Wonders as episode 533, 13 April 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:46 — 39.3MB)

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The Time Traveler’s Cookbook

by Angela Liu

  • Day: 4202
  • Place: Northern Laurasia (later known as Mongolia)
  • Time: 66,000,000 BC (late-Cretaceous Period)
  • Meal: Magnolia and Grilled Oviraptor

Mom’s cookbook recommends tenderizing the meat so I fashion a club from a young cycad, but I might as well be beating a rock with a feather.

Don’t eat dinosaur. Just don’t. Mom marked it as a must-have, saying it looks and tastes “like an exotic giant chicken,” but just getting to the meat has been a nightmare. The skin’s teeth breakingly-tough and the sucker hooked me in the thigh with one of its nasty claws during the hunt. I’ve staunched the bleeding with Happy Time Traveler’s super medical glue, but holy hell it still hurts. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 540: That Good Night

Cast of Wonders 540: That Good Night is a Cast of Wonders original.

Bereavement

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:26 — 42.6MB)

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That Good Night

by Francesco Rahe

This is how the old pass.

Like fog on a sunny summer day. Like a gray cirrus cloud fading before the pearly moon. Like a brush of cool wind on a starry night. Like a snowflake melting upon a windowpane.

They pass in the night, silent, with a single peaceful breath. They pass in hospital beds, amid beeping machines, with a rattle of oxygen shaking free from their chests. They pass with families around them, with aged spouses clasping their hands, or they pass alone, with no one at all. They pass and they enter the shadowlands and no matter who is with them when they pass, this final step they take alone. They enter the shadowlands alone, they stride its craggy shore, they sail their coracles past the moonlit sky, and they do not return. (Continue Reading…)

image of aurora in the arctic

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Cast of Wonders 535: The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen

This story was first published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, issue 124, June 2013

Death, bereavement, harm to animals

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:52 — 59.9MB)

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The Girl Who Welcomed Death to Svalgearyen

by Barbara A. Barnett

In the town of Svalgearyen, on the thirty-third day of the months-long winter night, Grandma Marit abruptly cast her knitting aside and marched toward the door.

“It’s my time,” she declared—a pronouncement that elicited a whimper from Gunther, the bushy little sheepdog who had been curled up at her feet.

Her granddaughter, Adda, set her own knitting down with far more delicacy but also a great deal of surprise. “Where are you going?”

“Well,” Grandma Marit said as she heaved herself into her heavy winter coat, “I can’t die here, now can I?” (Continue Reading…)

chinese bao

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Cast of Wonders 533: The Time Traveler’s Cookbook

Cast of Wonders 533: The Time Traveler’s Cookbook is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:35 — 43.7MB)

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The Time Traveler’s Cookbook

by Angela Liu

  • Day: 4202
  • Place: Northern Laurasia (later known as Mongolia)
  • Time: 66,000,000 BC (late-Cretaceous Period)
  • Meal: Magnolia and Grilled Oviraptor

Mom’s cookbook recommends tenderizing the meat so I fashion a club from a young cycad, but I might as well be beating a rock with a feather.

Don’t eat dinosaur. Just don’t. Mom marked it as a must-have, saying it looks and tastes “like an exotic giant chicken,” but just getting to the meat has been a nightmare. The skin’s teeth breakingly-tough and the sucker hooked me in the thigh with one of its nasty claws during the hunt. I’ve staunched the bleeding with Happy Time Traveler’s super medical glue, but holy hell it still hurts. (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 521: Wind Settles in the Bones (Staff Picks 2022)

Originally broadcast as Cast of Wonders 511, 14th October 2022

Dysfunctional family and working relationships
Bereavement

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:04 — 46.0MB)

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Wind Settles in the Bones

by Stephen Granade

Syn hated pre-race press conferences. Instead of mentally preparing for competition, she had to smile and answer every media outlet’s repetitive questions. Timm Yancy with One AU especially frustrated her. He unfailingly asked inane human-interest questions like “what did you have for breakfast this morning?” (a magnetocarbonate shake so she could sense magnetic fields, followed by protein-rich cricket bars for the nausea, same as every race day) and “is that a new haircut?” (as if it would be seen under her spacesuit helmet). But Syn hadn’t become the third-ranked solar wind racer by putting off unpleasant tasks, so she called on him first. And that was how Syn learned that her dad had died.

Syn’s teeth ached and her ears hummed from the cameras floating in front of her. Their magnetic fields were a hundred times stronger than the solar wind’s, and the magnetocarbonate made her bones thrum like bass strings plucked too hard. Then Syn realized how long she’d been silent, gaping at Timm. Her media training took over. She offered a sad smile calibrated just so. “It’s hard, but I know he’d want me to focus on the race.” (Continue Reading…)

space athlete

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 511: Wind Settles in the Bones

Cast of Wonders 511: Wind Settles in the Bones is a Cast of Wonders original.

Dysfunctional family and working relationships
Bereavement

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:03 — 44.4MB)

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Wind Settles in the Bones

by Stephen Granade

Syn hated pre-race press conferences. Instead of mentally preparing for competition, she had to smile and answer every media outlet’s repetitive questions. Timm Yancy with One AU especially frustrated her. He unfailingly asked inane human-interest questions like “what did you have for breakfast this morning?” (a magnetocarbonate shake so she could sense magnetic fields, followed by protein-rich cricket bars for the nausea, same as every race day) and “is that a new haircut?” (as if it would be seen under her spacesuit helmet). But Syn hadn’t become the third-ranked solar wind racer by putting off unpleasant tasks, so she called on him first. And that was how Syn learned that her dad had died.

Syn’s teeth ached and her ears hummed from the cameras floating in front of her. Their magnetic fields were a hundred times stronger than the solar wind’s, and the magnetocarbonate made her bones thrum like bass strings plucked too hard. Then Syn realized how long she’d been silent, gaping at Timm. Her media training took over. She offered a sad smile calibrated just so. “It’s hard, but I know he’d want me to focus on the race.” (Continue Reading…)

CoW 471 banner

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Cast of Wonders 471: The Storyteller’s Wife

“The Storyteller’s Wife” was originally published in the June, 2005, issue of Realms of Fantasy

Bereavement; illness

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:27 — 48.4MB)

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The Storyteller’s Wife

by Eugie Foster

Janie Harper felt strange driving home with the sun so high, the tawny-gold of noon instead of the cool, buttery silver of early evening. Ten years of nine-to-five drudgery, lost weekends sacrificed to project deadlines, corporate double-speak, and mind-numbing boredom. All gone.

She’d hated her job, hated her days spent watching the clock and wishing the hours of her life would speed away while she was trapped in her cubicle. But even with three months to prepare for this day, her last one, the morning had passed in a surreal haze punctuated by queasiness and a peculiar chill, like her stomach was lined with ice. She remembered nestling the glass-framed photograph of Tom, her husband, into the box the secretary had provided for her personal effects, but not carrying it to her car. And she couldn’t remember driving out of the concrete monolith of the parking garage, or if she’d obeyed the speed limit in the school zone, or even if she’d fastened her seatbelt.

At least her supervisor had known about Tom, about their situation, and had taken Janie aside before the pink slips went out. Janie, through her upset, had remembered to be grateful. She had needed the head start to make arrangements, to prepare herself and Tom for the now-uncertain future. But even three extra months hadn’t been enough time. No one was hiring: not for secretarial positions, not for retail associates, nor food service, and certainly not mainframe programmers who needed full health benefits. (Continue Reading…)