Posts Tagged ‘families’

Image of a derelict overgrown blue car

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 562: One Last Broken Thing

Originally published in The Dark, February 2021

Swearing (two f-words) & homophobic slurs

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:09 — 48.2MB)

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

One Last Broken Thing

by Aimee Ogden

In elementary school, the other kids called Liv’s home that haunted house out on Barnhill Road. Liv herself has never seen a ghost there, but not for want of trying. They called her father lots of things: Freddy Krueger, Charles Manson, David S. Pumpkins. Now that she’s in high school, the other kids call her the spooky girl: to her face, on ugly pieces of paper smashed up small and pushed through the vents of her locker. Stay away from me, spooky girl. Don’t talk to me again in English, spooky girl. I saw you looking at me in the locker room, you spooky fuck. (Continue Reading…)

Girl with balloons walking on a landscape made out of an open book

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 557: Printed in Ink and Ashes

Cast of Wonders 557: Printed in Ink and Ashes is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:10 — 55.1MB)

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

Printed in Ink and Ashes

by Priya Sridhar

In the basement, scant lightbulbs sputtered in and out. The single torch, propped on a shelf, shone on the pages as I reviewed my copy: The plight of the Hindu laborer must be addressed on a societal level. He is forced to face his burdens alone, often without friends or family.

Typewritten stencils, leaving corpses of plastic letters on the ground. Mildew sprinkled the walls and released a foul odor. When I opened new ink, that stink would mix with the mildew.

Rage filled me as I pressed the keys on the typewriter. When I visited my father, he hadn’t even offered me a cup of coffee or asked how I was. Instead, leaning on his store counter, he told me about his latest backaches and arguments with his tenants. When I hinted that I was parched but wanted to pay for a soda, he offered me a cup of white Ovaltine. Its taste reminded me of how I missed my mother’s chai, how it would always soak the tongue with spices.

Father owned a candy shop in Seattle by a trolley stop; it also sold sodas and tobacco for those interested. He would curate newspapers and magazines for travelers and offer hot coffee to loyal customers. For children, he would boil sweetened Ovaltine powder in milk.

“You have grown too fast,” he’d grumbled in Tamil. “And you are eating too much, Shyama. How much money are we sending for your education?” (Continue Reading…)

comforting image of a cup of tea and a paperback book

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 547: From Here

Cast of Wonders 547: From Here is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:53 — 20.1MB)

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

From Here

by Wen Wen Yang

The smoldering joss sticks behind the psychic burned my throat as I sipped on chrysanthemum tea from a juice box.

“Where are your lodestones buried?” The psychic had a round face like my nainai, though she wore her hair in a pixie cut instead of the ubiquitous perm.

“The Bronx,” I croaked out.

The psychic snorted. “What were you doing there?” (Continue Reading…)

Genres:

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)

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

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 by Freepik

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 539: Little Wonders 39 – Home Ties

Cast of Wonders 539: Little Wonders 39 – Home Ties is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:54 — 33.2MB)

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

Show Notes

Minor Magics of Chinatown was originally published in Factor Four Magazine, April 2022

Park’s All-Night Ramyun and Snack Emporium

by Seoung Kim

After the stoplights go to flashing red and the bars make their last calls, Park’s All-Night Ramyun and Snack Emporium lights up, its warm yellow lanterns beckoning customers from the street.

The tiny dining area just outside the truck is already full: a rusalka who always leaves the counter wet; her girlfriend Ms. Llorona, who uses too many napkins crying but refuses to order less spicy noodles; the old yokai lady Mrs. Rokuro with her mile-long neck; and a jiangshi who isn’t eating but stares at every drunk club-goer who stumbles down the street.

Yujin Park crosses their arms and leans back on the freezer, checking their phone for the fiftieth time that shift. It seems like everyone is out enjoying the last summer before senior year — except for them. Their feed is full of rooftop parties and group selfies.

Even if they could escape from the drudgery of scrubbing moldy drains, the thought of showing up covered in a thick layer of grease is too mortifying to bear. (Continue Reading…)

Art image of woman

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 538: Nnome

First published in A Mind to Silence – 2022 Caine Prize Anthology in August 2022

Blood, violence, abusive families, self harm, murder and death. Not suitable for all audiences.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:03 — 64.8MB)

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

Nnome

by Audrey Obuobisa-Darko

Onyankopɔn is a woman. And a man. And everything above and in-between. Akuba says Onyankopɔn kissed the tips of His fingers on the sixth day, and sculpted these bodies as worldly vessels for our spirits. Why do we call Onyankopɔn just ‘He,’ when Akuba says that all of us were made in the image of God; all the men, all the boys, all the women, all the girls, all those people who don’t quite look like either men or women but rather cut-and-paste versions of each thrown together?

Why do we reduce Onyankopɔn to only ‘He,’ when I see God in that video of my mother, with her full body that flows like emerald water, and silvery-black locs that cascade down her arched back till they kiss the point where her buttocks greet her waist? You should see the part where she wields her tumi, when she closes her eyes, and her locs dance and rise about her like living, breathing things, when they weave themselves together to form the shape of a stool, when the stool appears in the sky above, when her hair wraps around it and sets it down on the ground. I see Onyankopɔn in Asante from my class; his body glows like the sun on God’s happy day when he Fades from one place and Reappears at another. Onyankopɔn also looks like the man-woman person Da warned me to stay away from, with their body that can bend, and shift into different forms of being other than human. But when Onyankopɔn made me, They did not make me well. (Continue Reading…)

image of aurora in the arctic

Genres: ,

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)

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

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

Genres:

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)

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

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…)

A hand holding an oak seedling

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 532: The Hidden Forests of Earth and Mars

Cast of Wonders 532: The Hidden Forests of Earth and Mars is a Cast of Wonders original.

climate change and ecological collapse

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:24 — 53.0MB)

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

The Hidden Forests of Earth and Mars

by Anna Zumbro

Seventeen hours before some of us are to launch on a nine-months-and-forever journey to Mars, my little brother Enoch lands on my tricked-out Park Place and even he knows before counting his cash that he can’t pay the rent. We’ve been lowballing him so he can stay in the game (he’s six), but I bankrupted my dad last turn on this square so he knows what’s coming.

His face twists into a pout, then calms with obvious effort. Kids who are going to Mars have to learn to bounce back from disappointment. He knows that, too.

“It’s a good thing,” my stepdad Hugh says, sweeping Enoch’s money toward me. “There’s an old astronaut tradition that you should lose a game before you launch. Uses up your bad luck.” (Continue Reading…)

two figures facing away from each other, wreathed in abstract stylised curls of fog

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 527: Both Hope and Breath

Cast of Wonders 527: Both Hope and Breath is a Cast of Wonders original.

Transphobia, misgendering, rejection

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:58 — 58.6MB)

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

Both Hope and Breath

by Riley Tao

It’s perfectly normal for breath to fog up mirrors. Everyone knows that. For most of my childhood, I never thought twice about the way mirrors went cloudy when I drew near. The only time it really mattered was when Dad flew me to school; even well into my upper school years, I never could sit in the front seat without frosting over the rearview mirrors, much less pilot an aerostat myself.

In my senior year at Ettwood Upper, I was the only person still flown to school by a parent–and Dad never let me forget it.

“You know,” Dad said, smoke and mist drifting out from between his lips, “I did the math. If your Aspiration didn’t block you from piloting, I would’ve saved two hundred hours this year.”

I sighed, letting out a cloud of Aspiration. As always, the faint white mist hung in the air for a second before gravitating towards the nearest mirror–in this case, the left-hand passenger window. “Well, I’m sorry that the physical manifestation of my hopes and dreams isn’t good enough for you.” (Continue Reading…)

Genres: , ,

Cast of Wonders 526: La Puerta (Staff Picks 2022)

Originally broadcast as Cast of Wonders 517, 11th December 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:17 — 68.1MB)

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

La Puerta

by Ren Braueri

La puerta siempre estaba abierta. Just in case Javier ever came back.

But let me not begin there, because…if I started there – I’d have to tell you how it was all my fault. Instead, let me start with the day Papá brought La Puerta home. (Continue Reading…)

Ysarin (Staff Picks)

Genres:

Cast of Wonders 522: Ysarin (Staff Picks 2022)

Originally broadcast as Cast of Wonders 500, 17th July 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:27 — 57.1MB)

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

Ysarin

by Simon Pan

On days when I came home crying, my grandmother was always there with her song.

It was a tune friendly and old as the roads that crossed Mazael: the sort you shared while you watched the land roll away on horseback, or sitting at a moonlit fireside among familiar faces. I would lean against my grandmother on our rickety porch and breathe in her scent as she sang to the street.

Magic lay in that song, the notes so delicate you could tell a story about each one. As the beginning strands of music twined together, I would be transported to a place that let me forget the ache in my chest, a city of an entirely different skin than our Lenniel. A place of worn streets and thatched roofs wrapped in the smell of woodsmoke and fresh ale. A sunset, a fire, the sky on fire and the streets ablaze with torchlight.

“This is our song, dear,” she would say as she smiled down at me. “Don’t listen to the other children. We will always have our home with us…” Her fingers would press against my chest just above my heart. Somehow she knew the exact place where her spell took root. “Here.”

Even after so many years, that is how I think of home. Sitting there on that porch with the wind stealing my tears and carrying away the sound of magic. (Continue Reading…)