Posts Tagged ‘gardens’

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Cast of Wonders 454: The Fairy Queen

Cast of Wonders 454: The Fairy Queen is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:02 — 23.4MB)

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The Fairy Queen

by Lynn Buchanan

She made the first fairy by accident, with a twig she found under a hawthorn tree. It was a stick possessing the general shape of a human, with offshoots that resembled arms and legs, and a knot she called a head. Sitting in the shade of the tree, she wrapped a bit of twine around the twig’s torso, tearing off a piece of thread from the cuff of her sleeve and decorating the “arms” in tight white lines. With a ribbon pulled from her hair she clothed the stick, folding the silk into a tunic tied at the back with a bow. For hair she picked up a strand of leaves from the grass beside her, fastening the stem down the slope of the wooden face with three pieces of her own hair, pulled with a jerk and grimace from her skull and braided into a cord the color of sunsets. Last of all she attached to the twig’s back a set of butterfly wings, collected earlier that day from a trip to the garden. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 447: Candy Wrappers (Staff Picks 2020)

First published in Cast of Wonders episode 437 in November 2020

colonialism, death

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:41 — 32.2MB)

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Candy Wrappers

by Kaitlyn Zivanovich

The island is a circle. A magmic glow radiates from the lips of the volcano crater at one end—hot, and alive. On the other end the Visitor compound is white and cold, lit by the new false light. But it is darkness the island child seeks as she sprints through the garden of the dead, cradling her brother’s soul in her hands.

Mikmik dashes from night-shadow to night-shadow. She skirts around overgrown patches of soulseeds, left uncollected by their living. There is no singing in the garden. Jyn chatters and laughs in Mikmik’s palm, completely unchanged for all that he no longer has a body. “Faster!” he cries. The wind rushes over his soulseed. “Run, Mikmik, run!” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 437: Candy Wrappers

Cast of Wonders 437: Candy Wrappers is a Cast of Wonders original.

colonialism, death

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:23 — 32.0MB)

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Candy Wrappers

by Kaitlyn Zivanovich

The island is a circle. A magmic glow radiates from the lips of the volcano crater at one end—hot, and alive. On the other end the Visitor compound is white and cold, lit by the new false light. But it is darkness the island child seeks as she sprints through the garden of the dead, cradling her brother’s soul in her hands.

Mikmik dashes from night-shadow to night-shadow. She skirts around overgrown patches of soulseeds, left uncollected by their living. There is no singing in the garden. Jyn chatters and laughs in Mikmik’s palm, completely unchanged for all that he no longer has a body. “Faster!” he cries. The wind rushes over his soulseed. “Run, Mikmik, run!” (Continue Reading…)

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 408: Growing Resistance

First published in Translunar Travelers Lounge in August 2019

Profanity, Plague

This story comes with a pretty significant content warning.  It’s an incredibly hopeful story, but the setting and themes surround healthcare in a post-pandemic world. This may be just the story you need right now, or it might be the exact opposite. Please listen or read with that in mind.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:28 — 31.0MB)

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Growing Resistance

by Juliet Kemp

The late-afternoon sun hovers above the wall as I kneel on the earth, weeding tomatoes. Beyond the wall, yellow-orange light reflects off the clean sharp lines of the apartment blocks. Boxes for safe people, people who are provided for. People who matter. People who I knew, once upon a time. People who could afford the vaccine before the gates closed. The plague’s gone now, but the wall’s still here.

On this side, the wall’s shadow stretches out as the sun sinks, spreading over the crumbling low-rise council blocks that don’t get repaired any more. In between them there are patches of shanty-town on top of the spaces where the army razed houses to the ground.

My garden is on one of those bare patches, next to Mathias’s and my house, which was once in the middle of a row of terraces and is now on the end. Mathias insisted we put a fence up. I planted brambles up against it so it looks less like the barrier it is. It’s not like we don’t share what we grow here, and I understand why Mathias did it. Still feels like a tiny echo of the wall.

(Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 252: The Forty Gardens of Calliope Grey

Cast of Wonders 252: The Forty Gardens of Calliope Grey is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:40 — 26.5MB)

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The Forty Gardens of Calliope Grey

By Aimee Ogden

In her fourth-floor apartment on Wrightwood Avenue, Calliope Grey kept forty gardens of varying size and composition. She had gardens in drawers, in old hat-boxes and mixing bowls. In the drawer that pulled out from beneath her stove, she had a desert garden of cactuses and sagebrush; in the plastic freezer box that was meant to store ice cubes, she grew bearberries and arctic moss.

Real gardens, in miniature, not models or mere toys. Calliope didn’t go out looking for them, but they’d found their way to her one by one. It had been some years since she’d discovered a new one, but she still harbored hopes every time she opened a cupboard or peered beneath the furniture. Once, she’d opened a box of cereal only to have a jumble of dirt and tangled roots go spilling into her bowl. Another time, she’d left a coffee cup out on the end table overnight and found it overflowing with a tiny raspberry bramble the next morning. It didn’t matter where they come from, only that they found their way to her. She had room in her heart for all of them, and plenty more to spare.

(Continue Reading…)