Posts Tagged ‘magic’

colourful rabbit silhouettes on a red background

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Cast of Wonders 680: Firecrackers on 28 Mott Street

First published in Worlds of Possibility in February 2024.

Image by Pfeilgiftfeder from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:15 — 16.8MB)

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Firecrackers on 28 Mott Street

by Angela Liu

The children wield firecrackers as they enter the old shop on Mott Street. Copper wind bells chime as the door closes behind them.
Inside, velvet curtains block all natural light. Here the glow of porcelain lamps and red paper lanterns light the space. Glass display cases line the walls like a dusty museum: enchanted ivory boxes carved with intricate beasts, voice-altering fox masks, curse paper, flutes for conjuring love songs. Behind the unmanned register, a grinning cat amulet dangles on the wall alongside framed photos of the neighborhood’s most decorated magicians and standing next to each of them, in her signature tiger-print vest, is Miss Lin, the proud owner of 28 Mott Street, the last General Alchemy Shop in Chinatown.

Dino’s the first one to walk up to the display cases.

“Is that it?” he says, pressing a finger to the glass.

Sally swats his hand away. “You know Miss Lin likes to keep everything spotless.” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 679: Sometimes It Happens That Way (Staff Picks 2025)

First published as Cast of Wonders 631, February 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:10 — 49.7MB)

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Sometimes it happens that way

by Jamie Lackey

I stood on the platform bundled up in one of my pa’s old work coats, its stained, fraying cuffs hanging well past my fingertips. The acrid stink of magic was thick in the air, rolling off the engine in hot waves. My ma took me by the shoulders and shook me, her fingers cold and hard even through the heavy coat.

“Your uncle lined up a good job for you out west,” she said, leaning close to shout over the steady rumble of the engine and the din of strangers’ voices. She smelled like the expensive formula my baby sister needed, powdery and sweet. “You work hard, and we can bring you back home in a few years.” She tucked my train ticket into my pocket.

I nodded. The thought of leaving home made my stomach curdle like old milk on a hot day, but I was almost twelve years old. I wanted to contribute. I was small for my age, and not strong, not like my older brothers and father. But my uncle had found me a job where small was what the bosses wanted. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 674: Witches Racing Cars (Staff Picks 2025)

Image adapted from a photo by JAMES OKAJA from Pixabay

First published as Cast of Wonders 650, August 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:08 — 40.0MB)

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Witches Racing Cars

by Nadav Schul-Kutas

A small crew is waiting at the starting line. They’re all buzzing around the car, poking and prodding and talking amongst themselves. It won’t start, which is unsurprising. The car never starts on its own, but the young men with big ideas want to know why and the thrill-seekers are worried their team will get disqualified if this goes on any longer. A woman named after a forgotten god points towards a ruined gas station. A figure draped in feathers and marked with machine grease appears from behind the ARCO’s crumbling walls.

Finally, the witch is here. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 673: Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art (Staff Picks 2025)

First published as Cast of Wonders 645 in July 2025.
Image by Camila Denleschi from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:13 — 47.0MB)

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Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art

by Olivia B. Chan

In Chloe Chew’s suffocating hometown, there’s only one place fit for necromancy: the parking lot outside Em’s motel, where summer heat wavers above cracked pavement, blurring the darkness on the horizon. Forest fires have driven away all the tourists, so Chloe’s safe to prepare her resurrection materials between the yellow lines.

She presses her hands to the torn-up canvas as it flaps in the wind off the highway, Asperthbell’s skyline rippling in its peeling acrylic. Her victim is a painting she found in the back of Miss Plent’s classroom, wedged between old answer keys, entirely forgotten. Perfect for a resurrection. She recognizes Asperthbell’s gas station in its streaks of red, but besides that the painting’s portrayal of her hometown is unrecognizable—no ash. No smoke.

The painting’s ghost trembles in her hands. (Continue Reading…)

creepy christmas decoration

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Cast of Wonders 670: Little Wonders 47 – We Wish You a Creepy Christmas

Cast of Wonders 670: Little Wonders 47 – We Wish You a Creepy Christmas is a Cast of Wonders original.

Implied harm to animals; Cannibalism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:26 — 36.3MB)

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Show Notes

Episode art adapted from an image by Photorama from Pixabay

Christmas at Grandma Minerva’s was first published in Short and Twisted Christmas Tales, North Texas Speculative Fiction Workshop, Fall 2017 and reprinted at Metastellar, Dec 2021

Family Christmas

by Anne Wilkins

I’m hanging Great Aunty Jane on our tree by one pipe cleaner leg, while my sister Daisy places Great Uncle Richard.

“Careful with those ones,” Mama warns. “They’ve always been a bit flimsy.”

“They shoulda taken more care,” Daisy says.

Great Uncle Richard is just an old wooden clothes peg, the kind you hang out on the washing line, but with sticks for arms and legs. Every Christmas we end up hot-gluing those legs and arms back on, as they’re always falling off. There’s only a tuft of his hair left, but Mama says that don’t matter so much, as he was half-bald anyway. Great Aunty Jane is only slightly better; she’s an old piece of dowelling with small holes drilled into her body for where her pipe cleaner arms and legs fit. Those pipe cleaners are so worn through that you can see the metal, but Mama says that’s how Aunty made her, so that’s how she’ll stay. I’m also thinking Aunty must have been half-blind when she made her decoration because the bright red lips she painted on are huge.

“Some people don’t spend much time on their decoration,” Mama reminds us. “They ain’t got time or they don’t like to think of dying. Sometimes people gotta finish it for them.” (Continue Reading…)

historic nevada town

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Cast of Wonders 664: Blood and Talent

Cast of Wonders 664: Blood and Talent is a Cast of Wonders original.

Content notes: injury, violence, historical racism, domestic violence, death

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:05 — 77.0MB)

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Blood and Talent

by Jamie M. Boyd

William Bird was sweeping up at the end of the day when a white man barreled into his barbershop like a runaway stagecoach. The man carried a mess of a younger fella in his arms and cried out, “Help, he needs the Touch!”

When Bird saw the gaping stomach wound, his first thought was another mining accident. He motioned to the cot in the back, raised his hand and tried to staunch the flow of blood with his mind. Energy drained from him like water and traveled into the young man. It crackled and branched and–oh.

Bird went cold as his eyes flew open. He could feel the lacerations, trace them where they were too blood-saturated to see. And this was no gash made from explosives. It’d been inflicted by magic. (Continue Reading…)

green-toned image of a bayou

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 653: Life and Death and Love in the Bayou

First published in Writers and Illustrators of the Future Vol 40, April 2024

Domestic Violence. Mention of past attempted rape.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:10 — 44.2MB)

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Life and Death and Love in the Bayou

by Stephannie Tallent

It was the February the rain fell so warm and hard the bayous swamped over old man Rochambeau’s gator curing shack and the whole parish smelled like graveyard mold and sour-smelling gator crap, even the houses built up on stilts above the high-water line, that I decided to help my mama once and for all. No matter the cost to my soul.

’Bout that shed . . . I knew old man Rochambeau would just hit up my mama to use the ham hut for his haul, and she’d say yes, so I didn’t feel too bad. Not for him, anyway.

Felt bad for my mama, who’d be stuck bumping up against log- shaped hunks of gator meat while she seasoned and cured the hogs. Touch one of those logs of meat, and it’s like the Spanish moss is dragging against the back of your neck, like the spirit of the gator is still there and pissed off and just waiting to chomp on you and roll you.

Those spirits are truly there, lurking to garner just a bit of power, enough to touch the living world. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 650: Witches Racing Cars

Cast of Wonders 650: Witches Racing Cars is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:25 — 39.0MB)

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Show Notes

Image adapted from a photo by JAMES OKAJA from Pixabay

Witches Racing Cars

by Nadav Schul-Kutas

A small crew is waiting at the starting line. They’re all buzzing around the car, poking and prodding and talking amongst themselves. It won’t start, which is unsurprising. The car never starts on its own, but the young men with big ideas want to know why and the thrill-seekers are worried their team will get disqualified if this goes on any longer. A woman named after a forgotten god points towards a ruined gas station. A figure draped in feathers and marked with machine grease appears from behind the ARCO’s crumbling walls.

Finally, the witch is here. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 648: Precious Little Things

First published in Reactor (Tor.com), November 2019

Image by Kirill from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:31 — 66.6MB)

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Precious Little Things

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

There is a book on the floor of Shelf Hall. Tam walks in its shadow, the spine raised above him like the ridge of a hill. His parents passed down to him the story of long ago when it held riches. The tribes had come to it from every dominion, braving the spiders of the Dusty Expanse, the rats of the Wall Paths and the fierce, infested tangles of the Bearskin Jungle, all to take their share of this fallen treasure.

Its title once read, in letters tall as Tam, On The Essence Vital And Its Uses. First they had stripped the gold from those indented characters and then begun the work of carving off the leather from the slanted slopes. The thread had been unlaced from its spine and the glue chipped off, to be taken and re-melted in a thousand pots.

These latter days, only the wood of its cover-boards remains. That and the mouldering paper within, which magicians still sometimes mine in search of legible lore beneath the rot.

Tam is not after wisdom, though. He is after gold.

High above that fallen tome is the Shelf. Craning the peg of his neck, Tam can barely see it, just a faint suggestion of form against the distant ceiling, like a cloud. He rolls his wooden shoulders and flexes the knuckles of his carven hands. He has a long climb ahead of him. (Continue Reading…)

illustration of a motel and parking lot

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Cast of Wonders 645: Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art

Cast of Wonders 645: Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:07 — 45.5MB)

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Show Notes

Image by Camila Denleschi from Pixabay

Chloe Chew and the Museum of Undead Art

by Olivia B. Chan

In Chloe Chew’s suffocating hometown, there’s only one place fit for necromancy: the parking lot outside Em’s motel, where summer heat wavers above cracked pavement, blurring the darkness on the horizon. Forest fires have driven away all the tourists, so Chloe’s safe to prepare her resurrection materials between the yellow lines.

She presses her hands to the torn-up canvas as it flaps in the wind off the highway, Asperthbell’s skyline rippling in its peeling acrylic. Her victim is a painting she found in the back of Miss Plent’s classroom, wedged between old answer keys, entirely forgotten. Perfect for a resurrection. She recognizes Asperthbell’s gas station in its streaks of red, but besides that the painting’s portrayal of her hometown is unrecognizable—no ash. No smoke.

The painting’s ghost trembles in her hands. (Continue Reading…)

teddy bear reading a book, against a light blue background

Genres: ,

Cast of Wonders 638: A Spell of Grief

Cast of Wonders 638: A Spell of Grief is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:59 — 23.3MB)

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A Spell of Grief

by Rae A Shell

The library was closing in ten minutes.

Lucas stared at the picture books, paralyzed by both indecision and nostalgia. Hurry up! he screamed at himself. If he was late, if he screwed up the ceremony again….

Sure, Lucas would be hardest on himself. Aunt Meg was more likely to comfort him than scold him, but the two of them had agreed, were adamant, that this year, this year he would succeed. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 631: Sometimes It Happens That Way

Cast of Wonders 631: Sometimes It Happens That Way is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:23 — 48.6MB)

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Sometimes it happens that way

by Jamie Lackey

I stood on the platform bundled up in one of my pa’s old work coats, its stained, fraying cuffs hanging well past my fingertips. The acrid stink of magic was thick in the air, rolling off the engine in hot waves. My ma took me by the shoulders and shook me, her fingers cold and hard even through the heavy coat.

“Your uncle lined up a good job for you out west,” she said, leaning close to shout over the steady rumble of the engine and the din of strangers’ voices. She smelled like the expensive formula my baby sister needed, powdery and sweet. “You work hard, and we can bring you back home in a few years.” She tucked my train ticket into my pocket.

I nodded. The thought of leaving home made my stomach curdle like old milk on a hot day, but I was almost twelve years old. I wanted to contribute. I was small for my age, and not strong, not like my older brothers and father. But my uncle had found me a job where small was what the bosses wanted. (Continue Reading…)