Posts Tagged ‘Neurodiversity’

stately home garden distorted by a kaleidoscope

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Cast of Wonders 618: Beneath the Unreal Gardens of the Virtual Villa

Cast of Wonders 618: Beneath the Unreal Gardens of the Virtual Villa is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:12 — 63.5MB)

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Beneath the Unreal Gardens of the Virtual Villa

By M.K. Hutchins

Self-defense class in the virtual reality sim is supposed to be safe. My green dummy-partner lumbers toward me like a particularly unthreatening zombie and grabs my throat. I clasp my hands together, crash down on those green elbow joints, then strike up at its nose with everything I have, just like Mrs. Rodriguez showed us.

Green blood sprays all over me.

I cough, splutter, stagger back. Who’d program a dummy that way? Several girls gape in horror. Two guys start laughing. No one else made their dummy gush blood.

Mrs. Rodriguez smells wounded social prey like a great white shark—Carcharodon carcharias. She hurries over with a plastic-fake, angelic smile. “As you can all see, Anne has gotten into the spirit of things! Excellent work, Anne!” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 592: Flawless

First published in 2013 in the short story collection Twisted Winter, edited by Catherine Butler

Image by Leonhard Niederwimmer from Pixabay

 neglect and dysfunctional relationships

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:11 — 47.0MB)

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Flawless

by Frances Hardinge

When people stay in hotel rooms, they suddenly turn into toddlers. Weird, creative, screwed-up toddlers.

Let’s smear jam on the wall! Let’s leave apple cores in the drawers! Let’s hide used nappies behind the radiator, so that they fill the whole room with the smell of cooked poo! Hello, whoever cleans this room! I’ve left you a surprise!

Maybe they think there’s some hidden handle we pull to flush the room clean. But there isn’t. The only ‘handles’ are Mum, ‘occasional Kev’ from the village, and me. Kev’s just Occasional and Mum has everything else to do, so cleaning is mostly my job, particularly during the school holidays. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 584: Robot Girl

Cast of Wonders 584: Robot Girl is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:06 — 42.7MB)

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Robot Girl

by Grace Griego

At age nineteen, Robot Girl had dropped out of the most prestigious university in the country, had no objectives in life, and was now stuck pet sitting for the lovely lesbian couple at her old church. Everything she was programmed not to be and do, Robot Girl had now become.

1 Extra Large Pepperoni Pizza

Robot girl tightened her faded, pink Hello Kitty Hair band then typed her order through a delivery service, rather than actually talk to anyone on the phone. Something deep in her wiring went off at this idea, but she didn’t know why. Robot Girl much preferred not to bother anyone if she could help it. And really, she couldn’t help it, it was in her programming. “Remember, Robot Girl! Be nice and polite!” her mother had always told her before she went to school. “Got it! Polite and nice!” Robot Girl never failed to reply, the words coming out stiff and wrong.

Nice. Robot Girl had grown to hate that word. It was the kind of word a fellow classmate would use to describe you because they didn’t know what else to say. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 477: Three Monsters That Are Not Metaphors (Staff Picks 2021)

Previously published as part of Cast of Wonders episode 450

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:51 — 8.5MB)

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Three monsters that are not metaphors

by Dani Atkinson

1. The kelpie is not a metaphor for depression.

“You’re kind of like a metaphor for depression, though,” I tell her, and she snorts angrily. Her hide twitches, dark and sticky as tar pits.

Just because she’s deceptively appealing, and wants to trap me and drag me down into cold grey waters, means nothing. Just because I am already drowning does not make it a metaphor. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 457: Just Like the Speeding Heart

Cast of Wonders 457: Just Like the Speeding Heart is a Cast of Wonders original.

Neglect

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:10 — 13.5MB)

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Just Like The Speeding Heart

by Osahon Ize-Iyamu

It’s seven A.M. and you’re making akara and tea, just for yourself and not for the two of us. You ask if it’s time, and it is, but I won’t tell you that. Let you be silent and make your tea and not speak. Let you be as you are—unhearing as ever, keeping this energy as I keep this information from you. Mama—Let you be blissful in ignorance, and let’s keep the silence of the morning as a beautiful thing, a hallowed memory.

Let this be true.
(Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 450: Little Wonders 28 – Metaphors & Allegories

Cast of Wonders 450: Little Wonders 28 – Metaphors & Allegories is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:39 — 24.8MB)

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Show Notes

“This is not my adventure”, by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez, was originally published in Uncanny Magazine #30, Disabled People Destroy Fantasy, 2019

Three monsters that are not metaphors

by Dani Atkinson

1. The kelpie is not a metaphor for depression.

“You’re kind of like a metaphor for depression, though,” I tell her, and she snorts angrily. Her hide twitches, dark and sticky as tar pits.

Just because she’s deceptively appealing, and wants to trap me and drag me down into cold grey waters, means nothing. Just because I am already drowning does not make it a metaphor. (Continue Reading…)