Posts Tagged ‘Young Adult fiction’

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Cast of Wonders 696: The Purpose of a Pyromaniac Descendent

First published in Tales & Feathers, February 2025
Episode art by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:21 — 23.8MB)

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The Purpose of a Pyromaniac Descendent

by Wen Wen Yang

I don’t know why I expected the afterlife to be different from my beforelife.

In fact, I hadn’t expected an afterlife at all. As the youngest person in dìfǔ, with no descendants, I certainly didn’t anticipate gifts. I was a first-generation American who had a vague idea of the Chinese holidays, but stopped paying attention as soon as I left home.

I woke up in my grandparents’ home. My chest felt hollow, and I realized I didn’t have a heartbeat. Congenital heart defects are bullshit, by the way.

Nǎinai and Yéye greeted me with much hand-holding. We didn’t hug while living. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 695: Goldenrod

Cast of Wonders 695: Goldenrod is a Cast of Wonders original.

Non-graphic body horror

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:55 — 23.2MB)

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Goldenrod

by A. James

It was Krissy who loved the old McCarson house. I didn’t see the appeal. It had a frightening precarity to it. The house’s powder blue paint peeled and flaked in the front like lichen, and its front pillars were stripped back to the wood. Its steps crumbled like clumps of dry soil. During storms, the broken shutters thrashed and the rusted fence wailed.

It was also Krissy who concocted the plan to sneak over the orange-tinged chainlink fence. We went around to the back of the house so no one would see us. On this side it looked nicer. The back door swung open to our touch on screeching hinges. Inside, the walls and floors were cloaked in translucent sheets of plastic that crackled as we walked. Well, I walked. Krissy bounded and twirled, her mouth stretched in maddening glee. She scurried from one space to the next like an eager little mouse.

“Sid, come look at this!” Krissy cried from another room. The house groaned as I made my way across the hall. Krissy sat at a large piano. The translucent sheet of plastic that had protected the instrument lay in a crumpled heap on the ground. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 694: Ready to be Seen

Cast of Wonders 694: Ready to be Seen is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:16 — 48.4MB)

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Show Notes

Image by 1234hadar from Pixabay

Ready to be Seen

by K. J. Isley

My Soul-Ripening ceremony is over at last. The cake has been eaten, though not by me. The last guest bids me harmony and my mother politely ushers them out the front door. Since I had no list of friends to offer up, she invited my whole age set. I begged her not to, but she swept away my objections like so much unwanted clutter.

“The revelation of adulthood only happens once, Firin. I’ve watched you grow. Known you better than you know yourself all these years. This day matters.”

Even so, my mother demurred when they asked if she’d be presenting my Soulpiece during the gathering.

“Firin has always been modest. She will decide for herself who she wishes to share her soul with, now that she is eighteen.”

That’s when my fears coalesced into certainty. Whatever my Piece reveals about me, it must be terrible. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 693: Twenty-Four Hours

First published in Clarkesworld, June 2024

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 40:59 — 56.3MB)

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Twenty-Four Hours

by H H Pak

Six hours left.

“What do you want to eat sweetheart?” She looks at me expectantly, holding out her phone to show me the menu. “It is your special day. I’ll get you anything you want.”

I smile, shake my hands. “Eomma, it’s fine. You don’t have to do this.”

“I know. But this is your favorite restaurant. Why not indulge a bit?” She hums as she scrolls through the options. “It must have been hard to get anything authentic out there. I can’t imagine the cafeteria on the base was giving you anything half edible.”

“It wasn’t bad,” I laugh. “Mostly processed stuff. They couldn’t import very often across the desert.”

She sighs.

“Well, you’re here now and that’s all that matters. You’re here, and I’m going to get you anything you want. How about this set?” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 692: Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything

Originally published in Diabolical Plots, May 2025

Image by Jean-Marie from Pixabay

Ableism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:13 — 36.0MB)

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Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything

by Effie Seiberg

The Super-Abled 501 Local Union building wasn’t ADA compliant.

I sat in my wheelchair next to the three steps that led to their front door, and groaned. My brand new laser eyes didn’t exactly fix my mobility problems.

Two weeks ago, I’d been zapped by a falling piece of alien spaceship debris and developed laser eyes. Ten days ago, I’d lost my job at the City Planner’s office because of budget cuts. I wasn’t even mad though, because I could never push my projects through and you know who gets stuff done without anyone getting in their way? The super-abled. As soon as I got home I filled in my union application.

Yesterday I’d gotten notice that I could join after I demonstrated my new laser eyes in person. And now here I was. Stuck. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 689: All these inscriptions are for me

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

First published in translunar travellers lounge in February 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:33 — 35.1MB)

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All These Inscriptions Are for Me

by Carol Scheina

On the outside, there was no indication that the warehouse down the street from my apartment stocked its shelves with books from parallel universes.

It didn’t look like much: a chipped-brick box crammed between a mechanic’s shop and a medical supply depot. In front was an asphalt parking lot dotted with oil stains and flattened screws. The sign above it blinked “Books!” in a seedy-bar shade of neon red.

Money was tight because for one thing, the dentist’s office where I politely answered phones was temporarily closed for remodeling. And the other reason, which I didn’t like to think about, was because I was living on one income now that the divorce was finalized. I had to watch my budget, for there was rent and food, but still, I hungered for an escape between pages. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 688: Forestborn

First published in Gamut in February 2017.

Image by Jerzy from Pixabay

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:02 — 27.5MB)

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Forestborn

by Sylvia Heike

“I am forestborn,” the girl with a wild bird’s nest for hair said to me. “I can’t live in houses.”

I thought she meant some houses, large houses, and not all of them. Houses with a room for shoes, houses with keepers in aprons looking after said houses, houses with wings. I didn’t want that kind of home either. That’s the kind of house that ends up owning you, not the other way around.

I found us the perfect cabin built out of weathered logs, hugged by the forest on all sides. The carpenter who built it had quiet, loving hands—I could tell from the craftsmanship alone. The back garden was but a hare’s leap of grass, a humble doorstep between my world and hers.

Though we weren’t wed, I carried her over the threshold. “We are in the forest. I would never try to take you away.” (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 687: Little Wonders 50 – Quest Tropes

Cast of Wonders 687: Little Wonders 50 – Quest Tropes is a Cast of Wonders original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:23 — 28.0MB)

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Show Notes

The Last Quest of Corbin the Coward was originally published in Factor Four Magazine, June 2022.

Incite

by Lisa Para

I’m sure of it. The universe thinks I’m destined to become a Main Character.

No way it’s because of my pink hair? But the day after I dyed it from my normal shiny black was when things started to get weird.

My public high school suddenly instituted school uniforms. When I walked in wearing my pleated skirt, a statistically unlikely number of boys got gushing nosebleeds and asked me to join their eclectic clubs. Um, no thank you.

The next afternoon, I had an honest-to-goodness meet-cute with a guy outside the library. I was so absorbed in my book I tripped on the water fountain’s edge. He snatched my novel from the air and folded me into his arms to steady me, but dropped his book in the water in the process. We laughed and our gazes met and it was like time stood still, with pink roses and shiny bubbles rising all around us.

Naturally, I punched him in the face and ran away before he could get the right idea. (Continue Reading…)

bones and a woodland backdrop

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Cast of Wonders 686: The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One

Cast of Wonders 686: The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One is a Cast of Wonders original.

Content warning: horror themes, gaslighting, gore, power asymmetries, pyrrhic victories.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:23 — 63.7MB)

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Show Notes

Image by biglinker from Pixabay

The Marrow Gatherer and the Rotten One

by Nichole L. Lightner

In a hollow under a dead tree, Clementine hummed an old song to honor the disciples. The song was a tradition passed down from her mother, and her mother’s mother, all the way back to the ones that named the celestial bodies blazing in the sky. Black stars burned in the afternoon’s amber sky, radiating hazy red and purple halos.

Around her, the strangled disciples’ bodies swayed from leafless tree branches, bramble thorns scratched against yellowed bones bulging up from the dirt, and scuttlers danced along the teeth in the trunks of the trees. Clementine sang to bring all the dead disciples peace. To beseech the Great Ones as they did was a cruel life to choose. The path to become an Idol, long-lived and educated in the deepest mysteries of the sky, was dangerous, and the disciples whose minds and bodies broke were brought here to the Starlit Woods, to Clementine’s trees. They died here, with Clementine and the Rotten One. This was also tradition, as ancient and revered as the Great Ones.

The dead disciples’ flesh belonged to the Rotten One, and their eyes belonged to the many-winged mavens. The bone-aphids made their nests in what remained, and Clementine, the marrow gatherer, burned the thin husks of the disciples’ bones in a small, sacred pyre and took the honey. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 685: Sunset at the Western Front

First published in ZBN Presents & ZBN Presents Year 2 in July 2024

Image by Iris,Helen,silvy from Pixabay

War. Multiple f-words.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:45 — 60.1MB)

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Sunset at the Western Front

by Christine Lucas

Millie craned her neck from behind the rusted bench to scout ahead. The overgrown square before her was what, fifty steps across? Five steps to the demolished kiosk slightly to her left. Then another ten steps to the cluster of the ever-present varnish trees a little to the right. If she kept her head low, she’d make it to the downed battlebot at the other side without being noticed—or followed. Deep in the Dead Zone, this area was patrol-free at this time of night. However, other scavengers had undoubtedly heard about the crashed chopper near the enemy lines. She needed the loot from that chopper; she hadn’t had a decent meal in days.

So Millie ran. And hid. And ran again. And ducked, and crouched in the crook of the battlebot’s armpit, a shadowy little alcove beneath the dented plates of its pauldrons. Humanoid in shape but three times the size of an average man, it now lay spread-eagle on its back, its pincers and stompers limp on the broken pavement. A gutsy spot for a human to seek shelter while other species roamed as they pleased. The battlebot had been left here long enough for flash floods to deposit soil into the crevices of its body. Dandelions sprouted all over, centipedes crawled in and out of bullet-holes, and another varnish tree grew out of the blast hole that had almost severed its torso from its legs. (Continue Reading…)

red headed woman with a camera

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Cast of Wonders 684: Little Wonders 49 – Aging Memories

Cast of Wonders 684: Little Wonders 49 – Aging Memories is a Cast of Wonders original.

Death, terminal illness, dementia. Some f-words.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:03 — 35.8MB)

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The Girl Detective

by Nadia Radovich

You: twelve, uncertain, under-dressed. The Girl Detective: fox-haired, quick-witted, fictional. Always zooming about, passport in one hand, magnifying glass in the other. Congenitally incapable of au-pairing in Madrid, skiing in the Alps, taking a train anywhere, without stumbling into some tantalizing mystery.

Your friend, Zofia: solving puzzles so fast that the Girl Detective never dies, not even in the game’s final level. You sit at her elbow, watching her deft mouse movements search chests, accuse suspects, dodge falling tiles. In the sunlight at recess you see the faint hint of fox color in her hair.

Then, in seventh grade, your friend Zofia: dead. You: at the funeral, the dim church light stealing all the copper from her hair, wondering if you only remembered it that way. (Continue Reading…)

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Cast of Wonders 683: Born of the Mountain’s Chill

First published in The Future Fire in May 2025

Image by Celio Nicoli from Pixabay

Colonialism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:22 — 34.8MB)

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Born of the Mountain’s Chill

by Louise Hughes

I was born on a day of deepest cold, on a mountain wrapped in ice, and lived there without worry for the first fifteen years of my life. Then came the newcomers and their village, fires, and judgement.

They came up onto the high pasture in the thaw season and stood among our silk tents. They sat and shivered and said, “are you not cold?” a lot. They walked around making suggestions to my mother, who was our trader and went to market. She knew the most about talking to other people and she was used to shaking hands with them, which made the rest of us flush. (Continue Reading…)