LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE - Science Fiction and Fantasy Story Podcast (Sci-Fi | Audiobook | Short Stories)

I’d never been on a quieter school bus. Kids were whispering to each other, looking scared as hell as the bus clipped stray branches from the endless forest pressing in on both sides of us. “This isn’t even a two-way road,” I murmured to Flora, the girl sitting beside me. She was chubby and had braces. “I know. Where IS this school? My parents said this would be the greatest thing ever for my college applications, but I don’t know about this.” | Copyright 2018 by Will McIntosh. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, a fox came across a cat in the forest. Or something very similar to a cat, at least. The thing was neither flesh nor fur, but pale enamel, the tip of its nose and the insides of its ears daubed with blood. It sat on its polished haunches atop a mossy log beside a babbling brook, paw metronoming in salute. “Hello,” said the fox to the cat, drawn to its gleam and its amiable expression, its bobbing foreleg, but mostly by the golden coin at its throat. | Copyright 2018 by Cassandra Khaw and A. Maus. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Qubits resolve and superimpose; information entangles and de-couples; consciousness re-emerges. I don’t know for how long I’ve been asleep. There’s so little energy left in the island-ship’s reservoir that I’ve been conserving as much as possible. A faint glow in the abyss, perhaps several thousand kelvins. It’s why I’ve been awakened. I change course and head straight for perhaps the last star in the universe. | Copyright 2018 by Ken Liu. First English language publication. Originally published in Chinese by the Future Affairs Administration on Weibo and WeChat as part of their “Spring Festival Gala” celebration in February 2018. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There once lived a man who was stolen from the sea. Rare and magnificent, he lived in his cave, rising to the surface every so often to pluck the strings of his violin for the birds before retreating into the water to play for his kin. They spent their days enthralled by the doleful songs of the man who lived in the littoral cave. But there came a day when the songs ceased and the people stopped going and the man was nowhere to be seen. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is exam week, and Donny is 14 years 10 months 15 days 10 hours 16 minutes old. He is bored and hungry and his scalp itches and he hates school more than he’s ever hated anything before in his life. He hates exams in particular, and he hates his math exam most of all. 54 minutes and 20 seconds are left before he can leave, before he can take the damned dunce cap off and be himself again. | Copyright 2018 by Bryan Camp. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pillai expected Kali border security to be much tighter than it was. All he got was a body search that was routinely thorough, and a few old-fashioned tests and checks. It reminded him of a visit he had made as a very young rightwing Hindu activist to an Indian nuclear weapon testing facility back in 1998, after the Pokhran atomic tests. His briefings had been correct in this respect: Kali did not seem to have much use for twenty-first-century Safe Care. | Copyright 2018 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Rajan Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well, the 101,201st Emperor needed some levies to build a huge statue of himself, so he said, “Okay, all of my recently subjugated peoples: If you’ve got at least two sons, you need to give me your first-born. But don’t worry, I’ll give him back, assuming he can survive ten years of lifting these big heavy stones.” In some places, people weren’t happy about this. The city of Yashar revolted, and in response the Emperor’s legions killed the men, castrated the boys, and sold all the survivors into slavery. | Copyright 2018 by Rahul Kanakia. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of course I can be angry. But I wear a headscarf. The moment I’m angry, you put me in your mental box labeled “TERRORIST” in neat, tidy small capitals. You store me under “Potential Danger” in the warehouse of your mind. When I cross the parking lot to the grocery store, sometimes people hit the gas, not the brakes. And this is a university town, supposedly liberal---or is it? I’m not a Muslim, but it’s not like most people around here can spot the difference. | Copyright 2018 by Bogi Takács. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Travel to Scandinavia if you can, the older cats told me, the queens in their raftered kingdoms. The coffee there, they said, is bitter as an old lie. The Norsemen are beautiful, their women even more sublime, but most importantly, they are quiet. Preoccupied only with Nordic things, disinterested in the outside world. This is crucial. This is what makes them safe. But this is not the only reason I am here. | Copyright 2018 by Cassandra Khaw. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The boy who will become court magician this time is not a cruel child. Not like the last one, or the one before her. He never stole money from Blind Carel’s cup, or thrashed a smaller child for sweets, or kicked a dog. This boy is a market rat, which sets him apart from the last several, all from highborn or merchant families. This isn’t about lineage, or even talent. He watches the street magicians every day, with a hunger in his eyes that says he knows he could do what they do. | Copyright 2018 by Sarah Pinsker. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The river’s in flood again, and it feels like a blessing from God. You emerge from your home, built with wood and plastic scraps of ancient towns, and stand on the green hill high above the rushing waters. You remember from when you were young that the river would spill over its banks every year, submerging the low-lying land, turning fields that had lain fallow through the darkness and bitter cold of winter into lakes of rushing, wild water. And then when the waters had drained away, the corn could be planted in the deep sediments left behind. | Copyright 2018 by Susan Jane Bigelow. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I seem to make an outcast of myself every time I’m a teenager. Which is fine, I guess. I’ll take one good dog and one good friend over being a phony and fitting in. Alicia points. “There he is, Jamie!” A couple hundred feet away, our trailer park’s newest resident grabs a box from the van parked in front of his single-wide. He’s gray-haired and buff, like if The Rock were an old man. Alicia and I are sprawled on top of a wooden picnic table in the park’s rusted old playground. | Copyright 2018 by José Pablo Iriarte. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The city surrounded him while he slept. He had been fleeing it for four days. Long before its walls became visible, it was a grayish smudge on the horizon, beneath which the air shimmered in silent testimony of its radiant heat. It was one of about ten living cities he knew of and he had avoided it for as long as he could, staying out of their usual migratory paths, contenting himself with the company of the small tribes who had also managed to keep out of the reach of the cities, living on roots and the small animals that fell to his bow. | Copyright 2018 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the doors in the closet, behind the boxes, leads to a harsh desert world. The first time you stepped through, you didn’t bring water, and nearly died as you crouched beneath the sun, waiting for the door to open again. You were saved only by the unexpected appearance of someone draped in gray, who gave you water before showing you a mottled face of lizard skin. You screamed. By the time you returned, you could barely stand. Your head pounded; your skin was badly burnt. | 2017 by Mari Ness. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henrietta followed the receptionist down the hall of Schneider Hospital. The woman’s keys jangled as she walked, mixing with the echoing clicks of Henrietta’s blue church shoes. No other noises greeted them. Henrietta watched her shadow stretch itself in each unlit room, her form made large by the ultra-bright fluorescent lights of the hallway. One of the lights in the hall blinked on and off. Henrietta pinched her eyes closed to ward off dizziness. Her lower belly throbbed and she stifled a groan. | Copyright 2017 by Cadwell Turnbull. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your name is Alex and you live in a small town at the edge of the sea. You have a sister and two parents and no pets. In your town, everyone follows their destiny: They cross the street, cook endless meals, stand in the same room, deliver the same mail every day. You can’t remember most of their names. It’s the way it’s always been. You’re different. You wake up one morning and know something’s wrong. It’s an unsettled ache in your chest. Bad things will happen soon. Unfortunately, you can’t articulate these feelings. No one but you knows anything is different about today. | Copyright 2017 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Engineer’s meat wept and squirmed and wriggled inside her steel organ cavity, so different from the stable purr of gears and circuit boards. You couldn’t count on meat. It lulled you with its warmth, the soft give of skin, the tug of muscle, the neurotransmitter snow fluttering down from neurons to her cyborg logic center. On other days, the meat sickened, swelled inside her steel shell, pressed into her joints. Putrid yellow meat-juices dripped all over her chassis, eroding away its chrome gloss. It contaminated everything. | Copyright 2017 by Rachael K. Jones. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kango and Sharon first met at a party, one of those lavish debauch-fests where people fly in from all over the galaxy wearing sentient fetishwear that costs a whole asteroid belt. The specially grown building had melted, causing toxic fumes that killed a few hundred people, and then the canapés on the appetizer table came to life and started mutilating bystanders with their razor-sharp mandibles. The party was going according to plan, in other words. The only thing that nobody could have predicted, even the most OCD of the party-planners, was that two of the party’s minor entertainers ended up standing around near the Best Dressed Dead Guest lineup. | Copyright 2017 by Charlie Jane Anders. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the witch came across the man whose leg had been shot through by the arrow he was hollering and disorderly and seemed like a bit of a nuisance. Still it could be said honestly that the man had a particular charm about him. For example when the witch asked if he was all right the man responded with only an agonized groan but beyond the groan there was also a look he gave her like the groaning in agony was a joke they alone were in on and she felt an immediate conspiratorial intimacy with the man with the shot leg. | Copyright 2017 by Max Wynne. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Vortal ripped open in the heart of Manhattan. It began as a microscopic dot, invisible to the naked eye. Just hung there in midair, almost two meters above the street. People walked, drove, biked, rollerbladed, skateboarded, jogged, and one dude on his way to a Broadway audition even tap-danced by without noticing it. It grew. A day later, it was the size of a pea. A Metro bus struck it. It was still barely visible and the Sikh driver was hardly expecting to collide with a nearly invisible pea-sized obstacle suspended six feet up in the air. Narrated by Deepti Gupta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a faerie tree in my front yard. Its branches are gnarled like an old woman’s fingers, knobbed like her knees, and the trunk hunches down like she’s reaching for my house. Mamaw said the hole at the base of faerie trees is where faeries come out or rush in or leave gifts if it’s big enough, though I was too young to remember. She says I was fussy in any arms that weren’t hers or the tree, least ’til I got used to everything. When I was real little, Sister says she could always find me curled half in the tree if I’d toddled off, like I fell asleep tryin’ to find Mamaw’s faeries. | Copyright 2017 by Kathleen Kayembe. Narrated by Jayme Joseph. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pretty much everybody made peace with it very early on in the process. It wasn’t the most pleasant prospect in this world, or any other. But it had been explained to us in the most rational and persuasive terms imaginable, in sentences so simple that even the dumbest among us were capable of getting it; and once we swallowed that pill and incorporated it into our daily lives, it really didn’t make much of a difference in the scheme of things. We were adults about it. But that doesn’t make much of a difference when your four-year-old daughter looks up at you with her big brown eyes and asks you, “Daddy? Why are the space men going to grind us into hamburgers?” | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in originspace, Basher sobbed in Doom Maiden’s arms. Sparks stared at the ground. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. I wanted to punch something. Mostly I wanted to punch myself. Or maybe Domino. If only he had listened to me! Why did I ever think I could be a leader? Not even my best friend listened to me when it counted. How could I have been so stupid? How could he? “We’ll get him back,” Basher said. She was frantic. “He’s still alive. Right, Sparks? He’s still alive.” | Copyright 2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I made the decision to take up an after-school job closing trans-dimensional portals into pocket-worlds full of dangerous monsters and traps, I thought it would be easier—or at least more fun—than working the counter at a fried cockatrice joint or selling newssheets on a street corner at the crack of dawn. My team’s first outing into dungeonspace—when we defeated The Cavern of the Screaming Eye on our first try—had gone pretty good. Since then, we’d been running low threat level, poorly synced dungeons as practice, the kind that don’t actually kill you if you take damage inside them. | Look for the thrilling conclusion on 10/17/17! | Copyright 2017 by Jeremiah Tolbert. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ship dies in orbit above an abandoned world. Kitshan curses. Metal bones shudder around him as the last of the ship’s breath is sucked into vacuum. His skill at the helm and hasty patch jobs have kept the engines together, but luck is scarce out here, and his is gone. The ship is unminded. Lifeless metal, basic programming, and manual flight operations are things he can tolerate better than another consciousness wrapped against his. The viewscreen flickers and a cold vista stretches across the interior curve of the cockpit: the small star, bright and distilled against the void. | Copyright 2017 by A. Merc Rustad. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That’s how Cynthia and Ugo met. The Easter egg hunt had just started when little Cynthia noticed a dark, short-haired nine-year-old boy, all alone, sitting by the church steps. Her first impression of him was his quietness, and the way he stared at her. When she told him (well, shouted) that it was impolite to stare at strangers, and why wasn’t he running like all others?---the dark-haired boy walked quietly over and told her that they didn’t need to hurry. | Copyright 2017 by Giovanni De Feo. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was something sinister about the representative’s perfection. The oiled and combed dark hair, the even white teeth, the polished fingernails. His immaculate dark jacket and trousers, the pressed collar and cuffs of his shirt. He looked as if he’d dressed in the shop itself, not ridden up the damp valleys from Manchester on some dirty, smoking steam train, inevitably acquiring the grime and the dust from the tired upholstery of a grubby carriage. No one who had undertaken the walk down the wet high street should have kept their shoes so polished and shiny. | Copyright 2017 by Tony Ballantyne. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Ladies and gentlemen, everyone you know---the entire world you know---is now dead.” Murmurs ripple through the assembled cadets. Not because they’re shocked---everyone knew what they were signing up for---but because it all happened without fanfare, a jump across light-years of space unaccompanied by any grand orchestral swell or roaring engine thrusts. The wiry guy with a shaved head standing next to Tone mutters, “Jesus, I didn’t even feel anything.” | Copyright 2017 by Timothy Mudie. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was definitely something to be said about being Mrs. Lim, even into the Underworld: something about comfort, something about privilege, something about a status quo carried into the afterlife. The previous matriarch that bore the title of Mrs. Lim had moved on long before Mrs. Lim got there, but since Mrs. Lim had not liked the domineering nature of her predecessor, this did not bother her overmuch. One of things to be said about being Mrs. Lim was that during Cheng Beng, she received many, many presents. | Copyright 2017 by Jaymee Goh. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The American boy, whose name was David, had always collected things. Coins, minerals, seashells, insects, and even house-brand bars of soap from hotels in his family’s travels. His collections helped him know who he was when so much of life did not; and the things he collected did not make him bleed, when so much of the world—the sharp, angular things of it—did. When you bought an old coin in a store, the coin didn’t bruise your skin or scratch your fingers. | Copyright 2017 by Bruce McAllister. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the commuter jet descended toward the ruins of Las Vegas, Roland Zhang craned his neck at the window, watching the skeleton towers grow nearer. Billowing clouds of dust clogged the air, and wind-blown dunes partially buried the filthy, abandoned buildings. He’d viewed footage from the far corners of the Earth, every remote hellhole imaginable, but this was the first time he’d ever seen the real deal in person. He tugged at his collar, sweating in spite of the air conditioning. | Copyright 2017 by Christopher East. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Are you all right?” The voice, sharp and worried, shot out of the pocket of shadow to her left. Startled, she turned and found herself blinking at a cop, one of the ones who patrolled the park on foot. In the last light of dusk, she could just make out his half-frown, his badge, the hand resting on a nightstick. He reminded her of her father. She shivered and pulled her sweatshirt more tightly around her. She should have brought warmer clothing, but she wasn’t going to be here long. | Copyright 2017 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Namaste, helloji, please to come in. First time visit, so nice you came. Thank you for removing gravity shoes. Please be comfortable, no formality. It is like your home only. What for I can get you? Mineral tea? Carbon Filter coffee? Gel Cola? If it is not in our supply ration, we can send Senthil to fetch from company concessionary on main asteroid. Senthil is our homebot, see, he is understanding our language fully now. Beginning time he was little confuse. Now he is fully understand. | Copyright 2017 by Ashok K. Banker. Narrated by Pooja Batra. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I remember as children we were warned about the women who drove the unmarked white vans that circled around our neighborhood during those long hot summers, in particular creeping slowly down the boulevard which ran alongside the park, where if you positioned yourself at the right angle, I suppose in front of the swings, you might be able to see a flash of a child’s private yellow underwear as they pumped their legs upward. | Copyright 2017 by Debbie Urbanski. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The derelict hangs in Neptune’s blue orbit, a chip of shadowy flint from a distance. Up close, it’s old and rusting, myriad old systems cobbled together, and Hadley swallows her nervous and exhilarated heart a dozen times as she latches the pod to its belly, makes a hard seal at the airlock, and geckos her team inside. The exterior of their spatulae suits—hands and knees and hips—permits them freedom of movement even in zero gee. Especially in zero gee. She glances back at their pod once. | Copyright 2017 by E. Catherine Tobler. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many years ago, in Shangdong Province, there lived an unfortunate farmer by the name of Dou Zhuo. Like most of us who walk this teeming Earth, he was trapped in the circumstances that fortune had provided him. He owned a patch of land that supported crops only after backbreaking effort, and then with results that betrayed its resentment of the demands he put on it. His cucumbers were bitter, his cowpeas difficult to boil, his leeks over-pungent, his pak choi stiff, and his edible amaranth hardly deserving of its name. | Copyright 2017 by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro and Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Slots Palace,” says Suze. You all stare at her. Staring at her is worth doing. She’s moved into a new bod since coming here, and the change has been a big improvement. There wasn’t exactly anything wrong with the one she initially adopted for the pentagon’s pre-consensuality union, but she became dissatisfied with it and the dissatisfaction affected the rest of you---especially Kagura, who said it reminded him in all the wrong ways of a past consensual of his who turned out badly. | Copyright 2017 by John Grant. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I rooted her system on the first day. It was the only way to be sure. Sure that she’d love me. Step by matching step, I walk her under the boughs of great elms in Prospect Park, while the slanting sun passes through the tangled mesh of leaves to dapple her smiling face. When her heart rate spikes, I know she’s excited. When it slows, she’s bored. | Copyright 2017 by Matthew Kressel. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The sun burned through the clouds around noon on the long Cytherean day, and Dharthi happened to be awake and in a position to see it. She was alone in the highlands of Ishtar Terra on a research trip, five sleeps out from Butler base camp, and---despite the nagging desire to keep traveling---had decided to take a rest break for an hour or two. Noon at this latitude was close enough to the one hundredth solar dieiversary of her birth that she’d broken out her little hoard of shelf-stable cake to celebrate. | Copyright 2015 by Elizabeth Bear. Originally published in OLD VENUS, edited by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin. Reprinted by permission of the author. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s 12:15, and Monica West is late for our lunch. We’re meeting at a trendy Greenwich Village bistro, one of the few to survive the depression that bankrupted the City, and so many of its residents, nearly two decades ago. There are few reminders of those trying times here now. The place is packed with the young power elite, the air thick with talk of mergers and screenplays and spring designer collections. I order a glass of Cabernet and wait. | Copyright 2017 by Scott Dalrymple. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Then the Bird of A Hundred and Eight Names gathered together her three new children, and she said, “You have passed our people’s tests and joined our ranks, and may leave if you wish. But leaving will take you among the Alabar, who collect salt in their bare hands and have no fear of rust, and call themselves merely people. Some among us speak slightingly of them, for their lives are short and easily ended, and they don’t protect one another as we do. You should be more wary." | Copyright 2017 by Shweta Narayan. Narrated by Twinkle Khanna. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jade was the sort of backwoods girl who had a map of the countryside tattooed on her heart, and she could feel it in her bones when the pieces of her world shifted. So when the new family moved into the house across the road that late summer, she felt ripples of wrongness radiating out from them and their too-bright clothes, their bizarrely old-fashioned wood-paneled station wagon, and their rolling words. | Copyright 2017 by Susan Jane Bigelow. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You woke up female this morning, so now you have a choice: do what other people want, or be a bitch. It is a thing you know without precisely knowing it. The knowledge is built into the muscle memory of this miraculous new body; it is draped across the bones like a weight. You shudder, stretching your delicate female limbs beneath the unfamiliar, sun-drenched sheets. Female for a day, you think. | Copyright 2017 by Kendra Fortmeyer. Narrated by Gabrielle de Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was one girl I really liked in school when I returned to Earth, but it took me three months to say hello. I wasn’t good with human beings. We’d just gotten back from Pitipek (a red-dwarf star system “just left” of Tau Ceti, as the joke goes). My father had been stationed there for two years with the TU’s Planetary Safety Agency, and living with the slow, enigmatic, bipedal Pitipeki---especially in one of their villages, and under those endless clouds---tends to make you lose your people skills. | Copyright 2017 by Bruce McAllister. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It took James Washington forever, almost literally forever, to remember that his wife and children were as dead as he was. For a while, he barely even realized that he was dead himself. Heaven, for lack of a better word, is bliss, and as anybody who has known euphoria can tell you, bliss doesn’t always allow room for rational thought. | Copyright 2017 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’re just stepping into the crosswalk when the SUV screeches to a stop with its bumper six inches from your hip. It’s sleeting. It wasn’t sleeting when you left your apartment, so you’re wearing canvas sneakers with holes beside the little toes, where all of your sneakers always get holes, and you haven’t been able to feel your feet for six blocks. It’s been weeks since you got more than four hours of sleep. | Copyright 2017 by Jess Barber. Narrated by Bonnie MacBird. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’ve sought a world with a higher-than-average ratio of sunny days and a pharmaceutical industry that developed a decade before my own. Sun, of course, improves mental health. And a more developed pharmaceutical industry implies a more liberal outlook towards chemical intervention, a more specific range of treatment plans. It isn’t easy to write equations for these variables. | Copyright 2017 by Lina Rather. Narrated by Claire Benedek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As usual, Win was late to work. Since he hadn’t had time to eat breakfast at home, he arrived at his office—tucked into the old wing of the hospital, now a maze of ancient files and obscure personnel—clutching a styrofoam vat of cafeteria coffee, a donut balanced atop it. He wore jeans and hiking boots and a wrinkled pinstripe dress shirt, from which his ID badge hung crookedly. “Winston Z, MDiv, LCSW, BCC,” it read. | Copyright 2017 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beeblax beats its wings against a superlumic slurry of time and space, and the universe turns to liquid starlight in its periphery; inside rides Aria Astra---Stellar Champion of the Star Supremacy, Wielder of the Sister Ray, Spacetrotting Coolgal, and Humanity’s Last Hope---nestled within a blob of translucent pink jellymeat, and it is totally cool and only a little disgusting. | Copyright 2017 by Violet Allen. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dear Sara: The official verdict that I am no longer classified as human arrived in a windowed envelope bearing the return address of the Bureau of Lineage Affairs. There is one envelope for me and one for you, although I haven’t opened yours. Except for the return address, these envelopes look like something from the bank, or perhaps an offer for home insurance, the kind we throw away. | Copyright 2017 by Greg Kurzawa. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices