On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time. I can’t tell you where it is, exactly. It has an address, of course, as all buildings do, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you. What I can tell you is that the building is called The Oakmont. | © 2023 by P A Cornell. Narrated by Nan McNamara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lara is a summer witch born with fruit rich on her tongue, a monkey god's chittering beneath her skin, and a full July sun's worth of love for love. Her ba claims to have read Pasternak, but she knows it was Julie Christie's face he traced when he named her, Julie's yellow-gold hair her ma made fun of him for admiring, bright as an August afternoon. © 2023 by Ruoxi Chen. | Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The chrysanthemums are dying. The yellow flowers face downward, stems wilting at the neck. Their petals curl and brown at the edges like burning paper. You lift one of the ragged blossoms up, as if to try and help it support its own weight. You keep the flowerpot on the kitchen countertop right by the apartment window where it can get the most sunlight, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. © 2023 by Sam Kyung Yoo. | Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

In the fading shadows of dawn, a hunter meets a wolf with white eyes, a wolf whose mouth stretches open, and in its growl there are three faraway voices, distorted as if heard through water, so the hunter shoots. He does not wait to see what he has done. | © 2023 by Lowry Poletti. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The forest whispers of my sister’s arrival long before I sense her. Birds flutter between pink-girdled maehwa trees, mocking her voice in the tongue only shamans understand. Seonbyeon, Seonbyeon, they repeat mindlessly, and this is how I know my sister is looking for me. But I don’t know which sister, not until she finally appears from the forest gloom. | © 2023 by Hana Lee. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It takes a Black woman to tell the truth about another Black woman, whether she likes that woman or not. If the woman in question is loved, the story reaches mythological heights, she could do no wrong, she was brown skinned and beautiful, intelligent, had all her faculties and her teeth, all the men and women of the neighborhood called her by a term of endearment, which is how Medea morphed into Ma’Dear. | © 2023 by Davida Kilgore. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad...

It's so dark. Black-orange-bloody-bruised. Flashlights throw long beams across the sand. Police lights flicker blue and red, blue and red, blue and red, and the Ferris wheel on the pier glows an obscene neon. No one thought to turn off the calliope. It echoes off the empty boardwalk, cheerfully macabre.  | © 2023 by Margaret Jordan. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Outside is the palace of slaughter. Under its gambrels of boiling sky, there is the cold unforgiving sea; there are mountains ready to cradle your bones. Along its corridors of singing grass, there are horseback warriors who will cut you to pieces. | © 2023 by Simo Srinivas. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am haunted by a funeral, a pageantry of mourners and tears that I can only barely remember. I am not certain, but I suspect the funeral may be my own. The mourners are masked in elaborate disguises. Feathered and ribboned and silk. If I know any of them, I don’t know that I know them. The flowers arranged beside the casket seem to carry some meaning, a meaning that has nothing to do with me. And yet… I feel myself drawn to that casket, feel that it belongs to me in some way. My dream self...

Don’t feed him, Greta. We can’t afford to feed him! There’s not enough to eat! We were lost when we found the tower made of sugar that stretched up into the sky in endless red and white spirals. A sea of ants milled at its base. Fat dollops of sugar dripped onto the surrounding trees, candied the leaves, and brought curious bees to hover. ©2023 by Melissa A Watkins. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The beheaded tilapia nudged teasingly against the riverbank in a bloody soup, staining the lush weeds beneath the little girl’s feet. Oblivious to the stench, she squatted beside the muddy water, her gaze tracking over the dead fish. There were a dozen of them, freshly killed. Flies had only just begun to settle over silver flanks, scuttling shyly over tooth marks. | ©2023 by Anya Ow. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I walk into Old Town. In a curio shop on the promenade, an old man sells paintings, deras, kikois, and ornaments. Tuk-tuks move swiftly along the cabro paving, passing the teapot sculpture at the round-about. Pushcarts lumber beside the street restaurants and past the old buildings covered by vines. A radio plays “Malaika,” the song rising like a wisp of steam. Shouts of children playing football near the sea reach me. I buy a ticket to Fort Jesus and the seller tells me I am lucky because it...

The toe wiggled at Mirella from the compost heap. She let the lid drop with a thud and a cloud of flies. Enough. Time to order an electronic composter. | ©2023 by K.A. Wiggins. Narrated by Judy Young.

“Everyone’s making bread,” I say, trying to sound casual and not like I’m terrified, because talking about bread is easier than talking about what’s going on. My phone balances on my belly as I lie in bed. “It’s like the pandemic hit, and everyone’s collective delusion went ‘I’ll bake bread, that’ll solve it.’ I just don’t get it.” | ©2023 by Effie Seiberg. Narrated by Gigi Yelen.

You hear the door open as if in dreaming. Back when you were a conservatory student, you chewed a third of a melatonin tablet every night—to keep yourself from snapping awake before sunup, chest tight, your head still achy with exhaustion. Now, mornings are difficult: your eyelids weighted, sliding; thick grey wool between your temples. Your body drifting in a warm, slow sea. | ©2023 by P.H. Low. Narrated by Paul Boehmer.

In a castle flanked by fjords, so very far from everything that the winds rarely raised its banners, there lived a troll princess. Her mother was a troll queen, by virtue of a castle and a bad temper, but queen she was, and her ambitions did not end at the still shores. | ©2023 by Malda Marlys. Narrated by Ruth Wallman.

The dead return in strange shapes, yoked to those who mastered them in life. Thais sees them: shadowy animals who slink between the townspeople in the market square. When he was born, so he is told, his mother held up his birth-wet body and pressed her nose to the middle of his brow. They lay together, crowned by oak branches dragged low to the ground by last night’s rain, on the stone table at the center of the woods. | ©2023 by Lowry Poletti. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki.

Shaundra took the small, empty cardboard box and swiveled on her work stool to place it gently on top of her daughter Dineisha’s head. Her daughter went cross-eyed trying to look at it and started chewing on the corner of her thumb, smiling at the game. ©2023 by Erin Brown. Narrated by Janina Edwards.

I’m happy on the road. The land stretches like a languid animal, and I find tranquility in its measured length. Outside the car the earth breathes, the ground rising and sinking. Even though I am the one driving, concentrating on the road and the trucks roaring past, it’s like a meditation for me—my mind empties into the open space. ©2023 by Flossie Arend. Narrated by Susan Hanfield.

Angie is three months dead before I get her letter. She sent it the week before she died, and I guess that figures; the postal service got f****d in the twenties and never recovered. Maybe she even relied on that delay. ©2022 by Jennifer R. Donohue. Narrated by Justine Eyre.

Walking, crossing, moon-kissed streets, black top, blue jeans, unwashed. Her afro is home to a million brown-winged birds, everlastingly chirping. There’s a baby boy, eight months old, asleep in her arms, and maybe he dreams of beautiful spinning star-like things because he doesn’t know of the hurt in the heart that loves him. ©2022 by Victor Forna. Narrated by Janina Edwards.

The bee liberation group meets at seven o’clock every other Thursday in the group study rooms on the fourth floor of the Main Library. Hannah tears tabs from the flyers that they post all over campus—outside the big auditoriums in Wells Hall, on the doors of the dorm cafeterias, in the women’s bathrooms—and feeds them into her jacket pocket. When she forgets and puts the laden jacket through the laundry, they turn into so much confetti. | Copyright 2022 by Aimee Ogden. Narrated by Janina...

The sun draped itself over the left armrest of the couch at dawn, while Zella sat waiting for the typewriter’s tapping to commence next door. Even though she’d tossed and turned all night in the summer heat, she still found herself rising early, expectant. | Copyright 2022 by Z.K. Abraham. Narrated by Susan Hanfield.

She wasn’t at his funeral, so I took the van around to where I knew she was staying while she was in town. He always taught us to stick close to our home. It was her ex’s place, a rundown one-story with dead grass and an old plastic playground for some forgotten children. | Copyright 2022 by Aigner Loren Wilson. Narrated by Janina Edwards.