Welcome, Stranger! This is a story for you, you who wait for my words to fall into your ear, so that we can share being and become more than we are alone. | © 2024 by Vandana Singh. Narrated by Annette Oliveira, with Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All of us remember what Mother’s Day was like before we became sterile: flowers and candy for living mothers and tears for dead ones and anger at bad ones, and women who couldn’t be mothers or who’d lost children marinating in grief, and nobody really profiting from any of it except Hallmark and the restaurants and florists. | © 2024 by Susan Palwick. Narrated by Judy Young Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is a city called Salemo. Salemo sits atop a cliffside at the edge of a sea. | © 2024 by David Marino. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes. | © 2024 by David Anaxagoras. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I know you’ve been following me since I left school, boarded the train, and took to the alley. Why didn’t I run? | © 2024 by Modupeoluwa Shelle. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Audio Recording, “Lydia and Ecco at Insight,” February 3, 2134 I didn’t run. If the boy had not called to you, you would have run. I would not have run. | © 2024 by Endria Isa Richardson. Narrated by Annette Oliveira. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. | © 2024 by Mitchell Shanklin. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of flatbread smeared with soft, spicy cheese; and the wine has a buttery quality he hasn’t encountered in decades. It’s marvelous. It’s been such a long time since he attended a wedding. At the last one, Thor ate so many of the hors d’oeuvres that he hadn’t been able to finish his dinner. Nate wants to tell Thor how...

Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. | © 2024 by Marissa Lingen. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it, the kind of man who will not be coming back.... | © 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her (for how could he fail to kiss her, loving her as truly as he did?) then the gods in their mercies and compassions granted her life, that she might return his love. | © 2024 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer. A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts. | © 2024 by Angela Liu. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story as it is told in the dry valleys north of Averon, where the only roads run down to the Cricket River and the only power is the freehold of Skadar, begins with a merchant envoy from the southern coast who traveled from Averon. | © 2024 by Alex Irvine. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm---I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon. | © 2024 by Will McMahon. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next to her holding her waist in the space between his biceps and his lower arm. And her mother who is half an inch shorter than her stands on her left side. | © 2024 by Shingai Njeri Kagunda. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was a long fall in-system from the warp point, so Va Sojourner had plenty of time to observe. She found a peace in her observations that was expensive or painful to scratch out anywhere else, when she had to organize herself around the demands and expectations of everyone around her. | © 2024 by Phoebe Barton. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass. | © 2024 by KT Bryski. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the third evening of every week, dozens come to Stalactite Keep to hear the storyteller teach about the place beyond Wonderland. Tonight, with only dewdrops of honeycomb light seeping through the cells of the sky, Creed told them of toys. | © 2024 by Wen-yi Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Josea Dream was the pearl captain at the heart of the bivalve ship Blue Spring, which had swum the black for a thousand years. It was a mystery to Josea---it was a mystery to anyone who’d ever thought about it---why the bivalves suffered their captains’ proddings. | © 2024 by Christopher Rowe. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scarlett’s eyes had to be perfect. Jon was the artist who’d made her, so it bothered him to think that so much of Scarlett would be crafted by other people. Scarlett’s limbs were carved from silicon polymer and coated in a soft synthetic skin from the best prosthetics companies in the world. | © 2024 by Everdeen Mason. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent scholarship has shed considerable light on many previously puzzling or mysterious aspects of the life of the Baba Yaga---or, as some would still have it, the Baba Yagas. But one element has remained largely unstudied, and indeed, almost completely ignored. | © 2024 by Mari Ness. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mahō Shōjo Kira Kira Sunlight is an American web series created by an unknown animator or animators. The show combines magical girl anime tropes with cosmic horror, following high schooler Sally Hoshino (Kira Kira Sunlight) and her friends. | © 2024 by Stewart C Baker. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The coffin she carried had felt like an imposition at first—a holy imposition! a welcome imposition! but an imposition nonetheless. But by now she had carried it on her shoulders out from the tenth school, carried it across plains, up and down canyons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My son tells me that there’s a man in the house, someone he hears well after the lights are out, in the narrower halls or maybe at the far side of the den---a gait and creak he’s certain isn’t me or his mom, since he can hear us both breathing heavily and tossing in our sleep. | © 2024 by Thomas Ha. Narrated by Mirron Willis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices