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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 is the day of secession. | ©2023 by Dennis Mugaa. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 fucked in the twenties and never recovered. Maybe she even relied on that delay. ©2022 by Jennifer R. Donohue. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paris Opera Ballet, 1841 / You’re enjoying your reprieve here at the opéra, m’sieur, are you not? All the wealthiest gentlemen do. Here in the exclusive foyer de la danse, wives are forbidden and young girls lightly clad. Champagne obtained, you complain of your tiresome wife—how she will never replicate a young girl’s bloom, no matter how much rouge she rubs on her cheeks! | Copyright 2022 by Kelsey Hutton. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Step One: You Wait - You are patient and your love, true. There is nothing you cannot withstand. | Copyright 2022 by K.S. Walker. Narrated by Justine Eyre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elizabeth is the first person to notice I’m inside her. “Tell me how to do it,” she whispers. It’s a shock. No one has spoken to me directly in ages. I’m nothing more than a whisper when I slip beneath her skin. I’m less than a breath. I should be undetectable, but somehow, I’m not. It might have been a relief—to be acknowledged, to be known—except that Elizabeth clings to me with her bony fingers and won’t let me go. I struggle to escape her, but no matter how hard I push, she’s got me trapped inside her body. | Copyright 2022 by Jennifer Hudak. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once upon a time, in the dark ages before the singularity, there was a fox who, while walking its way along a riverbank, saw a great big bevy of catfish fleeing in a panic this way and that. Curious, the fox called out to the fishes, saying, “Good fishes of the stream, I see you fleeing in a panic this way and that. I do not wish to interrupt your suffering, but I am curious and as a fox I must follow my curiosity: Surely, there must be some great evil from which you are fleeing?” | Copyright 2022 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ninth - It is a few days before your suspicions are confirmed. Perhaps it is the baggy trousers your daughter has started to wear, or that she picks at her food. She will lie if you ask her outright, this you know. You throw her bedroom door open without warning, the damp towel clutched around her chest after the shower the only barrier between you. Her mouth hangs open, shrieking like brakes in protest. | Copyright 2022 by Eliza Chan. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The year was 1999. Tupac’s Brenda’s Got a Baby was the anthem in Old Creek ghetto. Yes, I wasn’t born. But the first time, in a beat-up, metal-scrunched blue taxi, on her way back home, when the song came on, Mother felt my first kick coincide with the blistering bass beat. It’s a wonder how I knew that feet were made for dancing. | Copyright 2022 by B.S. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices