Gene Doucette | Primordial Soup and Salad

Call me Philoctetes. My real name doesn’t matter, and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you what it is, anyway. Security concerns, you understand. What you need to know about me is that I was a US Army Green Beret---one of the Quiet Professionals. Usually tasked with working with the locals in counterinsurgency efforts and the like. The stuff that doesn’t---or shouldn’t---make the newspapers. | © 2023 Deborah L. Davitt. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

29 Kesä 202339min

The most beautiful boy you have ever seen in your life is hot-wiring a spaceship. It’s an objectively unsexy spaceship, insofar as a spaceship can be unsexy---a six-seater built like a 2008 Honda Odyssey, a car model you’re only aware of because it continues to appear in memes. The boy is decidedly not unsexy, though. His name is Eddie, he’s your xenobiology lab partner, and he’s currently bent over the spaceship’s popped hood. | © 2023 by Dominique Dickey. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Kesä 202339min

Crunches and shrieks buffeted the Magellan LLC smartship as it plunged into Enceladus’s kilometers-thick ice crust, making their way to the subsurface ocean and the rival LuxeSpace corporation’s station situated there. Warning signals flashed through Jarrell and his fellow shipminds’ readouts, but they followed their orders and continued inward. They’d long since learned to ignore such dangers---the digitized brains of former human corporate-soldiers that controlled smartships could afford to take risks and go places traditionally-crewed spaceships wouldn’t dare. | ©Timothy Mudie. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Touko 20231h 12min

I came to the city to find an egg. A robin’s egg, to be precise, an oval of pale, perfect blue that echoed the spring sky. Inside, not a robin, but an emerald. Inside the emerald, a wizard’s heart. He had decided he missed it, and he wanted it back. It was the usual sort of thing, or so he had assured me. His heart taken out and stored for safekeeping, a place where his enemies---and certainly there were many, jealous of his power---would never think to look. So well hidden, in fact, that he himself was no longer quite certain where it was. ©2023 by Kat Howard. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

4 Touko 202325min

The house wakes from its somnolence as the witch trudges up the path made of tarts. Through its rock-candy windows, the house scans her figure for any signs of hurt. The witch’s errands in the city make her nervous. And the house, being made of her magic and therefore of the witch, worries along with her that the wrong person might recognize her, or simply think they do. | ©2023 by Amanda Helms. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

27 Huhti 202318min

What I observed was a giant anthropomorphized ribbon microphone, the type one might imagine standing in front of a radio announcer and his studio audience, selling soap in the dirty 1930s. It sauntered lazily over to an overstuffed red couch, walking on stick-figure legs that looked like they’d been hand-drawn by a young child. The large red couch sat next to a five-foot tall elephant ear plant. | ©2023 by Brian K. Hudson. Narrated by Scott Peterson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

6 Huhti 202352min

The town was not called Byzantium. The Ministry named it during the first meeting. “It’s not a colony,” Thomas James would have said if he could, but the office was hot and bright, the sun in the windows, in his eyes. He felt like he was surrounded by faceless figures even though there were only two other people in the room. The town they were talking about was located between worlds. The entrance was in the remains of Ooldea, out on the edge of The Nullarbor Plain. | ©2023 by Benjamin Peek. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Maalis 202347min

“Who loves you?” I ask. My daughter looks away. Doesn’t answer. I lean down and turn her to face me, resting my thumb in the dimple in her chin. It’s the same dimple her mother has. Or had. “You love me, Daddy.” “That’s right, so please listen closely,” I say. She’s only nine, but Anya’s eyes are flat and black and hard to read in the dim light of the cave. “Only you can make our family whole again.” “But. Last time. I saw . . .” ©2023 by Daniel H. Wilson. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2 Maalis 202327min