The country was at just over ten thousand deaths the morning that the door appeared. On Kosmo’s phone NPR was interviewing a doctor with a nasal voice about the need for social distancing, while Kosmo himself collected empty cans from around his home office. They were everywhere. Walls of recyclable cans dominated his room. Just […]

“Ambition!” Trevor emphasized, rapping knuckles hard on the wood table. “That is what makes the great men!” He took a satisfied swallow from his mug. Across from him, Barnaby put down the daily he’d been reading and sipped from his own beer. Pulling out a handkerchief to dab froth from his lips, he scratched thoughtfully […]

Aden had never once forgotten his gear for bulk trash day, but he found it touching that Nura still taped a monthly reminder note on the door from the kitchen to the garage. Sweet of her to remember, given how exhausted med school had her these days. He ducked out to the garage to toss […]

STORY: EP538: The Starsmith AUTHOR: Jonathan Edelstein NARRATOR: James Odcombe HOST: Tina Connolly This story has not been previously published, but is set in the same universe as “First Do No Harm,” which appeared in Strange Horizons. Discuss on our forums. For a list of all Escape Pod stories, authors and narrators, visit our sortable Wikipedia page Thank you …

I wriggle, delighting in all of these things in me. I want to digest them all.

Jeffries says he's worried about the retrovirus. I think he just doesn't like Matthews, doesn't want him hanging around. Truth is, myself and the kids excepted, Jeffries likes cattle and dogs more …

Marbles, reading glasses, fichas de Monopolio, a key, all cemented onto the crumbling old plaster, maybe eight feet across. Only when he took a step back could he see it formed the shape of a woman…

Her feet feel unfamiliar in her plain white washekongs, the tennis shoes she used to wear so often, before her world fell in. Now she only wears two sides of shoes when she needs to fake normal.

The seventh repetition almost played out like all the others. A different person filled Luis' place, but despite the evidence before my eyes, I could only see my idiot husband.

At first, the murder is universally mistaken for a run-of-the-mill political assassination.

Kristian is fidgeting and asks the dreaded and inevitable question for the umpteenth time. "Mummy, Ma, are we there yet?" "Almost there, sweetpea," says Maarit, sharing a grimace with me. I’m…

Later, Brother Francis would not be able to remember when it was that he first started thinking of the golden thing as a man—possibly when it blanched, braced itself against its restraints, and vom…

Part of being a princess in the kingdom of Splöstlienne meant learning the things one might expect princesses to be taught

Splöstlienne was a wasteland of thorns. Here and there, ragged yellow buds were emerging among them, but the cold winter kept them mostly bare.

At close range she can be seen to be shaking, a hard tight focused trembling, not confined to the hands. She looks close to resonant frequency. Amrita wants to, somehow, by touching her with one fi…

Some of the passers-by made jokes at me. Though I could not understand their language, yet I felt sure they were joking. I asked my friend, "What do they say?" "The women say that you look very man…

Here is a most peculiar object. Come closer, take a good look. See, here it is, laid out in this museum basement. It is a battered iron cage—human-shaped.

The city was ready for its beloved daughter to make the first nonmotile journey in history: the ship, which would never leave the city, would traverse half the galaxy.

I kill ships. Read a tagwisp on the EDNA strand that specifies my function and it would be just that, short but precise.

This is the sort of thing people like: the implication that, despite their minivans and microwaves, if they found the door in the wall, they too could enter fairyland.

I’d not long been made journeyman when the Schöpfers’ Guild gave me my first commission in 1928. Frau Leitner from Bavaria had written to request a small restoration–I took the so…

"Little things get little gods. It's only natural."