Just Like The Speeding Heart by Osahon Ize-Iyamu It’s seven A.M. and you’re making akara and tea, just for yourself and not for the two of us. You ask if it’s time, and it is, but I won’t tell you that. Let you be silent and make your tea and not speak. Let you be […]

Straw Spun by Leah Cypess ‭Alina unfolded the letter slowly and with great care:‭ ‬it was very old,‭ ‬and‭ ‬felt thin and fragile under her steady fingertips.‭ ‬Her heart was pounding in a way unfamiliar to her,‭ ‬and not just because of the whispers she had heard on the way to the throne room:‭ ‬gold […]

Radio Free Heartland by Corey Mallonee When the car was just a distant cloud of dust above the corn fields I turned to Smoke and told him, “You ought to know I shot someone.” “We all do things we regret,” he said, without looking up from the circle he was drawing in the dirt. His […]

An American Refugee by Tiah Marie Beautement I first spot the surfer as I run down the path that cuts below the lighthouse. I can’t believe it. The Point is full of holiday campers, so motors are banned on the water until eight a.m. and it is only six-thirty. I run down the steps; reaching […]

The Raptor Snatchers by Rachael K. Jones Dad said you can’t buy friends, but that’s not always true, because I bought my best friend Zilla with my 10th birthday money. She didn’t cost much because velociraptors were pests, which meant there were too many of them in Absence, and nobody liked them. Rooster’s Rescue was […]

Widow Bones Makes Her Rounds by Gretchen Tessmer “Brom Bones too, who shortly after his rival’s disappearance conducted the blooming Katrina to the altar, was observed to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related, and always burst into a hearty laugh at the mention of the pumpkin, which led some to suspect […]

The Penelope Qingdom by Aidan Moher It was during the particularly frozen-solid Prince George winter of ’91, a few days after the new neighbours had arrived, that I first stumbled into the Penelope Qingdom. “What are their names?” I asked my moms as they bustled about the kitchen getting ready. They’d invited themselves next door […]

Earn Your Breath by Jaime O. Mayer Liith had fought the Snake Island raiders every summer since her fifteenth year and had yet to taste defeat. She had dueled the boat-men of the north with their fish-belly white skin and won the pair of metal knives envied by many a man in her village. Yet, […]

Silkstrand, A Minute Of by Anton Stark Imperial Majesty, Lord-for-Countless-Years, Son of Heaven, Ruler of Industry and Wisdom; this your servant Cai Jing of the Ministry of Works greets you. As per your Imperial Decree, I have compiled the following report on the matter of Master Su’s Clock and its abnormal behaviour. The facts of […]

The Young Adult Fiction Podcast

This is not your father's time travel. There's no machine, there is no dial. There's no telling where or when you'll go. The only thing that can change is you. It will make you what it needs to make you, to fit you in, to make it work. And when you come back, that is if you come back, it won't be the same you at all. You're messing with the nature of things, and the nature of things does not like to be messed with, as Garrett Ronson and his friends find out, the hard way.

Seven Kinds of Baked Goods by Maria Haskins.  Narrated by J.S. Arquin.  #Fantasy #Fiction #Podcast #Poison #Assassins #Dwarves #Blades   "The smell of mold and winter-stored potatoes chokes me as I dangle across the high-cantled saddle; the coarse fabric of the sack chafing my face and hands, the rag stuffed in my mouth ensuring I can't even complain about the bumping and bruising.      Yet even now, even here, I wouldn't change a thing about the life I've lived, if the chance were given.  After all, it has to count for something that I'm the only Dwarven crafter ever to cause more deaths with flaky pastry than a well-honed blade."   Maria Haskins is a Swedish-Canadian writer and translator.  She writes speculative fiction and poetry, and lives just outside Vancouver with a husband, two kids, and a very large black dog.  Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Shimmer, Cast of Wonders, and elsewhere.  Find her online at .   Please help support The Overcast.  Subscribe on or so you never miss an episode.  Don't forget to leave a review while you're there!    

My latest story for R.B. Wood’s Word Count Podcast was written for the show’s Halloween episode, and you can listen to it here. The photo prompt for this episode was a very evocative an…