GlitterShip

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 48 is part of the Summer 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

Circus Boy Without A Safety Net

by Craig Laurance Gidney

Lucifer came to him in drag. He was disguised as Lena Horne.

C.B. went to see The Wiz with his family. The movie was pretty cool, by his standards, even though he thought Diana Ross was a little too old to be playing Dorothy. But the sets were amazing–the recasting of the Emerald City as downtown Manhattan, the Wicked Witch’s sweatshop, the trashcan monsters in the subway. The songs sometimes lasted a little too long, but they were offset by Michael Jackson’s flashy spin-dancing. But it was the image of Lena Horne as Glinda the Good Witch that would follow him.

She appeared in the next to last scene in a silver dress. Her hair was captured in a net of stars, and she was surrounded by a constellation of babies, all wrapped in clouds, their adorable faces peering out like living chocolate kisses. He fell in love. Ms. Horne was undeniably beautiful, with her creamy, golden skin, and mellow, birdlike features. Her movements during the song “Home” were passionate. They were at odds with shimmering, ethereal-blur in which she was filmed. Indeed, she could not be of this earth. In all of his life in Willow Creek, NC, C.B. had not seen anything like this before.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 47 is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL and part of the Summer 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

The Last Spell of the Raven

by Morris Tanafon

When I was very young, I watched my mother win the Battle of Griefswald. Standing knee-deep in our ornamental pool, she transformed the surface into a picture of Germany, and dripped fire from her hands into the water. I stood with my tutor in the crowd that watched, and did not understand why she gripped my shoulders until they ached, or why the people watching cheered and gasped. I saw the fire snake around the houses, and tiny people running from it. But until I was older I did not understand that it had been real.

Nobody talked to me about magic. My father never spoke of it, and my mother believed that I took after my father and had no talent for it. Still, at the age of seven I used it for the first time—a desperate child will reach for any tool. I knew that magic existed, from my mother’s conversations with her friends, and that it could be used to do wonderful things. And I knew that my cat Morrow was dead. So when I was given the body to bury it, I took her out to the backyard instead, and performed my best guess at a spell. The form was foolish, but the intent genuine, and intent was all it needed.

Morrow stirred, and my cry of delight caught my mother’s attention. She looked from me to the cat, heard five seconds of my babbled explanation, and began screaming.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 45 is part of the Summer 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

Nostalgia

by Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam

Tori takes another hit of nostalgia; the smoke is creamy mint cookie down her throat, smooth and hot. It fills her lungs, tickles, burns, and as she coughs it out she laughs, smoke pouring from her lips. Fog fills her head. The live oaks’ winter skeletons crisp into focus as the drug takes hold. Tori feels the cold on her skin as if she is a little girl in the snow, her hand in her father’s glove, surrounded by his smell of smoke and vodka. Her mother hates the cold but watches from the window. Tori’s belly is full. It hasn’t been this full for years, not since home, that word a lighthouse beacon she will never again reach without this burn of throat, cloud of mind, her parents having pushed her out once they met her first girlfriend. Tori passes the pipe to her companion.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 44 is part of the Summer 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

The Need for Overwhelming Sensation

by Bogi Takács

I am staring at the face from a thousand newscasts—the gentle curve of jaw, the almost apologetic smile. Miran Anyuwe is not explaining policy. Miran Anyuwe is bleeding from a head wound, drops falling tap-tap-tap on the boarding ramp of our ship, the sound oddly amplified by the geometry of the cramped docking bay bulkheads.

“I’m looking for a ride out,” they say. They are not supposed to be on Idhir Station. They are supposed to be three jump points away, heading the accession talks, guiding Ohandar’s joining of the Alliance.

I uncross my legs and get up to my feet—one quick, practiced motion. I bow my head briefly. “Esteemed, I will inquire.”

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 43 is A GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL and part of the Summer 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

In Search of Stars

by Matthew Bright

It starts with a secret place, as many stories do.

On the outside, it is a laundrette. The printed letters on the plate glass are peeling, but still legible: Whites. Below it, a list of numbers is scraped away, leaving the cost of a wash a mystery. Occasionally, I pass it in daylight. During the day, the door is propped open by a rickety stool, and I peer inside. It is filled by graying women with rumpled, dishcloth skin who talk quietly amongst themselves about their children and their husbands.

Once, I dare to take my clothes there to wash. An innocent errand, I reason; no shadow of suspicion could fall on a man simply doing his laundry. This does not prevent the women from eyeing me as if the mere presence of a man amongst them is suspect. To compound this, I am unprepared, and am forced to swap a nickel for a palmful of powder, a foolish error met with sad tuts.

As I empty the powder into the drum, I study the door in the corner.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 42 is part of the Spring 2017 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

The Passing Bell

by Amy Griswold

My hired horse threw a shoe between Bristol and Bath, and by the time the wearying business of getting another nailed on was complete the shadows were growing long and the wind was sharpening its knives. 

“It’s kind of you to put me up,” I said, jingling pennies in my pocket to encourage such generosity.  In a town so small it had neither pub nor inn, I considered myself fortunate to be offered the chance to sleep in the blacksmith’s loft. 

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 41 is part of the Spring 2017 issue!

Read ahead by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

A Spell to Signal Home

by A.C. Buchanan

“Ash.”

The voice is at once close beside me and yet muted, as if the sound is being filtered through a dream or a long stretch of time, a universe drawn out like an endless vibration of music. I can taste the sweetness of blood in my mouth, but no syllables emerge and my body feels heavy and soft.

“Ash.”

Beyond the voice are the sounds of a living planet. It’s hard to pinpoint how the noise of life and the noise of machines differ, when one can so easily mimic the other and both contain so much variety, the boundaries between them blurred, but it’s unmistakable. This is no barren outpost, no hub of spinning metal; this is a result of millions of years of evolution, web-like ecosystems tangling into one another. It will differ from all others and yet on another level it will be the same as all others, interlocking chains of consumption and relation and habitat.

“Ash, we’re going to need to get you out. Can you talk to us?”

[Full transcript after the cut]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 40 is part of the Spring 2017 issue!

Read ahead by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

She Shines Like a Moon

by Pear Nuallak

It’s cold in London but you glow with warmth. You travel limbless and limned from your core, throat crossed with black silk just as it was in your first days. Yes, you were naked then, washed clean in monsoons, dried by storm winds. When was the last time your sly hunt was wreathed in rice flowers? Do you recall how dtaan-tree fronds stroked your secret self as you rose, star-bound?

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading

Download this episode (right click and save)

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 39 is part of the Spring 2017 issue!

Read ahead by picking up your copy here: https://www.glittership.com/buy/

Mercy

by Susan Jane Bigelow

The sea had taken them.

Rion stood by the edge of the water, the waves curling around her bare, metal-and-plastic feet. She knelt by the water and placed her hand in. Sensors registered temperature, composition, motion. But they couldn’t find what Rion had lost.

Here and there the remains of buildings stood like ghastly stick figures, silhouetted in the deepening cool of twilight.

Rion stood and closed her eyes. She stretched her hands out and reached her sensors as far as they would go, but no. Nothing lived on this shore, now. She was alone.

And so she lowered her arms and began walking, one step at a time, into the sea, until the water covered her head and she was gone.

[Full transcript after the cut.]

Continue reading