PodCastle

PodCastle is the world’s first audio fantasy magazine. Weekly, we broadcast the best in fantasy short stories, running the gammut from heart-pounding sword and sorcery, to strange surrealist tales, to gritty urban fantasy, to the psychological depth of magical realism. Our podcast features authors including N.K. Jemisin, Peter S. Beagle, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jim C. Hines, and Cat Rambo, among others. Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can.” Tune in to PodCastle each Tuesday for our weekly tale, and spend the length of a morning commute giving your imagination a work out.

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PodCastle 626: DOUBLE FEATURE! A Sharp Breath of Birds; A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death)







* Authors : Tina Connolly and A.C. Wise
* Narrators : Tina Connolly and Dani Daly
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
*
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“A Sharp Breath of Birds” was originally published in Uncanny Magazine.
“A Guide to Birds by Song (After Death)” was originally published in Clockwork Phoenix 5.


Rated PG-13.
“A Sharp Breath of Birds” is a companion piece to Laura Christensen’s artwork “Swan Dive.”
A Sharp Breath of Birds
By Tina Connolly
You are two on the day you see your first personal bird. It is the sort of thing you barely remember later, at six, seven, twenty. And yet you cling to it as your first memory: a sleek black penguin waddling through your nursery, it in black, you in white lace, mended and re-mended because you will not stop pulling off the threads to suck. You remember, later, a surprising softness to its feathers. You remember that it went right on past, even though you lunged for it. Your two-year-old images end like this: dark, warm, comforting, gone.
At seven, you see the birds regularly. You incorporate them into all your pretends; there is always some princess carried off by a bird to a nest made of raven feathers and filigreed spoons and shiny bits of silvered foil. Alice from next door easily accepts all the bird imagery as a fact of life; surely everybody plays games with birds in them, and she finds you books with more; the seven sparrows, and the dove maiden, and the nightingale at sea. Sometimes the princess is rescued by Alice, or Alice by the princess, and sometimes both girls rescue themselves, and sometimes nobody rescues anybody and they settle down as gainfully employed bird-bandits and bring more spoons and candlesticks and hand mirrors to the nest until your mother puts a stop to that and the bandits have to put all the things back.
At twelve you swear to keep playing princess-bandits forever, swear it under a double moon with a flock of geese flying past.
At fifteen you, drunk, try to remind her of this.
At seventeen Alice says nobody gets to make nests in real life and she says it louder, ten times, as if enough repetitions will get you to accept it and then she hands you a letter from her sweetheart inviting her to the next dance and asking if she could please bring a date for his cousin, recently home from the war. The paper trembles between you and you look at it for a long time. You fold it up and hand it back. Why not, you say, and a murmuration of starlings on the carpet takes skittish flight.
The rain is falling on the day you marry Alice’s sweetheart’s cousin. It seeps under the cracks in the chapel door, floods the aisle. It soaks your white silk shoes and you are supposed to be paying attention to the words you are saying but instead the words repeat like a metronome: I paid seven dollars for these shoes and I will never wear them again. The water does not seem to bother anyone else, they keep smiling fatuously at this charming double wedding, though the winds lash outside and the windows are blinded by it.


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 May 13, 2020  49m