Author Topic: PC626: DOUBLE FEATURE! A Sharp Breath of Birds; A Guide to Birds by Song  (Read 1355 times)

Ocicat

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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: Setsu Uzume
Audio Producer: Peter Behravesh

“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.

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Show Notes
Rated PG-13.“A Sharp Breath of Birds” is a companion piece to Laura Christensen’s artwork “Swan Dive.”



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.




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Nyckname

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Episode link is returning a 404 error.



Guardian Lion

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I've been trying to download this episode for a few days now. My podcatcher keeps reporting 404: Not Found for URL http://media.libsyn.com/media/podcastle/PC626_DOUBLEFEATURE_ASharpBreathOfBirds_AGuideToBirdsBySong(AfterDeath).mp3 . I get home same when I try to download or play it directly from the website at https://podcastle.org/2020/05/12/podcastle-626-double-feature-a-sharp-breath-of-birds-a-guide-to-birds-by-song-after-death/ .

Please look into then when you have a few moments. (I don't have iTunes or Spotify accounts. And YouTube works in a pinch but stops every few minutes when my phone screen turns off.) Thanks!
« Last Edit: May 18, 2020, 04:16:54 AM by Guardian Lion »




Raj

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While I quite enjoyed the first of these stories, I couldn't get into the second at all.  I was losing track of the layers of the story and also found that I wasn't caring very much (which meant that I kept zoning out, which didn't help with trying to follow it).  Not for me, but onward to the next one.

http://lordofthemoon.com ; (Former) Editor of TBD magazine: http://tbd.org.uk