Episode 256: Phalium Arium Ssp, Amans by Victoria Sandbrook
• Narrated by
Katherine Inskip• Audio production by
Jeremy Carter• Episode art by
Leigh Wallace•
A Cast of Wonders original!•
Read along with the text of the story•
Click here to listen to Episode 256Victoria Sandbrook is a fantasy writer, freelance editor, and Viable Paradise XVIII graduate. You can find her work at
Shimmer, in
Sword & Steam Short Stories, and now on
Cast of Wonders. She is an avid hiker, sometimes knitter, long-form talker, and initiate baker. She often loiters around libraries, checking out anything from picture books to monographs. She spends most of her days attempting to wrangle a ferocious, destructive, jubilant tiny human. Victoria, her husband, and their daughter live in Brockton, Massachusetts. She reviews books and shares writerly nonsense
online at on
Twitter.
Katherine Inskip, assistant editor of Cast of Wonders, teaches astrophysics for a living and spends her spare time populating the universe with worlds of her own. She is addicted to chocolate and Japanese logic puzzles. You can follow her
online and on
Twitter.
Leigh Wallace is an Ottawa writer, artist and narrator who works as an Access to Information and Privacy analyst for the government of Canada. Her art can be found at Tea Princess Chronicles and is upcoming in the
Sunvault anthology. Her fiction is available in
Tesseracts 19, PodCastle and
Urban Fantasist. She is a graduate of the 2013 Viable Paradise workshop. You can find more of her work at
DeviantArt or on
Twitter.
Nora tugged her gloves down further over her freckled wrists. Every other couple in line had linked arms, but John Reidy had not so much as inched his elbow towards her. She wasn’t sure what pained her more: the ache in her hands screaming that this parish carnival sideshow hid more magic than most or her inept suitor. The line could not move fast enough.
But nothing about this show was fast. Patrons shuffled between intricate, though fraudulent, displays: palm-sized peacocks with visible clockwork, chicken-sized dragon eggs wiggling as a hidden steam boiler hissed, monkeys that might as well have still had their old organ-grinder parts attached. Nora struggled not to roll her eyes. Dull, boring, badly engineered. And not a true cryptid to be seen. Everyone else had sighed, pointed, marveled. Only John Reidy seemed as disappointed as Nora. He’d polished his glasses, refolded his handkerchief in his pale fingers, and said “hmm,” three times.Tags: Cast of Wonders, clockwork, cryptid, dating, exploitation, Jeremy Carter, Katherine Inskip, liberation, magic, motorbike, sideshow, together, Victoria Sandbrook, Young Adult fiction
