PodCastle 368: Dinkley’s Ice Creamby Effie Seibergread by Khaalidah Muhammad-AliOriginally appeared in “Fierce Family”, a Crossed Genres anthology showing positive representations of QUILTBAG families, in January of 2014.
Shanti squirmed with anticipation, trying to wriggle away from my hairbrush but caught by the knots in her curls. “A fair!” she said. “With monkeys and elephants and a magic man!”
“Yes, a fair!” I agreed, not wanting to confirm the rest – not wanting to set up any disappointment as I set down the brush on her bedside table. She beamed up at me with her sunshine smile and I looped a thin elastic around a pigtail. Four years old, and I’d never been able to take her before. Too expensive.
Fairs don’t come to the city. It’s too crowded, and where would they set up the tents? To even get to the fair it was a five dollar bus ride (two dollars for kids), plus a dollar eighty five for the shuttle if you didn’t walk. We walked.Rated G.Effie Seiberg is a science fiction and fantasy author living in San Francisco. A graduate of Taos Toolbox, her short fiction can be found or is upcoming in Lightspeed Magazine’s “Women Destroy Science Fiction”, Crossed Genres Magazine, and Stupefying Stories, among others. She lives near the former and upcoming (but not present) sculpture of a 4-ft-tall pink bunny head holding a skull in its mouth. You can follow Effie on her website,
effieseiberg.com, or on Twitter, at @effies.
Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives in Houston, Texas with her husband of twenty-five years and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming and gardening. She has self-published one novel entitled
An Unproductive Woman, has published a story at Escape Pod and has a story upcoming in the
An Alphabet of Embers anthology. Khaalidah also reads slush at Escape Pod where she is on a mission to encourage more women to submit science fiction stories.
Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to long youth.
You can catch her posts at her website,
www.khaalidah.com, and you can follow her on twitter,
@khaalidah.
Listen to this week’s PodCastle!