CoW Ep. 190: Staff Pick 2015 – Home Isn’t

[danooli]

Episode 190: Staff Pick 2015 – Home Isn’t by Kelly Sandoval

Narrated by Katherine Inskip
Audio production by Rikki LaCoste
Originally published in Flash Fiction Online.

Every year in January, Cast of Wonders takes the month off to recharge our batteries, plan the year ahead, and highlight some of our favourite episodes. As part of joining the Escape Artists family, this year we’re pulling out all the stops. We’re running 10 staff pick episodes over the month, each one hosted by a different member of the Cast of Wonders crew.

We hope you enjoy slush reader Katherine Inskip’s favorite story from 2015, Home Isn’t by Kelly Sandoval and narrated by Katherine Inskip. The story originally aired October 25, 2015 as Episode 178.

They tell him he'll be happy when he gets there. It was wrong, what was done to you, they say. We're making it right. You're going home.

Click here to listen to Episode 190
Click here to read the text of the story

Original Episode 178 notes:
Halloween is here and what better time for a scary story. And much like the sweets and chocolates soon to grace the pumpkin buckets and pillow cases of eager trick o treaters, we have a fun-size story for you this week. We’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to check it first for pins and needles.
Kelly Sandoval is a speculative fiction author, Seattleite, and Clarion West graduate. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015. She’s currently writing Unveiled, a novel about the aftermath of the faerie apocalypse. You can find her online and on Twitter.

The story is narrated for you by our own Katherine Inskip. Katherine teaches astrophysics for a living and spends her spare time populating the universe with worlds of her own, which you can read at her blog, Trisigmatic. She’s on Twitter as well.

Tags: aliens, Cast of Wonders, experiments, first contact, forced migration, home, Horror, Katherine Inskip, Kelly Sandoval, Rikki LaCoste, staff, Young Adult fiction

[Unblinking]

I enjoyed it. 

Their supposed attempt to be kind, to return this creature to its own kind, seems more cruel--taking away everything it has known without bothering to ask its opinion.  But I was glad to see the end, being welcomed and accepted by family.

[TrishEM]

I wasn't quite sure whether it was family that received him -- IIRC, the silver-furred greeter simply said, "I am the one who waited for you." So it's good that someone chose to wait, and it was comforting that the greeter told him "Fear goes ... Home comes..." but I was a little concerned: If this one waited, does that mean everyone else from his family/nest/class/whatever is gone? And is that gone elsewhere or gone-dead?
Anyway, it was an interesting story to hear and to ponder afterward.

[Unblinking]

I wasn't quite sure whether it was family that received him -- IIRC, the silver-furred greeter simply said, "I am the one who waited for you."

I guess, to me, the one who received him must be family from the statement of being the one to wait.  Not necessarily blood-relation, if the aliens even have the same concept of blood relative as we do, but the one who waits for your arrival is one I assume to at least be an adoptive family and, IMO, the family that waits for you and cares for you is what matters, not chance relations of blood.

[danooli]

IMO, the family that waits for you and cares for you is what matters, not chance relations of blood.

I agree with this wholeheartedly.

[Devoted135]

This one was so interesting, lots to ponder afterward. The humans basically treated him like a slightly more intelligent chimp, and now he's supposed to be able to integrate back into his society? I really empathize for him. The phrase "Fear goes, home comes" also really stuck out to me. I hope that is true for him.

[Fenrix]

One of the interesting bits that jumped out at me was the use of cannibalism in one of its traditional fashions. In a colonial sense, accusation of cannibalism was one of the simplest and most effective methods of "Othering" the indigenous population to make it a moral obligation to "civilize the savages" if they can and exterminate them if they can't.