So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. | © 2024 by Mitchell Shanklin. Narrated by Judy Young. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To be fair, the first one is work, so he doesn’t even get to pick his outfit. But an olive-scented breeze squirrels joyfully through his hair; waiters bring out little triangles of flatbread smeared with soft, spicy cheese; and the wine has a buttery quality he hasn’t encountered in decades. It’s marvelous. It’s been such a long time since he attended a wedding. At the last one, Thor ate so many of the hors d’oeuvres that he hadn’t been able to finish his dinner. Nate wants to tell Thor how good the hors d’oeuvres are at this wedding, but he’s not sure they’re quite there yet.| © 2024 by Sharang Biswas. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. | © 2024 by Marissa Lingen. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If a robot stands alone in a field, staring into the forlorn distance as it obeys the last order it was given by a human, that order being, “Don’t move until we come back for you,” which it can remember uttered with a cruel sneer by a man who has taken a cruel dislike for it, the kind of man who will not be coming back.... | © 2024 by Adam-Troy Castro. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her (for how could he fail to kiss her, loving her as truly as he did?) then the gods in their mercies and compassions granted her life, that she might return his love. | © 2024 by P H Lee. Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer. A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts. | © 2024 by Angela Liu. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author Alex Irvine discusses 'Kopki and the Fish,' a tale set in a dry valley with limited resources. Follow Kopki on a quest for a special fish with healing powers, navigating challenges and societal judgment. Dive into themes of duty, sacrifice, and redemption as Kopki's actions lead to a dark path ahead.

I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm---I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon. | © 2024 by Will McMahon. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The last picture that Karu has of her father alive is on the day of her graduation. She has this big smile that by the placing of her dimples makes it obvious that she is his daughter. He stands next to her holding her waist in the space between his biceps and his lower arm. And her mother who is half an inch shorter than her stands on her left side. | © 2024 by Shingai Njeri Kagunda. Narrated by Janina Edwards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was a long fall in-system from the warp point, so Va Sojourner had plenty of time to observe. She found a peace in her observations that was expensive or painful to scratch out anywhere else, when she had to organize herself around the demands and expectations of everyone around her. | © 2024 by Phoebe Barton. Narrated by Roxanne Hernandez. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices