Weekly, we broadcast the best in fantasy short stories, running the gammut from heart-pounding sword and sorcery, to strange surrealist tales, to gritty urban fantasy, to the psychological depth of magical realism. Our podcast features authors including N. Jemisin, Peter S.
Beagle, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Jim C. Hines, and Cat Rambo, among others. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. It was only a small pool, built up at the sides with wooden panels, more like a tank for training children in. It stood in a courtyard in the shadow of the school, and the sun reached it only at rare intervals. Behind it lurked a stone and sulking outhouse, pebbledash walls lashed together with a corrugated plastic roof.
In its damp darkness the children undressed, and tripped, and snapped tight, powdered rubber caps over their skulls. Under its benches something black grew wetly out towards them. It was the hut that Freya hated most of all. Miss Wallace was young and pretty and was allowed to wear any jumper she liked, unlike Freya, who was a pupil and had to wear a plain grey one like everybody else.
Miss Wallace also had colourful bracelets on her arms and hair that rose up above her head and fanned out like branches. When she moved they swayed about her; the bracelets and the hair both. In the older years they had a teacher for English and a teacher for history and a teacher for comparative mythography, but Freya was only nine so Miss Wallace was her everything teacher, and she needed no other.
For Miss Wallace, the outside world was the whole point, it was something to push both your hands into and wiggle about. That was why Class 7C were allowed to follow her, symmetrical grey cygnets, through the hall and out the fire escape and down the iron stairway that led to the pool with the mermaid in it.
