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Direct link: Because I Prayed This Word (mp3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Alex Dally MacFarlane's "Because I Prayed This Word." You can read the full text of the story, and more about Alex, here.

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Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor, and historian. Other historical stories can be read in the anthologies Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories, Missing Links and Secret Histories, and Zombies: Shambling through the Ages. She is currently editing The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women, out late 2014.

Where it is not stated, translations from Ancient Greek are by Sonya Taaffe and translations from Arabic are by Sofia Samatar, used with their permissions, for which the author is deeply grateful.
Anaea Lay lives in Chicago, Illinois where she writes, cooks, plays board games, reads too much, and questions the benevolence of the universe. Her work has appeared in many places including Apex, Penumbra, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Nightmare. She lives online at anaealay.com.
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3 Aug 2026

I had a daughter and then I didn’t. I woke in the cradle of midnight, shivering from a supernatural cold. I thought at first that she was crying, that she had woken me, like so many midnights before. But there was silence all around me. I sat up on one arm and peered into her crib. She was gone. In her place was wrapped a sallow, horned little boy. His eyes blinked open. I look at him. He looked at me. Changeling, I thought. Then he started to scream. “Why weren’t the windows
The deads are punctual. They arrive exactly when there is nothing left to distract us.
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