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Direct link: Inventory (mp3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Carmen Maria Machado's "Inventory."

You can read the full text of the story, and more about Carmen, here.

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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.
Carmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in October 2017. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, NPR, Electric Literature, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and Best Horror of the Year. Her short story "The Husband Stitch" was nominated for the Shirley Jackson and Nebula Awards, awarded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and longlisted for the Tiptree Award. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, the Yaddo Corporation, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Artist in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and lives in Philadelphia with her partner.
Current Issue
18 May 2026

Maybe we overestimated ourselves, I thought, watching the ferries hum against the wine-dark sea. Even if we floated above it, we were still bound to the ocean, engulfed in all its weight and inescapable history. To believe otherwise was a kind of hubris. But we had believed otherwise anyway, and so each of us had become something smaller, less human, suspended in a brittle net of want and memory. And then she appeared. At the wrong time, in the wrong place. My Scylla, my monstress, my deathless siren of anglerfish light. Longing, in that empty, unmoving ocean, for things that had not existed for centuries. How could anyone blame her? The only alternative was to grieve. 
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Strange Horizons
2 Mar 2026
Strange Horizons invites non-fiction submissions for our March 30 special issue on “Fungi in SFF.”
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