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Direct link: Needle on Bone (mp3)

In this episode of the Strange Horizons podcast, editor Anaea Lay presents Helena Bell's "Needle on Bone." You can read the full text of the story, and more about Helena, 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.
HelenaBell Helena Bell is a writer and tax accountant living in Chattanooga, TN. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and The Indiana Review. Instead of cats she collects graduate degrees and currently has MFAs in Fiction and Poetry as well as a JD, LLM, and MAC. You can find her at helbell.com.
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20 Apr 2026

The dragons are beautiful even when they’re dead, their serpentine bodies stacked up and up, their metallic blue scales glinting under the sun. This close, Mina can see how blank their eyes are through those thin layers of membrane. How empty. Dragons are not violent by nature, but they hunt what hunts them.
Twenty-eight years of casting away / Until the earth beneath crumbled
his grungy skin nonetheless sequined with embedded nanocircuit sensors
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