Hello and welcome to the travel cast episode 382. The travel cast is a weekly

audio fiction magazine that brings strange stories by strange authors to strange listeners such as yourself.

I'm your host, Norm Sherman.

Women and Aliens Month continues with Down the Well by Alya Johnson.

Alya Dawn Johnson's the author of six novels for adults and young adults.

Her novel, The Summer Prince, was long listed for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Her most recent Love is the Drug, won the for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.

Her most recent Love is the Drug

won the Andre Norton Award.

Her short stories have appeared in many magazines

and anthologies, including Asimov's,

Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Subterranean, zombies and Unicorns, and Welcome to Bordertown.

In addition to the Norton, she's also won the Sibbles and Nebula Awards and been nominated

for the Indies Choice Award and Locust Award.

The stories read to you by Jonathan Dance and produced by treble cast producer Adam Prott.

So without further ado we bring you Down the Well by Alya Dawn Johnson.

I enjoy watching the children, she said.

It comforts me to remember that I too was a child once, and one day they too will be old.

Her shiny olive skin was firm, but even the best youth treatments couldn't

hide the purple veins that snaked around her arms like cables. She appeared to be in well-preserved middle age, only I and a few other agents knew the truth.

Her eight remaining fingers were casually laced over a knobby walking stick that she carried for show.

A particularly knowledgeable observer might have noted that the Cherry Red Wood was at once

...