EscapePod, Episode 120, When They Come Back by Natalia Theodoridu.

Flashback Friday. Hello, folks, welcome to Escape Pod. I'm Alistair, your host, and this week's story is the penultimate stop in our tour of some of the big numbers from EscapePod's 20-year-to-date voyage.

This one comes to us from Natalia Theodoradu, and first appeared as Episode 550, back in November 2016.

Natalia is a media and theatre scholar based in the UK.

She is a finalist for the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, an editor of Sub-Q Interactive

Fiction magazine, and a Clarion West graduate from the class of 2018.

She has had work published in Clarksworld, Strange Horizons, Beneatheseless Skies, Nightmare,

Fireside, Cross-Genras, Inter-F interfiction, the mammoth book of SF stories by women

and elsewhere. Your narrator for this story is Iber Ammancast. Iber is an Emmy-nominated,

writer-producer, director, currently working for KLCS PBS in Los Angeles. A voracious reader who

began narrating fiction podcasts

in a decade ago, she is now one of three narrators on Inner Space Outer Thoughts,

Caltech NASA JPL's first science fiction anthology. In her free time she's learning

to make neon signs and getting way too into hockey. So, change is constant. Who will you be when you return? Because you will return.

And so will story time.

When they come back, they were called Maria and Michael, and Chavon, George, Elise, and

Sarah, and Violet, Daisy, Jasmine, Rose. No, perhaps these were not people names. These were

flower names, weren't they? And Gabriel, Raphael, Baucus, Athena, Io, Muhammad. But these are mythical names, and God names, and prophet

names, so hard to tell them hard after all these years after the, all these years after they,

and Natalie, Vasilia, Dmitri, Usmain. The angel is rotting. He's leaning against the trunk of an olive tree.

I examine his body, but avoid his eyes, as always, just in case.

I would have liked to have been a man, he had said once, so I always think of him as one,

...