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PODCAST

Stories

Francis Rosenfeld

A weekly podcast of short stories and book readings by Francis Rosenfeld. Discover literary fiction, surreal tales, and introspective narratives exploring reality, identity, and human connection—perfect for listening on the go.

fiction

All Episodes

07:50

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 3.1 The Dionysia

Stories ·

2025/03/08

Persephone used the pretext she had to oversee the progress in the barley fields to take her leave from the city, which was bursting at the seams with crafting festival paraphernalia, cooking, and the stress people always experience on the eve of major holidays.The city’s noise and bustle gradually disappeared as the goddess ventured into the fields, which had already been plowed and sown, and whose fresh shoots were starting to emerge, green and slender like grass. The clearings and meadows

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10:27

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 2.3 The Moirae

Stories ·

2025/02/28

The world is surface, a shimmery veil of illusion, woven from gossamer and dreams by the Moirae to give the unbound consciousness a home.Behind this elusive veil, the fundamental action principles of existence, known only to the gods, continuously transform reality, sometimes unseen, sometimes picking at its back and putting waves through its diaphanous fabric. Its visible side glistens like a mirror, reflecting any consciousness that is there to see it, its ever changing imagery shifting to

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10:44

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.2 Charming Dionysus

Stories ·

2025/02/22

“Good morning, princess!”Dionysus entered the room, surrounded, as always, by a large posse of obviously impaired maenads and satyrs. He never went anywhere without them, and sometimes Persephone wondered if he’d ever been alone. Huge Etruscan amphorae filled with wine had been brought to the room for his visit, a welcome escape from the white on white decor, even though the god himself barely partook, since he drank nectar like the rest of them, to restore his beauty and youth. Persephone admired

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10:05

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.1 The Healings of...

Stories ·

2025/02/14

It was almost midnight when the goddesses and their suite reached the temple, where they were welcomed in complete silence by the priests, who took them to the Thollos and retreated respectfully, content with the privilege of watching the ceremony.Persephone parted the veil between worlds, allowing the denizens of her kingdom safe passage to the land of the living. “Merry meet, Asclepius,” she welcomed the famed doctor with a smile. “I carry glad tidings from your husband, mistress, and all his

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10:18

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.3 The Haunted Caves

Stories ·

2025/02/08

They saw it from afar, as they were traveling among the clouds in Helios’s chariot, the strange city of caves, carved in the soapstone of a cluster of spiky cliffs, sometimes by nature, sometimes by man, displayed amid the arid landscape like a giant sculpture, maybe an artifact the titans left behind, before his love of humankind landed Prometheus his penance.A huge human beehive it seemed to be, where the diligent workers moved about through hundreds of holes in the stone cliffs towards the

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10:00

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.2 Praise Olympus!

Stories ·

2025/01/31

The sun woke her up the next morning, the memory of her dream still fresh. She was picnicking in her orchard, eating pomegranate seeds at dusk, while Hades, who sat beside her, watching, brought each seed to life with a light of its own as her lips touched it, just to amuse her.A group of nymphs burst into the room, giggling and shoving each other, and suddenly grew quiet when they found themselves in the presence of the goddess. A prolonged monotonous droning of odes and praise ensued, a spectacle

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09:55

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.1 Spring

Stories ·

2025/01/17

Persephone had a secret, one she could never tell her mother.She had never enjoyed the gossip, the pointless aggravation, and the churning of vanities and ambitions that surrounded her life in the living world, the daily rehashed dramas of the nymphs’ latest trysts, the self-centered empty dalliances of the male gods, the petty envies of the spurned minor goddesses, the closed-minded expectations of the powers that be, the gaudy, useless pomp, the empty rhetoric. When tall, dark, and handsome

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04:35

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Rose

Stories ·

2025/01/10

Rose Brecht had an enchanted childhood, rendered even more so because she’d been born blessed with a vivid imagination. Her mind made up worlds and stories, so complex and filled with detail that even the grown-ups had trouble telling them apart from reality some times. Though they got her in trouble more often than she liked to admit, these worlds inside her mind felt very real to her, even though she couldn’t share them with anybody, not without being scolded. Throughout her childhood this

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11:10

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes, Endlessly...

Stories ·

2025/01/03

Local: Denoting a variable or other entity that is only available for use in one part of a construct, relating to a particular region or part, or to each of any number of these.My beloved child, there are so many things I wanted to teach you! We all live in a subset of reality that only reaches as far as our minds and our senses. We occupy a small room inside being, and in that room we’re like the orange that falls off the side of a wagon and upsets every other fruit in its path. We get a sense of

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12:59

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly...

Stories ·

2024/12/27

Fractal: A complex geometric pattern exhibiting self-similarity in that small details of its structure viewed at any scale repeat elements of the overall pattern. [This observation is unrelated to the manuscript, but it refers to an event so unusual for the climate of this region I thought it would be worth recording. Today, July 24, at four in the afternoon, it snowed. The large and very cold snowflakes signaled to us that the wind currents that made this strange weather event possible drew

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12:40

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Only Echoes Endlessly...

Stories ·

2024/12/20

Scale: The relative size or extent of something.The first thing you should consider when you ask yourself how something works is at what scale. A grain of sand is the same as a rock or a planet, it is our specific experience that renders it minute. Our sense of proportion, rooted in our own size, makes some processes obvious and others obscure, we can only perceive things based on our own scale. Our mind has a broader view, but it too is limited. We are range bound to the things we can observe,

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11:21

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Clarity

Stories ·

2024/12/13

Clarity: The quality of transparency or purity; the quality of being coherent and intelligible.[Nowhere in the document is the fact that somebody arranged the pages out of sequence more clear than here. The writing is neat and correct, but labored, betraying a hand still striving to achieve full control of its fine motor functions. There is no doubt the scribe is the same, the markers of the handwriting clearly indicate it. Even the rose seal looks tentative, as if a child had gotten permission to

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10:53

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Constant

Stories ·

2024/12/06

Constant: A number expressing a relation or property which remains the same in all circumstances, or for the same substance under the same conditions.The universe is a living contradiction, and I stopped trying to reconcile its paradoxes a long time ago, so I will state this knowing it doesn’t yield to logic. Existence is constantly in motion, endlessly transforming and renewing itself, and yet, throughout its churning essence there are fixed points, constants, fundamental invariants. They are not

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15:13

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Always and Forever - Rapture

Stories ·

2024/11/29

Rapture: A state or experience of being carried away by overwhelming emotion.I will describe a personal experience for you, because it is the best way I can think of to illustrate the concept we’re about to discuss. I went out into nature just before dawn, during that ghostly hour that puts a chill through one’s bones no matter what the season. It is unfamiliar, that hour, a time when we’re usually asleep, and that made me uncomfortable to be out, among the shadows and the creatures of the night

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14:34

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero - Revelation

Stories ·

2024/11/22

Revelation: The divine or supernatural disclosure to humans of something unexplainable relating to human existence or the world.The expectation to understand everything, while worthy, is unreasonable. Some things can’t be counted in the time frame of existence, some knowledge is so alien to our mind we can’t put it in a structure of understanding. Don’t shun such knowledge and such things. It is pure vanity to believe we have a grasp on reality just for understanding a few of its laws. Think about

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15:20

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero Shift

Stories ·

2024/11/15

Shift: A slight change in position, direction, or tendency.Let’s talk about a quality of existence which escapes the inattentive eye: its movements are not smooth, it advances in jerks and jumps, in sudden shifts, going from one state to another without passing through the stations in between. This works for gaining understanding and knowledge as well as it does for freezing a pond. Reality doesn’t advance along threads, it takes the stairs. It stays in a state for a while, no matter how much

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15:20

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Divided by Zero - Options

Stories ·

2024/11/08

Option: An act of choosing; a thing that is or may be chosenLike all naturally evolving systems reality doesn’t behave according to a predetermined plan, it runs on repeated trial and error and on eliminating the fruitless branches in the tree of choice. Even though you can’t see it, reality presents and tests options for itself constantly and automatically, in a manner you may recognize from the quiet processes inside of a body. It favors the organisms best fit to survive; it breaks down

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15:36

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Mirror Reality Synapse

Stories ·

2024/11/01

Synapse: A junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter.There is an interstitial stretch that fills the space between knowledge and learning, a field where ideas roam free. Inside that space there is no organizing structure, everything melds together in a chaotic jumble, free to create associations and break them as easily as breathing. These free moving concepts are like rapping raindrops of knowledge on the roof of

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14:40

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Mirror Reality -Sympathetic

Stories ·

2024/10/26

Sympathetic: Relating to, producing, or denoting an effect which arises in response to a similar action elsewhere.Frequently actions, states and events emerge simultaneously in various parts of reality, acting exactly the same, like synchronized ripples in its fabric. Sometimes an event gets reflected by another, completely bound to it like an object to its shadow or to its mirror image. Never can these shadows and reflections act independently from the object that generated them. Unlike

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16:03

The Blue Rose Manuscript - Roots, Branches and...

Stories ·

2024/10/18

Concentration: The relative amount of a given substance contained within a solution or in a particular volume of space; the amount of solute per unit volume of solution; the action or power of focusing one’s attention on mental work.You are familiar with concentrated essence from the flower oils and hydrosols you have sampled in the apothecary shop. Concentration eliminates the bulk of a medium to extract the essence blended inside it. Let me help you understand how you can concentrate and direct

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115 results

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