Audiobook audition scripts

The thing about ticketing a fairy carriage is that it always sees you coming. This one was parked across two bays on Hollis Street, shaped like a seed pod the size of a van, drawn by two moths the size of ponies, smelling of cinnamon. I got my book out. The moths looked at me. I looked at the moths. Six years in the Other Division and you learn the rules. Never accept food. Never give your full name. And never write the ticket in pencil, because they can rub pencil out from a distance. I wrote it in ink. I tucked it under the silver handle. The carriage sighed, which I had not known carriages could do. Behind me, somebody cleared their throat. Small. Tall hat. Very old eyes. "That's mine," he said. "Then you owe the city forty dollars," I said. "And you're in a loading zone." He smiled, and every streetlight on the block went out.

The ledger listed names, dates, and amounts paid — nothing more. But the dates corresponded exactly to the deaths, and the names were men of considerable standing, which explained rather neatly why nobody had looked very hard. "If I take this to the inspector," I said, "it disappears." My companion — a woman who had more cause than anyone to see this through — didn't hesitate. "Then we don't take it to the inspector." "That leaves us considerably short of the law." "The law," she said, with a precision that cut, "has been considerably short of us for some time." I folded the ledger into my coat. Outside, the city moved on as it always did — indifferent, relentless, entirely unaware that two women in a borrowed room had just decided to do something quite inadvisable. I found, to my surprise, that I was not afraid. I was, if anything, rather determined.

I installed the camera for the nanny. I want that on the record. I am not a paranoid woman. Every parent on our street has one. Rosa is wonderful. The camera proved it in a week. She sings, she does the voices, she cuts sandwiches into triangles because Lily will not eat squares. So I stopped watching. This morning I saw the alert from two a.m. Motion detected, nursery. Rosa goes home at six. It was my husband, in the dark, standing very still by Lily's bed. Not checking on her. Just standing. Then he turned, looked straight into the camera, and held up his phone, as if he were reading something off the screen. As if he were checking whether it was recording. At breakfast he poured my coffee, kissed the top of my head, and asked whether the camera app had been playing up. He thought it might need resetting.

In the year 2401, the last human who still believed in a self — a fixed, continuous, singular self — was a woman named Maren Solís, age ninety-one, living in a climate-managed habitat on the coast of what used to be Portugal. The researchers who came to study her were not unkind. They were simply unable to fully comprehend what she was describing when she said:  I.  "You mean your current iteration?" one asked. "No," she said patiently. "I mean me. The same me. The one that's been here the whole time." They wrote this down with great interest and no understanding whatsoever. After they left, she sat in the late sun and thought about her husband, dead forty years, and how he had always known exactly who she was — the same way, she supposed, she had always known herself. She found this comforting. She did not try to explain why.

Three in the morning is not romantic. Three in the morning smells like yeast and burnt sugar and the inside of my own head. I have been proofing bread in this room since I was nineteen, which is either devotion or a failure to leave, and most days I could argue it either way. Marcus comes at four, because the delivery is at four-fifteen and he has decided, without ever saying so, that I should not be the one carrying flour sacks in the dark. He does not knock. He takes the crates. He puts the kettle on wrong, every time, too much water, and I have never once corrected him because a man who makes your tea badly at four in the morning is a man who is coming back at four in the morning. Tonight he leaned on the counter and said, "You look wrecked." I said, "You look worse." And he laughed, once, quietly, the way you laugh in a town where the neighbours are asleep. That is all. That is the whole thing that happened. I have thought about it eleven times since.

They told me the crown chooses. That it burns the unworthy to ash and seats the worthy on a throne of living bone. What they didn't mention was that I'd been carrying it in a flour sack for three days without so much as a warm tingle. I set it on the altar. It glowed faintly, then flickered out. "Is it broken?" I asked. The High Priest looked like he wanted to dissolve into the floor. "It is... deliberating," he said. I picked it back up. It was definitely broken. Or I was. Probably both.

She had spotted the grey coat twice. Once outside the archive. Once on the platform at Farringdon. That could be coincidence. The third time — reflected in the window of a coffee shop on a street she'd only turned down because she'd taken a wrong exit — was not. Mira kept walking. Didn't change speed, didn't look back. She'd been a journalist for eleven years and the first thing you learned was: don't run until you know where you're running to. She turned into a busy pub, ordered a tonic water she didn't want, found a stool facing the door and waited. The grey coat did not appear. Which meant whoever it was had made her first — and was good enough to know when to vanish. That was somehow worse.

In 1988, after fifteen years of military rule, Chile held a plebiscite. Should General Augusto Pinochet stay in power for another eight years? Yes, or No. The government expected to win. It controlled the state, the army and most of the airwaves. But the rules gave each side fifteen minutes of television a night in the final weeks, and the opposition, a coalition of parties that had spent years quarrelling with one another, had to decide what to do with them. Against the instincts of many of their own supporters, they chose not to lead with anger. They led with a rainbow. A cheerful jingle. Ordinary people laughing and looking forward. The message was that joy was on its way. On the fifth of October, more than nine in ten registered voters turned out. No won, with about fifty-six percent. Pinochet left the presidency in March 1990. He stayed on as commander of the army for another eight years.

When the train pulled into the Finland Station on the night of April 3rd, 1917, nobody in the crowd quite knew what they were looking at. He was short. He wore a round hat. He had been in exile for seventeen years and he was forty-six years old and he walked out onto the platform and immediately began telling the people who had come to welcome him that everything they had done so far was wrong. No coalition government. No cooperation with the bourgeoisie. No waiting. The Mensheviks in the crowd thought he'd gone mad from the train ride. He hadn't. He had simply decided, years earlier, exactly what he was going to do when this moment came — and the moment had come.

When you get hard feedback, you have two jobs, and you're going to want to do them at the same time. Don't. The first job is to hear it. The second job is to judge it. If you try to judge it while you're still hearing it, you'll spend the whole conversation building your defence, and you'll miss the one sentence that might actually have helped. So in the room, your only job is to listen and ask questions. Can you give me an example? What would better look like? Write it down. Say thank you, even if it stings. Especially if it stings. Then go home. Leave the notes alone overnight. Tomorrow, with a coffee and a clearer head, read them again and sort them into two piles. This is useful. This isn't. You're allowed to throw some of it away. You're just not allowed to throw it away tonight.

[Opening — the night of her first escape, September 1849] She left in the dark, which was the only time that belonged to her. The plantation of Edward Brodess sat quiet under a harvest moon, and Araminta Ross — who would become Harriet Tubman, who would become Moses, who would become a name that entire governments would both fear and fail to catch — walked north for the first time in her life. She was approximately twenty-seven years old. She had a head injury from childhood that caused her to fall suddenly unconscious, without warning, sometimes in the middle of a thought. She had no papers, no money, and no map. She had hypersomnia, narcolepsy, and what she called "visions." She also had a precision of purpose so total that it functioned, in the field, like a sixth sense. She would go back. That is the part people forget, or perhaps find hardest to hold. She crossed the line to freedom and then — thirteen times — she went back to bring others with her. She said later that on her railroad she never ran her train off the track, and she never lost a passenger. The record bears her out.

My father named every boat he ever owned after my mother, and my mother hated all of them. The first was the Margaret, a wee wooden thing with an engine that coughed like an old man at a funeral. The second was the Margaret Two. The third, when he'd had a good year and a bank manager who liked him, was the Margaret Anne, because he said she deserved her full name on something that size. She never once set foot on any of them. She said the sea had enough of her husband without her going out to visit. I started on the Margaret Anne at fifteen. My job was to gut fish and keep my mouth shut, and I was only any good at one of those. We'd go out from the harbour in the dark, and I'd stand at the rail watching the lights of the town get smaller, thinking, one day I'll leave, and I'll never smell herring again. I did leave. Thirty years in Glasgow, in an office with a window that looked at another office. When my father died, the Margaret Anne was the only thing he left me. The whole town expected me to sell her. I've had her out every Saturday since. I've not caught much. That was never the point. My mother still won't come aboard. But she walks down to the harbour every Saturday to see me in.