You are listening to a Clarksworld magazine podcast. Welcome to our final story for April

2025, issue 223. I hope all of these stories here this month have treated you incredibly kindly,

have given you a little bit of escape from the world and the uncertainty that we're living in.

I want to thank you for your ongoing support of the magazine, whether it's an email, if it's a subscription, or if you've gone to patreon.com forward slash Clark's World. Again,

we cannot do this without you, so we are incredibly thankful for all of your support. The title of our

story is an even greater cold to come, and is by Clarksworld familiar, Rich Larson.

Rich Larson was born in Niger and has lived in Spain and Czech Republic and is currently based in Canada.

He is the author of the novellas, Anix and Imir, as well as over 250 short stories,

some of his best of which can be found in his collections, Tomorrow Factory,

and The Sky Didn't Low Today and Other Glitches.

His fiction has been translated into over a dozen languages, among them Polish, French, Romanian, and Japanese,

and his Clarksworld story, Ice, was adapted into an Emmy-winning episodes of love, death, and robots. His latest book,

Change Log, drop September 2025. And Rich has a whole host of stories here at Clark's World,

some of which are Malum, Malum, Malum, the Scourge, The indomitable Captain Holly,

L.O.L. said the scorpion.

Once upon term.

And you are born exploding.

So, my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax,

and let me tell you a story.

It's cruel of the soldiers to come when Mama is so sick and so pregnant.

I tell this to Dextra, and she agrees.

Then she goes to Mama and clamors into her lap,

...