You are listening to a Clarks World magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clark World Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

Thank you for listening to all the stories we've given you throughout the

year. If you can spare it just a couple of dollars a month or more over at patreon

com forward slash Clark's world.

We'll lend so much support to bring you

exciting fiction, non-fiction, art, each and every issue.

So our fifth story is titled Appointment in Vienna and is by Gabriel Murray. Gabriel Murray is a writer-teacher interactive fiction hobbyist originally from Portland,, who has lived in just six U.S. states, put under about 21 different roofs, give or take a shingle.

His stories and articles have appeared in strange hor, Glittership, Daily Science Fiction, and elsewhere.

His favorite forms are the novel and the Inform Parser Text game due to his affection for maddening and drawn-out labor.

So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

I want the two images from Croco to be first.

May love Po pop it. If you outlive me and give a tinkers dam, and I won't hesitate

to resurrect Ned Fry, to harangue, if you don't you should remember. You do not have my permission to

colorize. You do have my permission to rearrange. They were taken in order but it interests me to imagine them either way.

The brothers looking up and then back down. The brothers engrossed, then unpleasantly aware.

Nothing else in the scene signifies which came first.

The shot is mostly rubble without a great deal of living subject to speak of, no flag flapping nor dragonfly on its circuit.

My beautiful composition of an ex-museum, I'm sure I already had the theme in mind became two awkward shots of unfriendly children.

It's good to make the most of things. They dominate the frame which is troublesome because I hadn't actually been intending to photograph them.

But I was 27, wasn't I?

Seven and 20, and so chilly and weary, so ready to declare that I had arrived.

...