You are listening to a Clark's World magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

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

We don't have much news to report, so I'm just going to jump right into our third story for the month of May, 2017.

And again, with the strep throat, the nebulo boards, and just general recovery after all of that.

Thank you for being patient with a podcast.

So our third story is titled Baronese and is by E. Catherine Tubler.

It's for Issue 128, May 2017. 2017.

Now E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and editor at Shimmer magazine.

And if you like what you hear, you can go to June 2016 for identity.

January 2016 brought you the abduction of Europa.

June 2015 brought you somewhere I have never traveled or third sound remix.

October 2014 brought you Pithing Needle.

May 2014 brought you migratory patterns of underground birds. and that's just for starters. So I hope you can

sit back, relax and let me tell you a story. In the Tank, they show Bishop, the Spider. It's the worst thing she's ever seen. She thought spiders were bad enough when they were an inch long, but this is five inches, orange, triangular and glossy wet under the lights. It has pinchers like a scorpion, legs like

pistons. The spider launches itself at Bishop without hesitating. She hesitates

and the spider is at her throat, in her throat, eating her from the inside out.

It feels as real as breathing as real as sky.

This is why she's in the tank. It's not real and Bishop tells herself that for the thousandth time.

The company means to condition her to what it'll be like out there in the trenches.

In the tank, Bishop can hesitate and not get herself dead.

The Tank is supposed to train the hesitation out, supposed to make Bishop a goddamn man against the monsters of the galaxy.

Get her phobia out in the tank, then off to the trenches.

...