You are listening to a Clarksworld magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clarksworld citizens. I hope this podcast finds you well. This is our second story for

the month of September 2022 issue 192. I hope you enjoyed all of the stories. Thus far,

whether this is your first or your over 750th, I think at this point. Thank you for your support.

So our story is titled Border Run and is by Octavia Cade.

Octavia Cade, we found at the website, ojcade.com, is a New Zealand writer. She is a PhD in

science communication and is currently occupied writing climate fiction and writing about urban ecology.

She's won four Sir Julius Vogel Awards and was the 2020 writer and residence at Massey University.

Her latest book The Impossible Resurrection of Grief was published in 2021 by Stelliform Press.

And if you like what you hear, you can go back to you're not the only one, the stone,

weta, and crown of thorns. So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax,

and let me tell you a story.

A lifetime of sailing and Safa had never gotten used to the thrill of it,

to the wide blue spill of horizon and how it held the world. He'd stood in storms and calm weather

and every stage in between stood against salt railings and on decks so heaving he could barely

keep his feet and each time it astounded him the sense of space, the certainty that with no land

in sight ocean was all there was of the world. I should have been a poet, he said, thought about it

even when I was 15 or so. He smirked hands cupped around the mug of early morning mint tea

he couldn't rhyme to save my life. I didn't think poems needed rhymes, said Karina. She was just

being polite. Safa had seen the small shelf of verses all well-thumbed when he'd come aboard to

be introduced to Tengaroa's captain. He'd known then that they'd get along.

Yeah, I had dreams of putting them to music, something to get myself a boyfriend,

...