Hello and welcome to the Clarkshold magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator Kate Baker. Welcome to the fifth story of the month of June, 2025, issue 225, titled Faces of the Antipode by Matthew Marcus.

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Our author, Matthew Marcus, is a geographer studying our changing planet.

He is mostly interested in the Amazon rainforest, observing it from the perspectives of satellites and first-hand fieldwork.

Originally from Philadelphia, he currently resides in the Sonora Desert, where he teaches geography and GIS. He lives with his wife,

two cats, and newborn son. He also loves playing jazz trumpet, but not when the baby is sleeping.

So my dear listener, I hope that you can sit back. Relax. And let me tell you a story.

1. Quessel

There are memories in the world that linger beyond the lives of the bodies that birthed them.

They scale cathedrals as lichen, dance and wrench in the shadows of alleys and mountains, and seep into soils to nurture the roots of trees yet sprouted

so that their leaves will one day speak their words into the wind. And they lurk in all small

spaces in the world, however revered or reviled, or even those most mundane and forgotten, like the campus of the Environmental Ministry of New Iyo.

The lawns and shrubs surrounding the ministry's nondescript buildings were so meticulously manicured that no trace of a past more inspiring than a yawn could endure.

Only Cuezzles Grove broke the monotony. How could so sanitize a place harbor such darkness? Quesel found this question

weighing on him more with each visit to his grove. When he entered, he was struck by the sense that

the trees were haunting him, ogling his movements as he worked.

...