Hello and welcome to another podcast by Clark's World Magazine for the month of March,

26, issued 234. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well. I'm your host and narrator,

Kate Baker. And as always, thank you for your ongoing support. Without it, we can't bring

you these stories, the podcast, the nonfiction, the art, and help to pay the staff that puts it all together. We are lost without you, so thank you again from the bottom of my heart. You allow me to do something that I love to do so much. Our second story for the month of March is titled First Human Ghost on Mars. It is by R.L. Messa. R.L. Mesa is the author of Our Love Will Devour Us, Dark Matter, Inc. 2023, with stories

in Clark's World and Nightmare magazine. Mesa writes speculative fiction from a not-haunted

Victorian house on the coast of Northern California, where he lives with his husband and the

strange animals they call family. If you like what you hear, I strongly suggest you go back to Outlier and the five remembrances,

according to Ste-E-319.

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

The afterlife on Mars is different from the afterlife on Earth.

I was the first ghost to experience both worlds, a pioneer like Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon,

minus the audience. There was no recorded proof to send the folks back home. The dead don't get

credit for their achievements. Our discoveries can't matter to the living. If they don't know,

we exist. But I was the first ghost on Mars. It counts. It matters. Being dead on Earth was rough.

The mere seconds I spent on the surface felt like

an eternity. The launch site was crowded with other ghosts, as if everyone who'd ever died in the

area was still around, minus their clothes, like there was no heaven or hell waiting for any of us.

Moving through the throng was impossible, like shoving between dementia patients in a nude

mosh pit, everyone lashing out and shouting for lost loved ones, fighting in vain to reach

locations where they no longer had a purpose.

My need to reach Mars was all-consuming.

Then the spaceship carrying my stroked out body left Earth's atmosphere and tore my

...