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

Greetings Clarksville citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

This is our third story for the month of February,

2020, Issue 161.

As always, thank you so much for your support for this magazine.

Please head to ClarkWorld Citizens.com to see how you can be a part of what we do each and every month.

A few dollars our way, we'll show yourla and is by Cooper Shrivastava.

Cooper Shrivastava grew up in Pennsylvania and now lives in New York City with several

houseplants she is hoping will one day develop sentience. She works in finance by day,

by night she writes short stories, and the first halves of novels. She is a

graduate of the Clarion 2019 Writers Workshop. So my dear listeners I hope you can

sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

It took Old plant 20 generations to understand their language and another 20

generations to figure out how to speak it back to them. Generation. That was their word, a word that old

plant never applied to itself. A word that old plant when it relayed its conversation back to the others didn't even

bother to translate from the kelps convulsive and glimmering light

language back into slow-speak, the master language of the trees.

Hello, was the first thing that old plant said to these strange beings in the water.

Wonderment. Ah! If only the scientists of bygone eras could see us in this moment unfurling the first lamina of contact, sharing among us the Sacariferous currents of friendship,

was the first thing, one of them replied to Old Plant.

The kelp then did something for which Old Plant had no reference in that first

meeting but later came to understand was one of their many, many under languages. It danced. Old Plant watched the slither and flutter, the counter-current

...