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

greetings Clarkshold citizens and welcome to the last story for the month of June 2022 issue 189.

I hope that you've enjoyed what you've heard thus far. Or maybe this is your first story coming

to Clarkshold. We have an entire back catalog at your leisure. So please go to the website

clarksholdmagazine.com and let us clerk with any. You can go to the podcast tab.

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it helps us bring you these engaging stories, this nonfiction, this podcast, and our art.

If only just 10% of the people who listened and

read the magazine's subscribed or paid it for just a little bit,

Neil and I could be doing this full time. So thank you. Our story is titled Mars Bodies and is

by Adele Gardner. Adele Gardner, who can be found at the website, Gardnercastle.com,

goes by the pronouns none, they, and mix. Adele is a fiction writer and award-winning poet with

work and analog forthcoming, Strange Horizons, Podcasts and Daily Science Fiction. A poetry collection,

Halloween Hearts is forthcoming from Jacka Names Press. A graduate of the Clarion West writer's

workshop, this gender-fluid night owl loves watching samurai films and reading comics with cats.

Adele serves as literary executor for father namesake and mentor Delbert Art Gardner

and guests edited the Arthurianna issue of I to the telescope. So my dear listener, I hope you

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

The seven minutes of terror had never been so terrifying or accelerating. We hurtled down our

heat shield's roaring, and my capsule, despite being harnessed in, my Mars body trembled in the

relentless vibration that accompanied the sound of the inferno. I raced down at a thousand miles

an hour. The supersonic parachute deployed with a nine G-jolt. Right on schedule, the heat shield

...