You are listening to a Clarks World magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarks World Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you very well. I know I'm a day late on the whole

podcast schedule. My blue Yeti microphone was having issues and I believe it was

the USB cable that decided to fizzle out on me so the good news

is that I had purchased over the weekend the Blue Yeti Pro microphone with a new

USB cable and some ferrite cores and a new pop filter and I did some research and hopefully

this podcast will come out sounding absolutely wonderful and better than it has since the inception of the podcast.

So welcome to the fourth short story that we're offering you during the month of April.

The piece is titled, Melt With You, and is written by Emily C. Scaffton.

Emily lives in Seattle with her husband and their child, a cat who thinks he's a tiger.

When she's not teaching or writing, she dabbles in roller derby,

flying trapeze, and any other absurd opportunities that come along.

Emily has an MFA and creative writing,

and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Idiomancer, Flurb, and everyday fiction,

with upcoming works in daily science fiction and after death in

anthology. And that's E.S.K.aftun.com. So you've waited long enough.

Without further ado, let me tell you a story.

Even after being reincarnated as a plastic lawn flamingo, Irma still insisted that the scruffy

panhandler on the I-95 off-ramp near our house had been Jesus.

We missed him, she'd say, painted beak opening to reveal a mouth that did not lead to a windpipe or vocal cords or lungs.

We mistreated Jesus again and now we're doomed.

...