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

Greetings Clarksville Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you very well.

I'm just going to jump right in to the third story of the month titled

Migratory Patterns of Underground Birds. This piece is by E. Catherine Tobler.

Now E. Catherine Tobler is a Sturgeon Award finalist and an editor at Shimmer magazine.

And if the name sounds familiar, you might want to go back to May 2013, where she did R plus D, divided by I

equals M, and to see the other whole against the sky was featured in November 2012. You or she who abode was June 2012.

So I invite you to sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

They say everything in the world has been discovered.

They are wrong.

Finding the bodies used to be troubling.

It's worse when the bunkers turn empty, the bodies taken.

The land is filled with bunkers, dark wounds carved into the earth,

reinforced with stone, brick, bars. They kept us in small spaces, but we expanded even so, and when they left, they, I still don't know.

We began to die, and so I left too before I could become a body for someone to discover.

Everywhere I go, the world is living and its people are dead.

Lights in the sky every third night as I travel, sometimes near and most times distance.

And then, not again.

The sky grows as quiet as the land, maybe more so because the land holds the whisper of wind through tall grasses and sometimes the trickle of fresh water, but there is never enough water.

It was this way in the bunker. So many bodies, so much thirst.

Here the land spreads quiet, low and still. I hunch against the short spiked grass and do not feel the seep of water through my pants.

Everything is frozen, a season unturned.

...