This is a podcast extra from Nature.

Each week, nature publishes a science fiction story in its futures slot.

At the end of every month, we read you our favourite.

This month's story is Green Bowls Will Cover The, written by Sarah L. Byrne, published on March the 15th and read by Charmany Bundell.

Don't judge me too harshly, little girl.

It's April, and this end of the lilacs reminds me it would soon be your birthday,

as if I would ever forget.

April was her birthday, although birth wasn't how I made her,

and Day meant nothing to her, with her chronobiology synchronised to standard temporal units.

Still, she had a birthday. She was a person.

June, and the world was green. That perfect budding green that lasts only weeks before the sun and the wind start to fade its freshness.

She was perfect. The day she

curled her apical merestim around my finger, I knew she knew me.

July. How she grew, shooting up so fast. Some days I thought I could see her growing before

my eyes, spreading, twining. I couldn't look away in case they missed something, didn't want to affect the bonding by leaving her alone.

I started to sleep in the lab.

You had your nanny, didn't you, to watch you in our quarters?

You had friends from school, homework to do.

She was only a baby. She needed me more.

August. The harvest time. The haymaking. was only a baby. She needed me more.

August. The harvest time. The haymaking.

I should have known what was coming. But it's a hazy dreamlike time. The hay bales lie like sleeping giants in the field and it's easy to forget how death looks like sleep from a far

...