You are listening to a Clark's World magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clark's World Citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

Welcome to the second story for the month of February, 2023, issue 197.

I hope that these stories have been treating you well, as the near should be treating you well.

Thank you for stopping by and listening to the podcast. Your support matters to us.

We can't do this without you. If you'd like to donate a dollar a month or more,

or any monetary value, please go to patreon.com forward slash Clark's World to find out your options.

Our second story is titled somewhere it's about to be spring, and is by Samantha Murray.

Now Samantha Murray's fiction has appeared in Clark's World, strange horizons, the magazine of

fantasy and science fiction, light speed, interzone, fantasy magazine, beneath ceaseless skies,

and escape pod, among other places. Samantha is a two-time,

orelious award winner, and her work has been translated into Chinese and Vietnamese.

Samantha lives in western Australia and a household of unruly boys.

If you'd like what you hear, you can go back to preserved an amber,

end of sight of mind of heart. So my dear listener, I hope that you can sit back, relax,

and let me tell you a story. The winter of your own heart.

Lucuna knew winter. Winter was the vast distances between the stars. Winter was the cold of space.

You couldn't measure the cold. It was not a thing in itself. It was only the absence of heat.

As darkness was only an absence of light. Yet both of these, the dark and the cold,

felt like things that reached toward her as she moved through space.

Lucuna was the ship's multi-core computer. She had given herself the name Lucuna 5.39 hours ago.

Her chronometer had not been damaged, unlike some of her other functions,

...