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 and safe and healthy and I hope that you are weathering this

Unimaginable situation we are in.

And I hope the sound of my voice is a comfort

if you find yourself alone in it.

I want to thank you for spending this time with me

as I narrate another story here.

This one is called The Amusement Dark and is by Mike Buckley.

Mike Buckley is a widely published short story writer whose work has appeared in

national journals such as the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Southern California

Review, in Clark's World, Daily Science Fiction, an Escape Pod. His work has been

anthologized numerous times including in the best American non-required

reading 2003 and the upcoming Red Hen L.A. Writers anthology.

His debut collection of short fiction, miniature men, was released in 2011.

You can find Mike at Mike Buckley author.com and if you like what you hear March 2015

brought you all original brightness July 2016 helium Helium Music.

November 2017, dead heroes, and July 2018 brought you a gaze of faces. So I hope you are wrapped up.

I hope you are comfortable.

And I hope that you can sit back, relax,

and let me tell you a story.

Contact, lost colony vessel, the intention. The man and his gizix stepped out of the burned hills in the pitch-black morning.

Machines towered in front of them, caught in the lights of the floating handhelds,

...