You are listening to a Clarksworld magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Greetings, Clarksworld citizens. I hope this podcast finds you well. Welcome to the final story of the year.

Thank you for joining us for all of these stories in December and for all of the stories that we've brought to you throughout the year and the years.

You've been with us for quite a long time. Thank you for your ongoing support.

So we traverse into 2023. I do hope that you'll help continue that support.

Please go to patreon.com forward slash Clarksworld.

Our story is titled The Lightness, Missed by Alex Sobel.

Alex Sobel is a psychiatric nurse who writes when he can find the time almost never.

His writing has appeared in publications such as electric literature, the Saturday evening post online, dark matter magazine, and daily science fiction.

He lives in Toledo, Ohio with his wife. So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Trish is only a month long when the ghoulin parents die. She doesn't speak ghoulos well enough to understand the details, but the point gets across.

A freak accident, stupid, meaningless, the kind of thing that makes you pay attention to randomness, to fragility.

When she finds out Trish goes to Annie because she has no one else, not on this planet, not even on earth.

Oh God, poor girl. Annie says, wrapping Trish in a hug. Trish doesn't feel sad, she feels nothing.

So it takes her moment to notice the moisture on her face to realize what it means.

She cries into Annie's neck with no idea what the tears are for, whom they belong to, or if she can even claim them as her own.

Nursing school, a last ditch effort in her late 20s to find a career to make money to capture some stability.

It was Ivy Drug Administration that derailed her. She had three chances to get it right, but she kept having sterile breaks.

Hands below her waist, not using alcohol wipes on the tubing, turning her head so sterile, field fell out of her peripheral, stupid mistakes, small oversights.

Trish knew that if they would just let her through, she'd figure it out. She'd be a great nurse.

Her patients and her clinicals loved her, especially the geriatric patients who just needed someone to care a little.

When Trish gave them their heparin injections or changed their wound dressings, they blamed her for the pain involved,

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