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

Greetings Clarksville Citizens. I do hope this podcast finds you very well, this mid-April.

Spring has finally started to bloom around these parts, and I can leave my windows open for the 65 to 7 degree to let in the cool breezes with a hint of warmth upon them.

To see the flowers starting to burst from the soil and unfurl to the sun.

I hope whatever you're doing, this podcast finds you very warm and wonderful. There's not much news to report so I'm just going to jump

right into the story. The title of the piece is The Petals Abide is by Benjamin Sri Dwenkau.

Benjamin writes love letters to strange cities,

beautiful bugs, and the future.

Her work has appeared in Tor.com beneath ceaseless skies

and Tasm Japan, the dark and years bests.

She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut

Novella, Scale Bright, has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

You can find Benjamin at her website Beekian that's B-E-K-I-A-N dot Wordpress.com. And if you like what you hear, you can go back to April 2014 or auto-dyedact. December 2013 brought you silent bridge pale cascade and April 2013 brought you annex.

So without further ado, sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

In the womb tank coded with thought and memory, Touserut learned three things, that her life would be full of peace, that she will never die, and that she will know precisely one tragedy.

These facts are absolute, untarnished by chance and impregnable to intervention.

After that, petals started be awake with her mouth empty so she does not choke. A tickle in her throat, a pressure against tonsil, and they emerge

fluttering, the shape of hands with spindly digits, the color of unlit space that demarcates empires.

She likes to speculate whose hands they might be modeled on or whether they are the quintessence

of hands, a mannequin standard. They are pristine and velvet, untouched by teeth and untainted by saliva, like no part of the body at all, no effort to resemble tissue or keratin.

Here, Tousserrat finds her orders in the capillaries that call to the light of a crecheted discs and press against her nerves and synthetic licks.

The petals are flowers of prophecy, the blooms of destiny, as long as she follows their

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