You are listening to a Clarks World magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator, Kate Baker,

greetings to Clarks World Citizens and welcome to our first story for the month of February

2020-23 issue 197. How has the new year been trading you? I hope that it's been

trading you well, that you're happy, that you're safe, and you're healthy. As always, I'd like to

thank you for your ongoing support of the magazine. Just coming by and listening to the podcast,

buying a subscription or going to patreon.com forward slash Clarks World,

where you can donate a dollar a month or more helps us bring you these fantastic stories

month after month, year after year. So thank you. Our title of our first story for February

is titled The Portrait of a Survivor Observed from the Water is by Yukimi Ogawa.

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo, where she writes in English but never speaks

the language. Her fiction can be found in such places as the magazine of fantasy and science fiction,

strange horizons and interzone digital. Her first collection, like Smoke, Like Light,

Stories is forthcoming in June 2023 from Mythic Delarium Books. So my dear listener,

I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

Something somewhere in her body quietly crumbles. The dust slowly spreads over the water,

the momentum of the collapse pushing it away, the trapped words of commands and programs breaking

free. Those which used to give her existence a meaning, she is smaller and lighter than she was

when she landed on this planet. The lost weight does not include the person who inhabited her,

of course. That is just too painful to count. You love your cupboard. There are many shells

in this place, all of them built by the curator, all of them a little bit wonky one way or the other.

But this tiny piece of furniture is the only thing that actually belongs to you.

The leftmost bottle on the top tier contains the first driftage that you've ever retrieved.

...