You are listening to a Clarksrolled magazine podcast with your host and narrator,

Kate Baker. Welcome to the third story for December 2022. We're edging ever closer to a new year,

and that is all thanks to you and your support. Please go to patreon.com for a slash Clarksworld.

Our third story is titled The Resting Place of Trees and is by Ben Berman Gunn. Ben Berman Gunn

is a writer from Takronto, Toronto, Treaty 13, and Williams Treaty territory, now living in Calgary,

Treaty 7 land, and home of the Blackfoot Confederacy, where he is a Ph.D. student in English

at the University of Calgary. He is the author of the collection, What We See in the Smoke,

Crow's Nest Books, and the novella, Visitation Seeds, from 845 Press. His next novel,

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, is forthcoming with Wolfsack and Wind in 2024.

So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you a story.

I knew it all along. The heart of the world is blue.

Maggie Nelson, Louis.

On the edge of the desolate wreckage of a crashed ship, the honey bee trembled,

climbing downwards from the motionless stalks of the machines antenna.

In its b-mind, it feels only order and structure and something that might have been relief,

having recently escaped capture by a spider. Through fractal vision, it sought the vector of

sweetness, yearning for growing things. It sees instead the mandibles of the robot,

it sits astride, slipping into the great smoking metal of the satellite before them.

For the briefest moment, a connection is made between the robot and the ship, when the second is

over, everything is dark and dead. The honey bee drops ash into the ground. For a moment,

the antenna of the robot wiggled, thought, digesting all he had learned.

Oh, dear, he said.

...