You are listening to a Clark's World magazine podcast with your host and narrator, Kate Baker.

Welcome to our first story for the month of November 2022 issue 194.

I hope that this podcast finds you well. If you're a first-time listener to the magazine,

welcome in. If you're an existing listener and a supporter of the magazine, thank you.

And if you'd like to support us, please go to patreon.com forward slash Clark's world,

where you can donate a dollar a month or more. And it really helps us bring you this incredible

fiction each and every month. This podcast or art or nonfiction. Just 10% of our listeners

gave a dollar a month or more. We could do this full time. So thank you to those of you who are

continuously making this ever closer to our reality. Our first story for the month of November

is titled The Rhythm of the Soul and is by Michelle Julia John. Michelle Julia John is a

speculative fiction writer from the twin Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She is a 2019

proper fellow and a graduate of the University of the West Indies. She obtained her master's degree

in sociology and uses it for world building in her stories. Though she would love to be at the beach

all day, you'll often find her loudly supporting her favorite football team, Chelsea Football Club,

when she's not writing or reading. Michelle is currently working on her first novel.

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

I was 10 years old and my father broke the world with the sweet notes of a steel pan.

He created a new version called it the S-pan, short for soul pan. Like any other,

he made it from a repurposed steel drum. Streaks of gold ran up the sides of his five-inch skirt,

tucked into a red iron stand. When he showed it to me, I laughed. Not because of the colors,

though he made it fancy, like some race car. Nah, it was because of the 20 carved notes,

much less than normal tenor pans. How he expected to play nice music when he was missing notes was

...