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

greetings Clarksrolled citizens and welcome to the sixth story for the month of November.

2022 issue 194. I hope this podcast finds you wonderfully well. I hope that you've been enjoying

the stories as far. If you like what you hear, please visit us over on our socials. I am Kate

Baker and Niel is at Clarksrolled and we're over on Twitter for as long as that shall live.

As always, thank you for supporting the magazine, whether you do it via a retweet,

sending it off to a friend or a colleague or visiting us on patreon.com for a slash Clarksrolled

every bit helps, especially that dollar a month or more. So our story is titled

The Transfiguration of the Gardener Irene by the Dead Planet Hipeia by Anne LeBlanc.

Anne LeBlanc is a writer and woodworker whose story is about queer yearning, culinary adventures,

and death have been published in a skate pod, apparition, lit, and baffling magazine.

Anne can also be found at the website and LeBlanc.com. So my dear listener, I hope you can sit back,

relax, and let me tell you a story.

The first of Irene's memories I eat is the night she learned I had been murdered.

It was karaoke night, not the official one for the cruise ship passengers, but an elicit one

Irene organized for a few of the other crew. They weren't supposed to be in the botanical garden,

but it was still two weeks from spaceport and the crew bar was noisome and full of men fueled by

cheap beer. So Irene ships a gardener, closed the garden for maintenance, and let her friends

spread themselves out beneath my fronds. My own memories of this moment are more

vegetable. I was alone, cutting far away from my planet self, Cecil, and mostly content to be

contained within my cramped garden plot. I remember the bum, bum of the music tickling my Hipeia,

the dimming of the grow lights, the blooming glow of the stars above, and the dance of micro-organisms

...