Greetings Clark's citizens. I am your host and narrator Kate Baker. I hope that these stories have been finding you well.

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Our story is titled The Weight of Your Own Ashes, and is by Carly St George.

Carly St George is a speculative fiction writer in Shirley Jackson Award finalist

from Northern California, her debut short story collection, You Fed Us to The Roses, is available

from robot dinosaur press. Her short fiction has been published in magazines such as Nightmare, Light Speed, and Pseudopod, as well as in multiple best of year anthologies.

When not writing, she's usually obsessing about television, obsessing over fan pick, or negotiating with her monster cats. She's losing.

With that said, I do hope you can sit back relax and let me tell you a story.

Alice wants to hold a funeral for me,

which is disconcerting because I'm not dead, but humans, like all aliens, and certainly all single forms, have their own idiosyncrasies.

I'm used to the idiosyncrasies of course. I've lived on earth in my

tertiary body at least since my hatching in San Francisco grew up in a cramped department

in North Beach and I'm very much a Californian, an American,

...