You are listening to a Clarksville magazine podcast with your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Greetings Clarksville citizens. I hope this podcast finds you extraordinarily well.

This is our last story for the month of March.

2020, issue 162. I hope you were hanging in there all things considered.

Thank you for spending your time with me and this magazine.

The piece is titled The Whale Fall at the End of the Universe

by Cameron Van Sant.

Cameron Van Sant is a transgender writer of Speco the Fiction. His short stories can be

found in Lightspeed magazine Queerly Loving Volume 2 and Capricious magazine,

The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue,

which was selected for the 2018 James Tiptree Jr. honor list.

He has also written non-fiction for In 2 magazine and You and Me magazine.

He lives in Sacramento, California with his partner.

You can find him on Twitter at Cameron Vaux-St.

So, my dear listener, I hope you can sit back and relax.

Know that you're not alone.

And let me tell you a story. Tristair drifts close enough to a star, close enough that it stands out slightly more than the others, and they wake.

The sail on their back unfurls and they feed on the light.

Their skin and tail scales glow green with photosynthesis.

The light is faint and absorbing it only makes them more

aware of their hunger, like a handful of water in a drought. They run their

tongue over their unused teeth still sharp in the vacuum of space.

...