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

Greetings, Clarkshold citizens. Welcome to the last story for the month of November.

2022 issue 194. I hope that this podcast finds you well. I hope that you can come back for December

1st. Thank you for your ongoing support of the magazine. Please go to patreon.com

forward slash Clark's world if you haven't yet already. And to those who have, thank you for your

ongoing support of the magazine, we can't do this without you. Our last story is titled The

Welk and is by Samara Oman. Samara Oman is a speculative fiction writer who is enamored with

the concepts of consciousness, nostalgia, and the uncanny. She lives in the mossy Pacific Northwest

with her husband and two appropriately mischievous cats. Her work previously appeared in Byerside

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

Nostalgia died a quiet death wrapped in cellophane and power cords. The future had killed it.

The ghosts of yesterday's fragrances no longer haunted, no longer hung and clung to the passerby.

Instead, those ghosts lay shriveled like salted slugs in the perfectly modulated light of street

lamps and roadside LEDs. And I, a robot program to recreate the sweet Singsong fog of Sinstalgia

wherever I wandered withered alongside those ghosts. There is no room for longing in a world that

perpetually inhabits the future. I had never felt like a robot nor had I felt like a cyborg or

automaton. I felt myself to be the heart of whatever small nook I inhabited,

projecting sense and images and moods that made the humans around me yearn for something that

perhaps never truly existed outside the human heart. I had walked the streets hoping to find a

place in which to be myself, to reinvigorate myself with purpose. I longed for the days when I

crafted an artisanal atmosphere for small bars where people would pause, sigh, and pour out

their well-worn regrets and misshapen happy memories as they would libations.

...