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

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

This is our fifth story for the month of March. Issue 186-2022.

I hope that you're doing well. I hope that you're keeping safe and healthy.

And I want to thank you for your ongoing support.

Please consider donating over at patreon.com forward slash Clarksworld.

I know I say this every single podcast and some of you might skip right through it.

But seriously, we can't do this without you. Your support matters very, very much.

We're not asking very much either.

Just a dollar or more a month to show your support so that we can keep doing our jobs and bringing you fiction.

This podcast, art, nonfiction.

Our story is titled Wanting Things and is by Cal Ritterhoff.

Cal Ritterhoff is a science fiction writer from Montauk, New York.

In 2019, he graduated with a degree in English from the College of William and Mary,

where he also received the 2018 Tiberius Grachis Jones Prize for nonfiction.

He currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona and is pursuing an MFA in fiction from Northern Arizona University.

He's also a teacher and torments his students daily with half-remembered 2010's pop culture references.

His best days are still ahead of him.

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

Warning, this story contains dangerous, almost radioactive levels of sincerity,

also a sex scene between a smart house and a toaster.

There are nights when she twists like a tree in the breeze, hair falling wildly in brown curls around her shoulders.

...