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

Greetings, Clarkshold citizens. I hope this podcast is finding you well. This is our third story

for the month of September 2021 issue 180. I want to thank you for spending this time with us.

I hope you were happy, I hope you were healthy, and I hope you're hanging in there.

Thank you for coming here to escape for a few hours a day,

each podcast, each story we tell. Thank you for your ongoing support. Please visit patreon.com

forward slash Clarkshold. See how you can donate a couple of dollars. If just 10% of our listeners

subscribed, we could do this for a living. Please consider and I thank you.

So our story is titled Xiao Long Bao, Soup Dumplings, and is by D.A. Xiao Lin Spires.

D.A. Xiao Lin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawaii, New York,

various parts of Asia and elsewhere where their keyboard appendage attached.

Our work appears in publications such as Clarkshold, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Fireside,

Starline, Liquid Imagination, and Anthology such as makeshift, ride the starwind,

sharp and sugar tooth, deep signal, and battling in all her finery. Select stories can be read in

German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Estonian, French, and Japanese translation. If you like which

here please go back to some of D.A. Xiao Lin Spires other stories such as Mama Borg's milk,

last wishes, the iridescent lake, coffee boom, decoctions micronized, and Antarctica.

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

The sky swelled with a million, each step that I took toward the rosy jade grove,

the redder and denser it got. It looked like the sky soaked itself into my mom's old lipstick.

I should paralyze for a moment by the thought of her lips, moving in her signature hushed way,

reading to me about math, about our family history, or at least what she remembered of it.

...