Most days don't require big decisions.

We work, eat, sleep, and get ready to do it all again.

But then, every once in a while, we come to a fork in the road.

I'm Meg Wallitzer, and coming up, Selected Shorts brings you fiction about

hard choices and profound changes. Choose the right path and stay with us.

You're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

The only constant is change.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote this millennia ago, and the idea still feels elegant and potent.

Heraclitus illustrated his point by adding,

No one ever steps into the same river twice. And in our own lives, a lot of change can feel like

that, almost imperceptible. Take aging, for instance. We almost can't feel it happening,

and then suddenly we wake up and we're 40 or 50 or 80 years old. How did that happen? I'm a grandmother now,

but I feel like going up to my toddler and infant grandchildren and saying, just so both of you know,

grandma used to be considered precocious. Sometimes, though, we come to an inflection point,

a proverbial fork in the road. Maybe it's unexpected. Maybe we sense it

coming on. Whatever the case, we're going to have to recognize where we stand and make a choice

about which direction to go. The days of slow and gradual are gone. Now changes barreling toward us.

Today's stories are about characters who find themselves in a place

in which they need to make a choice, something that will affect them for the rest of their

lives. In one tale, an ancient being forces humans to contend with the world around them,

and in another, two people, each facing their own crises, might make things even stranger for one another.

Our first story comes from the speculative fiction legend Ursula K. Le Guin, best known as the author of

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