This is serendipity.

Yeah, you listen to serendipity.

You think anyone will find this?

Somebody's gonna find it.

It's where robots fall in love.

I want to peel you like a carrot.

And flamingos can sound like Tom Waits.

Hey gee gee, do you know what the collective noun is for a group of flamingos?

Join me Ann Hepperman and me Martin Johnson for serendip, where we play the best audio fiction from around the world,

because this revolution will not be televised.

Find Srendipity wherever you get your podcasts.

From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. It was a hot day for me, probably nothing unusual by Mississippi standards, but my body,

still acclimatized to the Pacific Northwest was sweating and had a tendency to burn.

I was 28 days from home, standing at a literal crossroad in the Mississippi Delta.

The road that branched off to the northwest would carry me the 75 miles to my day's goal of Forest City, Arkansas.

It was an interstate town where the cars would be more amenable to my cardboard signs. Country roads, like this one, were hard to hitch-a-con.

I was at this intersection looking for a critical truth that I needed.

I was a 22-year- old kid with a trimmed beard, straight teeth,

and a life that, by nearly every metric, was an easy one.

And as such, I'd obtained a certain comfort in my home life, and a certain Bilbo Baggins-esque trepidation of the outside world.

So that summer, I left home. I told my friends that I was off for the summer to collect photographs and stories, but really

that was just a guise.

...