Literature can be scary in a couple of different ways. It can keep us up at night worried about witches and aliens, or it can make some of us want to censor a story so no one else can read it.

On this week's selected shorts, dangerous literature that is scary

in both senses. I'm Meg Wallitzer. Stay with me. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our

greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction. One short story at a time.

When we say something is hiding in plain sight, often it's used in a playful way,

like a set of keys lying casually on the countertop right where we looked for them,

that somehow escaped our notice.

Or in a romantic comedy, it refers to that longtime pal who supports the main character while she dates terrible men, and then suddenly, pow, she gets it. Love and a happy ending,

10 minutes away, and she never saw it coming. But there can be another slightly more haunting

meaning to this idea,

like an invisible network of connections among people, places, things, or events that just

isn't immediately apparent. If you've read something by Franz Kafka or Thomas Pynchon or slog through

any number of conspiratorial fantasies online, you know what I mean. It can be compelling

the idea that there's some secret order to our world. Some people see it, others ignore it at their

peril. I've been thinking about those magic eye pictures that everyone was looking at some years ago.

You know the ones I mean. You stare and stare at a seemingly bland scene like a field

full of daisies, and after a while, if you let your eyes relax, an image appears in the middle of it,

maybe a person or a hippopotamus, but in any case something big that was hiding in plain sight.

And this reminds me of how fiction, or maybe art of any kind, works. People always ask

writers during Q&A's, where do you get your ideas? And it's hard to answer that without being

glib, but I do know that however they arrive, ideas can't be forced. The artist simply needs to

stare and stare, if you will, until the hippopotamus appears. It was there all the time,

...