Which is scarier, running from the law or becoming your mother?

Do I have to choose?

Can I say that depending on the circumstances both might be same-level scary?

This week on Selected Shorts, join me, Meg Wallitzer, for two unusual stories by Jamaica

Concade and Laura Vandenberg.

I'm your host, Meg Wallitzer, and you're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

Sometimes the people we're closest to are also the people we most want to get away from,

and frequently, let's face it, they can be family members.

You know how on a cruise there might be two dozen people wearing t-shirts that say something

like, where the Carson family?

They're having a reunion on board the Duchess of the Sea, and maybe at first it seems

like they're having fun, but after a while there's nowhere to go where you're not going

to see another Carson, and that can be a problem if you're a Carson.

You can run, but you can't hide.

Not even at the all you can eat cracked crap buffet on deck four.

Because the truth is, in some very basic ways, all of us and our let's call them challenging

relatives, turn out to be inseparable.

The two stories on this program explore this tension from very different and unusual perspectives.

In the first, a mother and daughter become a force of nature.

In the second, a quartet of youthful bank robbers can't live with and can't live without

one another.

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