At Selected Shorts, we love What If Stories. What If you could turn back the clock and retrieve a lost moment or a lost love. On this week's show, two stories that ask those questions. 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 put time in a bottle. It's about time. Love you till the end of time. I have wasted time and now time doth waste me. It's closing time.

When we were thinking about the theme for this show,

we realized the extent to which time is a constant in our lives.

It's not just that we live in and through time, that's a given,

but the idea of time has pervaded our language colloquially and lyrically.

We spend our lives moving through time, and yet again and again, we're shocked, shocked to see it pass. So we decided to move past

the tropes and cliches and consider two very different stories on the nature of time and its

effects on us. In one, a woman chooses knowledge over comfortable ignorance.

In the other, a chance encounter turns the clock back for an aging artist.

Our first story, The Knowers, is by a selected short's favorite, Helen Phillips,

whose demure and dangerous works of fantasy have beguiled us over the years. She's the author of

five books, including the novel The Need, and was one of the authors we commissioned for our first

ever anthology, Small Odyssey's. The Knowers has a provocative sci-fi premise, the availability

of personal information that's sort of an extreme version of the

Freedom of Information Act. But the heart of the story is about the effect on a marriage when two

people choose different paths. Our reader is the multi-talented, multi-credited,

stalker Channing, whose television work includes the West Wing, and on stage her Tony-nominated performance

in House of Blue Leaves.

Here she is with Helen Phillips, The Knowers.

There are those who wish to know and there are those who don't wish to know.

...