When you've got a problem, what you desperately want to hear from someone is, I've got just

the thing.

And this week on Selected Shorts, fiction about solutions.

Salesmen, angels, and time travelers offer up their best fixes to problems of all kinds.

Who knows?

Maybe one will fix what else you?

I'm Meg Wallitzer, 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.

No matter how self-sufficient we are, we can't always cure what ails us.

And whether we're dealing with life's little annoyances like your basic leaky faucet or

those troubles of larger proportion, it's a relief to know that someone somewhere has

a plan to deal with it.

Maybe that plan feels a bit implausible or requires a significant financial commitment, but at

least for a moment, a solution really feels within reach.

In today's Selected Shorts, stories about characters coping with pre-existing difficulties

large and small, before they happen upon someone or something ready to change everything.

In one story, a door-to-door salesman unveils the must-have technology of the future, in

a second, a celestial being offers up a possible remedy for the aches and pains of life.

And stick around for our final story, a Ray Bradbury classic, in which a time machine

delivers a hero to our tumultuous present.

Let's begin with a story by Shinichi Hoshi.

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