If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with, even if the one you

with is a five pound bag of sugar.

I'm Meg Walitzer and on this selected shorts, the place where love overlaps with

inanimate objects.

Don't go anywhere.

I'm talking to you. We already know that that

inanimate object isn't going anywhere. You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. People don't talk all that much about requited love. You know the

kind where you love someone or something and they love you back. The kind where you have

all your needs met with no major complaints.

Now, nobody writes poems or songs about requited love.

Poets and songwriters only want to talk about the unrequited love

that keeps you up very, very late at night and

makes you cry until you need your electrolytes replenished and then maybe you squeeze your

pillow really hard and cry even harder because the pillow is wet from all that

crying.

Requited love, on the other hand, might just make you incredibly boring to your friends.

It can be a real challenge for a writer to create characters

who are happily in love. Even if they never fall out of love over the course of a

short story or novel, the reader might be expecting them to, maybe even hoping they do.

Because after all, fiction is often about movement of a kind.

It can be about that sudden turn that changes everything.

...