A death defying story by Louise Erdrich and we meet death himself on the next selected shorts. I'm Meg Walitzer at the edge of my seat.

Join me.

You're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Reality, what does it actually mean?

The actual world we live in?

A kind of truth against which we measure dreams and misperceptions?

Something like Plato's idea that our world is fabricated and that an ideal version exists somewhere else?

Take your pick. But no matter what, playing with the idea of reality is one of the functions

of fiction.

And on this program, three different stories with three very different ideas about reality.

In one story, a mother's unusual skill set changes the outcome of events. In another, death takes a holiday, and in the

third a damaged marriage haunts an adult child. Our first work, The Leep, is by the contemporary master Louise Erdrich, whose many published

works include the novels Love Medicine, The Night Watchman, and the Round House.

The Leap is grounded in a reality so nuanced and surprising that it takes your breath away.

There may be no more powerful instinct than a mother rushing to the aid of an imperiled child,

but Erdrick shapes the story around a compelling overlap of the past and the present.

Reader Elizabeth Reser's credits include Gray's anatomy, the Twilight trilogy, and the haunting of Hill House.

There are chills of a different sort in Louise Erdrich's The Leep, and here is Reiser to deliver

them. My mother is the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act, not a fact I think about much even now that

she is sightless, the result of encroaching and stubborn cataracts.

She walks slowly through our house here in New Hampshire, lightly touching her way

along walls and running her hands over shelves, books, the drift of a grown child's belongings

and cast-offs. She has never of a

...