A death-defying story by Louise Erdrick, and we meet Death himself on the next Selected Shorts.

I'm Meg Wallitzer 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 Leap, is by the contemporary master Louise Erdrick, whose many published works include the

novels Love Medicine, the Night Watchman,

and the Roundhouse. 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 Erdrich shapes the story around a compelling

overlap of the past and the present.

Reader Elizabeth Reeser'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 Leap,

and here is Reiser to deliver them.

Thank you. Louise Urdrichs the leap, 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,

...