So, how can you enjoy the Vatican from the comfort of your living room? How do you say,

I love you without actually using the words I love you? And how do you know your spouse is

really your spouse? I'm Meg Wallitzer and and coming up on Selected Shorts, answers to

these head scratchers and more,

as we hear fiction about strange

substitutions. 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.

Thank you. through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Our planet is a big place.

Overwhelming, really, as anyone who tries to keep up with news and world events will tell you.

And just as we all have our own perspectives on the world,

we've got our own methods of coping with it, too. Some of us introverts like to think and

write about things we've experienced. The more outgoing among us might talk it all out with

strangers at a bar. And some of us prefer getting creative by remaking or reshaping what we've seen

into something a bit more digestible. That is, we put the big, amazing, sometimes scary world

in perspective by creating a model of some larger real-world phenomena. On today's selected

shorts, fiction about these sorts of replicas and

remakes. Life presents a character with something wild and overwhelming, something that requires

a kind of creative recreation. Either that, or life supplant something real, with something we don't

recognize. In one story, a visit to an architectural marvel sparks a revolution

...