Oh, hello, my hothead friends, and welcome to another episode of Too Hot for Radio,

the show that is as saucy as the public radio audience is prude, which is to say we're pretty saucy.

I'm your host Aparna Ninsherla, and you know, I don't judge anyone for their conservative tastes and culture. I just happen to

prefer the kamamil and cocaine vibe we enjoy during this here Smutty Story Hour.

Now, if I had one wish, you can be sure I'd ask for nothing. That's right. Every one of us who went to middle school slash junior high knows that wishes are a fricking trap.

And we know this because we were forced to read the monkey's paw by,

let's say it together, W.W. Jacobs,

A W.W. Jacobs, the famed author of the Monkey's Pa, and probably something else in, I'm going to say, the moralistic

Gothic genre?

Some other finger-wagging parable involving an unspoken yet unavoidable

active animal torture?

I wish I knew, but as wishes are a a trap I can't Google it.

If you can't quite recall your tweenage education allow me to present the moral of the monkey's paw.

Be careful what you wish for. That basic rule of thumb

your mom has been repeating to you all your life. Though I'll presume your mom never whispered her most fervent wishes to a Simeon's

dismembered limb. While today's story doesn't involve monkey's paw level

wish fulfillment there's a definite yearning underneath it all. It involves a narrator

that is the opposite of that Hollywood trope, The Manic Pixie Dream Girl. So a kind of irresponsible woman looking to transform her own life.

It's a lot less catchy I realize but maybe more relatable. The story is by Aaron Summers. We heard another of her story's

10-year affair not long ago but we liked it, you liked it, why shouldn't we all

have more of the things we like?

Summers is the author of the novel Stay Up with Hugo Best and has been published in other venues including The New Yorker. Because the story involves characters other than our

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