There's something fundamentally human about pursuing unlikely goals despite terrible odds of success.

But when we know the likely outcome, why do we persist?

I'm Meg Wallitzer and coming up on selected shorts, fiction about hope, luck, literate aliens, lottery winners, and much more. Don't go anywhere.

You're listening to Selected Shorts where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time.

Something the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Some things in life are rare.

Seeing the Aurora Borealis or getting a tax audit,

some things are exceedingly rare and may never happen to you,

witnessing Haley's Comet or losing your money in a stock market crash.

And then there are the

categories of things that happen so rarely and to so few people, we'd have to live multiple

lifetimes to see them take place. Things like being struck by lightning or, say, winning the lottery.

And though these events are exceedingly rare, they can occupy an outsized place in our heads

as we catastrophize or fantasize about what might be. We might rehearse all the possibilities

in our heads, but of course if one of these staggeringly rare events ever did happen to us,

do we really know how we'd react?

On this episode of Selected Shorts, wild happenings that no one can truly plan for and their effect on the human psyche, at least according to fiction writers.

In one story, a woman with her own little free library finds herself in a book swap with

the uncanny.

In another story,

a lottery winner revisits the person

that she was before winning

to find out if she left anything behind.

...