Marissa Lingen | Islands of Stability

One day Lily decided to be someone else. Someone with a past. It was an affliction of hers, wanting this. The desire was seldom triggered by any actual incident or complaint but seemed instead to be related to the act or prospect of lateral movement. She felt it every time a train passed. Narrated by Kimberly Farr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Mar 201348min

A loon called this morning, loud and clear in the cold hours before dawn, but it was not that which woke me from my sleep. As I opened my eyes, the bay and the beach were wrapped in heavy blackness, invisible clouds shutting out any hint of starlight above. For a moment, I lay in my lean-to, breathing heavily under the shaggy bison skin blanket. Narrated by Adam Paul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26 Feb 201336min

Harry looked out the window and thought: At least I saw Paris one more time before it was destroyed in the bombardment. Narrated by Gabrielle De Cuir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

19 Feb 20131h 15min

With minimal fanfare and next to no audience, Invasion of a Small World debuted in the summer of 2016, and after a brief and disappointing run, the series was deservedly shelved. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

12 Feb 201332min

Perhaps you’ve heard an anecdote about a child named Cresencio who was skipping barefoot between hills of corn when a shallow bowl in the field, long turbulent with mutterings, broke into pieces. Cresencio spied a tongue of smoke, like the mockings of a demon; he bent, staring into the jagged mouth that was about to spatter the nearby trees with sparks and set his childhood on fire. Narrated by Paul Boehmer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Feb 201340min

My feet are scraped and bleeding, my slippers shredded and almost useless. The dress hangs in tatters around me. No longer white, it still bears the pearls along the bodice, and I hope I can keep them close and sell them in whatever town I find myself in. Provided I find a town. Provided I ever leave these woods. I have traveled for two days, surviving on puddle water and berries, hoping that the sounds I hear behind me aren’t my father, Roland, and the dogs. Narrated by Susan Hanfield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

22 Jan 201353min

You’ve heard of bottled cities, no doubt—society writ miniscule and delicate beyond reason: toothpick spired towns, streets no thicker than thread, pin-prick faces of the citizenry peering from office windows smaller than sequins. Hustle, politics, fervor, struggle, capitulation, wrapped in a crystal firmament might reclaim the land, stoppered at the top to keep reality both in and out. Those microscopic lives, striking glass at the edge of things, believed themselves gigantic, their dilemmas universal. Narrated by Christian Beeman. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Jan 201325min

Addison Howell didn’t so much arrive in the town of Humptulips as appear there sometime around 1875. He had money, which set him apart from everybody else—because everybody else was working for the logging company, and mostly they didn’t have a pot to piss in, as my Daddy put it. Narrated by Emily Rankin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Jan 201320min