Best American Short Stories

Summary

Selected Shorts: Best American Short Stories

Episode Date: March 26, 2026
Host: Meg Wolitzer
Readers: Cynthia Nixon, Ivan Hernandez
Featured Authors: Jessica Treadway, Julian Robles
Theme: Celebrating the 2025 volume of Best American Short Stories, edited by Celeste Ng—two standout stories that explore empathy and shifting realities, performed by acclaimed actors.

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Episode Overview

This annual “Best American Short Stories” episode of Selected Shorts is a celebration of contemporary fiction’s power to reflect, complicate, and illuminate real life. Hosted by Meg Wolitzer with guest reader Cynthia Nixon, the show highlights the selection process behind the prestigious anthology, led this year by guest editor Celeste Ng, and features two standout stories from the 2025 volume:

• “An Early Departure” by Jessica Treadway, read by Cynthia Nixon
• “Third Room” by Julian Robles, read by Ivan Hernandez

Both stories explore how lives can be thrown into uncertainty—suddenly within families, or slowly through obsession—fulfilling Ng’s stated aim for fiction that offers “a jolt of wonder” and builds empathy.

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The Best American Short Stories 2025: Editor’s Criteria

[01:08–05:23]

Selection and Criteria

• Meg Wolitzer introduces the show’s tradition of collaborating with the Best American Short Stories series, spotlighting new literary voices each year.

• Nicole Lammy (series editor) explains her process:

  "I read more than 3,000 stories this year, so I don't get out much, but the stories I read have been excellent company, as has Celeste Ng." [02:36]

• Celeste Ng’s criteria for selection (as read by Lammy and later by Nixon):

  1. Immediate “chemistry”—the story must grab the reader (“It's a lot like falling in love. You either have chemistry or you don't.”)
  2. A sense of completeness, even if the story leaves mysteries.
  3. Language that “startles or surprises” (“sentences that took my breath away with their absolute rightness”).
  4. Heft: stories must feel necessary to the writer (“the story was following them like a ghost...demanding to be told”).

• Empathy and Insight: Ng believes fiction creates distance that can help us see reality more clearly and invites “the willing reader to step into another’s world.”

  "Stories build our empathy by asking us to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's position..." – Cynthia Nixon reading Ng [05:50]

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Story One: “An Early Departure” by Jessica Treadway

[08:36–27:47]
Reader: Cynthia Nixon

Plot Summary

A moving exploration of “aunthood” and family dynamics. The narrator, Kim, recounts a tradition of New York trips with her niece Tanya, nephew Henry, and sister. Now grown, Tanya asks Kim for a secret visit, revealing her brother is facing expulsion for hacking (at a girl’s manipulative request), and asks Kim to use her legal expertise and “second mother” status to help.

Key Themes:

• The complexity of maternal identity beyond motherhood
• Family bonds and boundaries, especially between aunts and nieces
• The pain of having to say “no” for the right reasons, and the shifting power dynamic as children become adults
• The ache of losing closeness and the struggle to let go

Notable Quotes and Moments

• On maternal longing:

  "I liked to read quotes from successful women about not having children, like Jennifer Aniston, who said, you may not have a child come out of your vagina, but that doesn't mean you're not mothering." – Cynthia Nixon as Kim [10:52]

• On painful honesty:

  "Hacking into someone else's database and changing the data is absolutely a crime." [14:55]
  "Ah, those words. A second mother. They're meant to be a compliment, one of the highest. But the person so named, understands all too well how far the second mother falls short of the first." [18:25]

• On losing connection:

  “I hugged her, not wanting to let go, even though I knew she'd already slipped away from me to a place I'd not be allowed to enter, even if I did ever manage to find it again.” [22:51]

• The train scene with the stranger’s child underscores the final realization of the limitations of “passing” as a mother:

  “I realized that of course I hadn't fooled the boy as I had his mother. Didn't I understand children better than that? He'd smiled at me, not because I'd charmed him, but to let me know he recognized a liar when he saw one.” [26:10]

Host’s Commentary

Meg Wolitzer [27:47–29:17]:

• Praises the story’s focus on “aunthood” rather than motherhood—uncommon in fiction.
• Highlights the story’s ambivalence and surprises, especially as Kim must redefine her place in the family.
• Notes how Treadway continues the story beyond the expected “ending,” into a fleeting, complicated moment with a stranger.

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Story Two: “Third Room” by Julian Robles

[31:36–57:58]
Reader: Ivan Hernandez

Plot Summary

A Kafkaesque, darkly comic meditation on isolation, obsession, and reality. A Mexican academic, subletting an apartment in Mexico, discovers a mysterious man living quietly in a “third room”—a leftover maid’s quarters—and cannot decide what to do, even as more people (including the landlord, a writer, his own girlfriend, and then the police) are inexorably drawn into the room, slowly vanishing from his life and the world.

Key Themes:

• The porous boundary between observation and lived experience
• The existential need for connection, even as others slip away
• The expansion of private obsession to a mass phenomenon; the crisis of the “disappeared” in Mexico as surreal tragedy
• Literary self-consciousness: the writer as spy, as voyeur, as possible object of someone else’s story

Notable Quotes and Moments

• The narrator on dealing with the mysterious inhabitant:

  “I can't say for certain when the man arrived. One week the room was empty, the next he was seated at the desk, his hand moving from left to right, apparently writing.” [36:25]

• On his own inaction and displacement:

  “I was opposed, at least ideologically, to the existence of landlords in general and did not want to appear allied with her by suggesting that the man at the desk was adding to the electrical bill.” [37:09]

• Conversations with the New York writer:

  "Could I reasonably argue that the man was doing any harm? His presence unnerved me...In material terms, I didn't use a third bedroom. The man had no effect on my daily life." [40:47] “Have you tried sitting the man down and telling him about yourself?...The man in the third room could make for an interesting audience. I've been exploring monologues in my work lately.” [41:02]

• Dream sequence:

  “His face was simple and familiar. It was the face of any person in a crowd, anonymous and inoffensive...the papers were covered in Ulipo nonsense words continuously reorganized in adherence to the dream's fickle logic.” [46:18–46:56]

• As the “third room” fills with people, the story veers into surreal social critique and metaphor:

  "Since that day, the number of people in the third room has increased far past a point permissible by the fiscal bounds of the space. First, more police arrived, and eventually government officials and members of the military. This attracted protesters and counter protesters whose disappearances hastened and the arrival of volunteer organizations devoted to searching for Mexico's missing." [55:09–56:17]

• On the final inability to resolve the mystery or escape his own inertia:

  “The man has disappeared from sight, but I can never be certain of his definitive departure. His writing task has become gargantuan, perhaps impossible. For the time being, I have holed up in this, the apartment's second room, to focus on drafting my report for the committee.” [57:08]

Host’s Commentary

Meg Wolitzer [57:58]:

• Compares “Third Room” to Kafka and celebrates its “Mary Poppins bag type of elasticity” in considering reality and the writer’s task.
• Observes that both stories dramatize abrupt or corrosive alterations of what once seemed certain in their worlds.

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Thematic Links & Concluding Reflections

[57:58–end]

• Both stories start with everyday certainties—family traditions, apartments, relationships—and then methodically unravel them, forcing characters and listeners to reckon with ambiguity, loss, and the (in)sufficiency of empathy.
• Celeste Ng’s editorial vision is echoed: fiction as a space to understand the world and each other by inhabiting unfamiliar perspectives and uncertainties.

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• [01:08–05:23]: Nicole Lammy on working with Celeste Ng & Ng’s editorial criteria
• [05:50–08:36]: Cynthia Nixon reads from Celeste Ng’s introduction
• [08:56–27:47]: “An Early Departure” by Jessica Treadway, read by Cynthia Nixon
• [27:47–31:36]: Meg Wolitzer’s reflection on story one and transition
• [32:54–57:58]: “Third Room” by Julian Robles, read by Ivan Hernandez
• [57:58–end]: Meg Wolitzer’s commentary and episode conclusion

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Memorable Quotes

• Celeste Ng (via Nixon) on fiction and empathy:

  "Stories build our empathy by asking us to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's position, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. Unlike disinformation, a short story tells you up front that it is fiction, and when you know it's all just pretend, you're often more willing to play along." [05:50]

• Narrator (Treadway) on losing closeness to her niece:

  “I hugged her, not wanting to let go, even though I knew she'd already slipped away from me to a place I'd not be allowed to enter...” [22:51]

• Robles’s narrator on the surreal growth of the third room:

  "The number of people in the third room has increased far past a point permissible by the fiscal bounds of the space." [55:15]

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Summary Takeaways

This episode of Selected Shorts is an invitation to see the world through the lens of carefully-chosen fiction, where boundaries of self and certainty dissolve. With standout performances from Cynthia Nixon and Ivan Hernandez, listeners experience the necessary discomfort, laughter, and wonder that Celeste Ng and the Best American Short Stories prize in new storytelling. Whether you’re interested in the shifting shape of family or the elasticity of reality, these stories offer a weekend trip, as Ng writes, “to a place you've never been.”

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For more readings, archives, and news on future volumes: [Visit Selected Shorts / Symphony Space website]

Transcript

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[Meg Wolitzer]

It's that time again. Time to surprise, delight and provoke you with Selected Shorts Annual Celebration of Fiction from the Best American Short Stories Join reader Cynthia Nixon and me, Meg Wolitzer, for Stories of the unexpected from the 2025 volume edited by the author of Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste. One of our favorite things to do at Selected Shorts is to celebrate each year's new volume of the best American short stories. Not only do we often discover new and exciting writers and get to read their arresting and powerful works, we get to hear how each year's guest editor created their list of bests. I myself was guest editor in 2017, and I enjoyed sharing that process. The guest editor of the 2025 volume was the novelist Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told you'd, Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts. And we've chosen two stories that reflect some of the big things Ng was thinking about when she made her selections. That fiction provides insight into the actual world and that stories build empathy by asking us to imagine ourselves in someone else's position. Here is the series editor, Nicole Lammy, speaking about working with Ng on this year's story selection.

[Nicole Lammy]

I read more than 3,000 stories this

[Cynthia Nixon]

year,

[Nicole Lammy]

so I don't get out much, but the stories I read have been excellent company, as has Celeste Ng. I was so lucky to have the chance to work with Celeste. I knew her a little before this year, so I was confident that she had the two most important qualities for this job. She's a very fast reader and she has excellent taste. What surprised me, though, was her willingness to read resolutely and with joy all the stories that I deposited on her front porch and in reusable grocery bags. We live in the same neighborhood, so that was my delivery system this year. And then, to encourage me to send her more, I included stories of all lengths, from wildly eclectic points of view and in many different genre mashups. Her openness allowed me to pass on to her all the stories that stayed with me long after I first read them. Each of the stories in the table of contents and on the list of distinguished stories at the back of the book made little rooms in my brain that I can still well into my second year of reading for Best American Short Stories revisit whenever I need a little jolt of wonder. And since she can't be here tonight, I'd like to read some sections from Celeste's beautiful introduction to the collection about the four characteristics that she looked for in her final list of stories. First and foremost, Celeste writes, the story had to grab me. The best comparison I can find is that it's a lot like falling in love. You either have chemistry or you don't, and often it defies rational explanation. Second, the story had to feel complete. I don't mean that everything gets resolved at the end, but I wanted a sense that the writer had considered the story holistically and that all the pieces fit together, even if every corner of the picture wasn't fully revealed. Third, the language in the story had to be of the highest caliber. If a piece didn't have sentences that startled or surprised me, or images that took my breath away with their absolute rightness, it usually didn't make the cut. And finally, stories had to have heft. They didn't have to be serious or sad. In fact, quite a few of the pieces in the yes pile made me laugh out loud. But I wanted the sense that the author wrote this story because they had to, that the story was following them like a ghost, tapping them insistently on the shoulder, moving the furniture and rattling the walls, demanding to be told.

[Meg Wolitzer]

While Ng couldn't make it for the live show, Cynthia Nixon, a longtime member of the Shorts family, stepped in to host. Best known as a principal on Sex and the City, she's most recently been very busy in programs such as the Gilded Age, so we joke that this was one job that did not require a corset. Here is Nixon reading from Ng's introduction to the book.

[Cynthia Nixon]

Good evening, everyone, and welcome to selected Shorts. I am Cynthia Nixon, your host for tonight and thank you. And if you have not seen me on stage here or elsewhere, well, we'll get to know each other over the course of the next couple hours. I've hosted Selected Shorts many times, both here and on the radio, and I have to say I love being an actor, but literature is my first love, both new and classic. And and if there is only one thing I love more than literature, it is literature. Read out loud. As you may know, the Best American Short Stories collection has been the foundation for many a Selected Shorts show. The team at Selected Shorts scours the collection each year to shape a show around some of their favorite stories. We rely on the guest editor of that year's collection to provide insight about why they chose a story for Best American. And out of the thousands of stories published in magazines and small journals the previous year, the editor of the 2025 edition is Celeste Eng, the author of novels including Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts. Her work has been featured several times on Selected Shorts, and she herself has been a host of the live show. To give you an idea of her selection process, we wanted to share with you a telling excerpt from from her introduction to Best American 2025 it might feel a little strange to look to fiction made up stories for any kind of insight into the actual world. At the moment I'm writing this introduction, I'm quite pessimistic about the state of our country, to put it extremely mildly. So maybe when we live in unrealistic times, the unrealness of fiction can actually provide a useful distance, allowing us to see our own times more clearly. Obviously, this doesn't mean when you read a story, you suddenly find yourself in agreement with its characters or author. Stories are not magic spells, but stories build our empathy by asking us to imagine what it's like to be in someone else's position, thinking their thoughts and feeling their feelings. Unlike disinformation, a short story tells you up front that it is fiction, and when you know it's all just pretend, you're often more willing to play along. Okay, sure, I'll step into this world. It's all pretend anyway. It's like taking a weekend trip to a place you've never been and aren't sure if you'll like. But hey, it's only a weekend, right?

[Meg Wolitzer]

That was Cynthia Nixon reading from from Celeste Ng's introduction to the 2025 anthology. Now here she is performing the first selection, An Early Departure, by Jessica Treadway. Treadway is the author of four novels and three story collections, including I felt my life with both my hands.

[Cynthia Nixon]

An early departure. It wasn't the best time for me to be out of the office, but my niece asked, so of course I went. The train rides to New York took four hours for quite a few years. When my niece was little, we used to meet up there, all of us, on a Saturday in autumn. My sister and her two children, my mother and me, arriving from different places by train and having a hectic stand up lunch at Penn Station before checking into our hotel. We'd go to a show, eat at John's Pizza afterward, then walk through Times Square with us grownups flanking the kids, though looking back, I wonder how much protection we could have provided if anyone really wanted to get at them. We were only three women with not much weight amongst us. Still, we would have had the advantage of our investment in the children's safety, which counts for a lot. My sister and I look alike and my niece looks like both of us, and I knew that anyone seeing me hold Tania's hand back then as we strolled down the street might easily take me for her mother. I savored this more than I should have, but I figured it didn't hurt anybody. Nobody else had to know. Before bedtime on those Saturday nights we hung out together in one of the hotel rooms, just catching up and watching the kids goof around. One year my sister booked a hotel with a rooftop pool, and how much fun was that, watching my niece and nephew laugh and splash under the stars? Another year we arranged the trip around my 40th birthday and they sang to me over a red velvet cake from Magnolia Bakery. I got the impression that they all made a special effort to give me a nice time, knowing how I might feel turning 40 with no children of my own. Nobody said this out loud, but they were right that I felt a certain way, and the celebration helped in the moment, even though it made me sadder when I was alone on the train back to Boston the next day. Back then I liked to read quotes from successful women about not having children, like Jennifer Aniston, who said, you may not have a child come out of your vagina, but that doesn't mean you're not mothering. I'm mothering, I told myself whenever I spent time with my sister's kids, so they didn't come out of my vagina. Is that such a big deal? On Sunday mornings of those weekends we ate brunch together before we all headed back to Penn Station for our rides home on three different tracks. They were short visits, sometimes not even a whole 24 hours. But they were the most alive and comforting times I can remember, the kids so captivated by the novelties they saw around them, pretzels the size of their faces, horse buggies in Central park, and so eager to join the scene. The year my nephew Henry was nine, I bought him a stuffed frog from a street vendor and Henry promptly named the frog Hoppy, placed it on his head, and proceeded to walk around that way the entire day. My mother was healthy enough to walk long distances with us, from the park all the way down Fifth Avenue to where we always stayed, near Rockefeller Center. Tanya works there now, apprenticing to writers for a comedy sketch show. It's her dream job straight out of college, the one she told us she wanted when she was 11 and we all took the NBC backstage tour. The others of us smiled and said of course she would get a job like that, though none of us really believed it, but we should never have doubted her. Once, when she was three, we went to a minor league baseball game and our seats were across the stadium and from a pop up carnival. Tania caught sight of the Ferris wheel, pointed to let us know she was headed there, and took off. My sister and I followed the whole way, keeping her safe without her knowing, and we were amused, but more than a little unsettled when the baby never looked back. Tanya asked me to come see her in the city and followed this up with a second request, which was not to tell her mother. This was tricky because she wouldn't say why, but I convinced myself it had something to do with wanting to surprise her mother somehow. My sister's birthday wasn't for another six months and it wasn't a big one, but in this way I allowed myself to honor Tanya's request and to book my train tickets without mentioning it to my sister in our every other day text exchange. Why Tanya herself didn't just tell me whatever she needed to in a text or email I couldn't guess, though it would become clear all too soon why she wanted to see me in person. My niece apologized for not being able to put me up, but of course I understood. This was New York. She shared a two bedroom walk up with two friends from college. One of them paid a little less and slept in the dining alcove. I remembered such arrangements from being young myself, though in Boston, not New York. When I got older I would never have wanted to live in the same circumstances, but at the time it was fun. Besides, I could afford a nice hotel room. I checked in early and then met Tanya at one of the subterranean restaurants at 30 Rock. It was January, and from our table we watched the skaters on the rink outside. I hadn't seen her in half a year, since we'd all gotten together in the place my mother lived to celebrate her big birthday day. But I was glad to see that my niece hadn't changed much since then. One of my favorite things about her had always been her sweetness, and I admit that when she first told me she was moving there, I was afraid the city might turn her head. How's Grandma? She asked. I wish she could still make the trip down here, but she seems to be doing better than a lot of people her age. I agreed and kept myself from reminding her that she could always inquire of Grandma herself how Grandma was doing. I didn't want to start off on a rocky foot. I'd speculated a lot, of course, about why Tanya had asked me to make the trip down. Did she need money? And hesitated to ask her parents. Had something happened she didn't want them to know about? Was she pregnant and sought my advice? I can't deny it made me feel special to have been summoned. My niece said she needed me, so I dropped everything and went. It's about Henry, she said after the server had left the table. I knew she'd ordered the least expensive item on the menu because she expected me to insist on paying, which I would. He's in trouble. What kind? In the moment before concern hit, I felt surprise. Her brother, a senior in college, had always been a quiet kid, not afraid to go his own way but not interested in ruffling any feathers either. At least that's how it always seemed to me. It was hard to tell because of the quietness. He spent a lot of time on his computer, to the extent that I knew my sister sometimes worried about his eyes. But he seemed to enjoy our family visits, never hiding in his room or otherwise retreating when we were all together. I couldn't imagine what sort of trouble my niece might be talking about. He'd gotten himself involved in a hacking scheme, Tanya told me. There were plenty of kids at his school who knew how proficient he was at finding his way around various systems, and plenty who needed their grades boosted and would pay to have it done. Slowly I repeated Tanya's words aloud. Gotten himself involved? You make it sound as if he couldn't help it, as if he had no choice. I noticed that my hand was trembling as I reached for my water glass. Tanya saw it, too, and I wouldn't call that getting in trouble. I'D call it committing a crime. She sucked her breath in, barely audibly, and sat back in her chair. I didn't expect you to be so harsh, she said. This is Henry we're talking about. I know. It chilled me to see the look of distrust in her eyes. You think I'm not upset? And then, through the sense channel that connects women in a family, our mutual mind's eye, I could see we were both remembering the day her brother walked around New York with his favorite new stuffy balanced on top of his head. Oh, Hoppy. I put my hand to my throat. She leaned closer and I could see she was wearing the butterfly necklace I'd given her on her 16th birthday. My immediate response was to be flattered, but this was followed by a flash of insight I wish I could ignore. She'd worn the necklace to butter me up. It's not like it was a crime, she said. Somehow I managed not to exclaim. How delusional was she, how willing to ignore what she knew, never mind common sense, to believe what she wished to be true. Yaya, I said, then waited for her to look directly at me. Hacking into someone else's database and changing the data is absolutely a crime. No, I know, she said, not bothering to hide her irritation. But it didn't start out like that. She went on to recount the story of a crush her brother had on a girl who seemed to like him back, but it turned out she only made nice so he'd change her civics grade. I could tell how hurt Tanya had been to hear this on her brother's behalf, and I remembered the kick it had always given me to hear her use old timey phrases like made nice. So she dumped him. Afterward, I asked what made her think he wouldn't just go into the system again and change it back. Because she said she knew him enough to tell what kind of guy he is. So where does it stand? Did someone expose him? Is there an investigation? Tanya nodded. The college's disciplinary board. He's afraid he's going to be expelled. And after that the dean said they might involve the police. He hasn't told your parents? No, and he doesn't want them to find out. The server came and put our lunches in front of us. Neither of us reached for a fork. Why are you telling me, then? I asked, though of course I already knew. It chilled me again to see how much in that moment she hated me for making her come out and say it. We thought because of your job you might be able to. But she couldn't finish. Instead, she dropped her face toward her chest and began to sob. I'm sorry, Aunt Kim. I should never have asked you. I know it's shitty. I know it's wrong, and trust me, Henry does too. But he begged me. He didn't think you would do it if he asked. But he knows you're like a second mother to me. Ah, those words. A second mother. They're meant to be a compliment, one of the highest. But the person they are addressed to, the person so named, understands all too well how far the second mother falls short of the first. My sister had often referred to me as a second mother in relation to her own children, especially Tanya. I knew she meant well and wanted to make me feel good, and I would have felt touched by my niece using the phrase now, except that I realized she was doing so in an effort to get what she and her brother wanted. So she had become a little hard after all. I knew she would not have relished this task of trying to secure my help, but she had her priorities in order, and her brother came first. I had to admire it. In a way, she was still the girl who set out for her destination with no intention of letting anyone stop her along the way. I'm sorry, Yaya, I told her, and there was a considerable part of me that was sorry. The part that should have done what any mother would do. But I really can't intervene. Not that I think I actually could help, even if I did. Yes, you could. They'd listen to you. She was pleading. I saw that her eyes were dry and concluded with a tumbling crash inside me that her sobbing had been fake. Knowing I had to find a way to steel myself, I pretended I was speaking to a potential client I'd never met before instead of my beloved niece. I told her that matters like these had nothing to do with the ones I dealt with in my job. Even if the college did contact the police and press charges, my reach, my jurisdiction in a different kind of agency and a different state wouldn't come close. But it wasn't only that it wouldn't work or that I might get exposed. I told her it would be the wrong thing to do, that I had to say. This made me feel like crying myself, and the truth was that I said it even before I'd finished, mentally running through the sequence of people I might conceivably call to make life easier on my nephew. I know it doesn't seem like it right now, I said, but even if I did try to help, it wouldn't be the best thing for Henry. Why not? He's learned his lesson. He'll never do anything like this again. But he did it this time, and it wasn't a momentary lapse of judgment. That kind of thing has to be thought out. It has to be planned. It's better for him to face the consequences in the long run. Trust me. She had zero intention of trusting me. This I could tell from her face. So you're not even going to try? Her eyes pricked like points of glass. Oh, honey. In that moment I understood that the most rewarding and significant aspect of my existence, the role that had sustained me and buoyed me for more than 20 years in an otherwise lonely life, had just come to an end. I can't. Before I arrived, I'd hoped she'd bring me back to her office and show me around. She'd mentioned something on the phone when we made arrangements to this effect, but it became clear after I paid the check, after we took the escalator back up to the lobby that she intended for us to part ways. I hugged her. I hugged her, not wanting to let go, even though I knew she'd already slipped away from me to a place I'd not be allowed to enter, even if I did ever manage to find it again. I'd booked the hotel room for that night, expecting that Tanya would let me treat her and her friends to a dinner they wouldn't have been able to afford on their own. I confess I had fantasies about how proud she'd feel of her cool and generous aunt and the way the girls would hug and thank me when we stepped out of the restaurant. But now I didn't need the room, on top of which I wanted only to get away from the city. I canceled at the hotel even though it was too late to get a refund, then wheeled my bag to Penn Station, where I changed my return ticket, which cost me a fee, but it was worth it. Amtrak would not be able to hurtle me home fast enough. Home? Well, no. But back to where I belonged. On the ride to Boston, I sat on the side that gave a view of the water when there was water to see. In New London, a young mother got on with a boy who was about two years old and miserable, crying not for any particular reason but for the sake of crying. It's easy to tell the difference if you've spent any time around kids. I helped her collapse his stroller and offered him the bag of crackers I'd bought at the station but not yet opened the mother fell all over herself, thanking me, and the crackers distracted him for a while, but when the bag was empty, he threw it on the floor and started crying again. I couldn't change my seat, not only because the train was full but because the mother would know why I moved, and I didn't want to make her feel bad. I pulled out a folder and tried to look at some work, but it was futile. Partly this was because of the boy's whining, but mainly it had to do with how sick I felt about the scene I just had with my niece. At one point I sighed and let my glance fall across the aisle. The mother seemed to take this as an invitation. She leaned over and whispered, it gets easier, right? In a tone that attempted lightness but couldn't conceal the desperation it contained. I understood instantly what she assumed about me and perceived the familiar, shameful thrill of passing. You'll be amazed, I said, and something about the way I pronounce the word must have intrigued the boy or tickled him, the buzzy Z sound, because he paused in his crying to look up at me and smile. I smiled back. The mother jumped on it, grabbing first one toy and then another out of the diaper bag at her feet, and these distractions finally took hold. Her son became immersed in a handheld pinball game and stayed quiet for the rest of the ride. I felt a wave of pride I knew to be ridiculous, but it blunted the despair I'd boarded with. Only later, pulling into my station after they'd gotten off a few steps before, did the truth set in. Clutching my work bag tighter than necessary as I stepped onto the platform, I realized that of course I hadn't fooled the boy as I had his mother. Didn't I understand children better than that? He'd smiled at me, not because I'd charmed him, but to let me know he recognized a liar when he saw one. Jennifer Aniston could pretend all she wanted, but this kid wasn't about to let me get away with offering a promise that wasn't mine to make.

[Meg Wolitzer]

Cynthia Nixon performed an early departure. By Jessica Treadway I'm Meg Wolitzer. As any writer can tell you, one of the hardest things to do is to create complete characters who seem to step out of the lives you've created for them. There are so many short stories about motherhood. It's a subject that's been featured frequently on this show over the years, and this story certainly deals interestingly with ideas about motherhood. But we don't tend to hear a lot about Ant Hood. In fact, Ant hood is a word I don't even know that I've ever heard anyone say before. In this story, Jessica Treadway also explores, well, niecehood, which often seems to be a sort of recipient state, the aunt providing generosity and making sure that there are none of the tensions that might exist between a mother and daughter. But because the story is psychologically complex, the roles aren't as clear as they initially seem to be. I think an early departure was chosen for Best American because of the surprising dynamic between the two women, and also because Treadway keeps the story going past the ending of the visit, Taking it onto the Train, where the protagonist, freed of her family, possibly reveals something, if only for a fleeting moment, to a stranger who is probably too young to ever remember it. When we return, a room that may or may not exist. You're listening to selected shorts recorded live in performance at Symphony Space in New York City and at other venues nationwide.

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[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

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[Meg Wolitzer]

Welcome back. This is SELECTED Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. I'm Meg Wolitzer. On this week's program, we're celebrating the volume the Best American Short Stories 2025, with two of the stories chosen by guest editor Celeste Ng. We've partnered with this distinguished anthology for many years and and stories from early volumes are part of our archive. You can also find plenty of other great works, some from curated collections, some our staff just loved, on our website. You can also hear recent episodes of our podcast, and please join our extended literary family by subscribing Our second story from the Best American Short Stories 2025 is Third Room, by Mexican American writer Julian Robles. His work has been published in the Drift and Washington Square Review, among other journals. Reader Ivan Hernandez has many theater credits, including Dear Evan Hansen and Into the woods on television. You'll know him from series like and Just like that and Never have I Ever. Here he is reading Third Room by Julian Robles.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The Room

[Ivan Hernandez]

In November, my landlord and her family left the city to celebrate the abrupt cessation of her husband's paralysis. They planned to visit Durango, where she had grown up, and Quintana Roo, where the daughter's godfather lived. The family was feeling hopeful. All of us were. Before leaving, the landlord had halved my rent and and given me a spare key to the private terraza on the building's top floor. I kissed their baby on the head, hugged the husband, and wished them luck. In response to her husband's paralysis, which began shortly before I moved into the apartment in July, the landlord had purged a number of habits from her life and replaced them with healthier alternatives.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

She encouraged me to do the same,

[Ivan Hernandez]

to show my solidarity with her and with the sick man, I stopped listening to podcasts. While making breakfast, I practiced yoga and taped my lips shut before bed. There were other changes, too. I stopped reading novels with nameless protagonists. Instead of poking and counting the benign lipomas under my ribs, I plucked the outer edges of my eyebrows. The night before they embarked on their trip. The landlord invited me to dinner. Her family lived in the apartment directly above mine. The landlord's husband now healthy, I judged it appropriate to bring to her attention certain features of the apartment in need of repair low water pressure in the shower, a loose doorknob, flickering lights, and

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

naturally, the issue in the third bedroom.

[Ivan Hernandez]

But out of respect for their solemn dinnertime recollections of the husband's illness, I postponed broaching the these issues.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I sent a couple of courteous text

[Ivan Hernandez]

messages a day after they left, which, because she was a relatively benignant landlord, received prompt responses in the form of animated stickers and gifts. Her favorite animations tended to mirror the tone of my messages or the mood of the conversation.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

Clips of conga lines and dancing raccoons when my rent payments cleared, a meme

[Ivan Hernandez]

of a terrified Chihuahua the afternoon I locked myself out of the apartment. Rarely did she reply with words. That morning, frantic baby pandas spun beneath

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

my list of grievances.

[Ivan Hernandez]

At the top of the list was

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

the man who had been living in the third bedroom of the apartment since at least September.

[Ivan Hernandez]

To explain both my delayed discovery of him and my tolerance for his extended presence and it is probably necessary that I describe the layout of the unit. The main apartment consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom, a livingdining room, a balcony, and a kitchen. Adjoining the kitchen was an exterior walkway that faced into the building shaft. This exterior walkway led to a third bedroom otherwise unconnected to the rest of the apartment. Its size and orientation relative to the main unit suggested that it had once functioned as a servant or maid's quarters. The room sat at an oblique angle to the kitchen, which provided a view into its two windows. I recalled from my initial tour of the apartment a twin size mattress on the bedroom floor. Opposite the mattress was a desk and a leather swivel chair. The third room was perfectly livable and functional, but extraneous to my own living purposes and to my purpose for being in Mexico.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I had ignored it since moving in,

[Ivan Hernandez]

so I can't say for certain when the man arrived. One week the room was empty, the next he was seated at the desk, his hand moving from left to right, apparently writing.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

My reaction upon spying him through the

[Ivan Hernandez]

kitchen window was less fear and more akin to fatigue. I was in the middle of cooking breakfast and I had an omelette to attend to. Then I had to clean the bathroom.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I'll deal with him later, I thought.

[Ivan Hernandez]

When I came home that evening, he

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

was still in the room, still seated at the desk and still writing. The only Difference in the scene was

[Ivan Hernandez]

that the bedroom's overhead light had been turned on. The third room suffered from poor exposure to natural light. Its solitary bulb had likely been emitting that dull, whitish glow since the early afternoon.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

These seemed like reasonable grounds for confronting the uninvited lodger. Financial grounds, I mean. But I remembered that the landlord covered the utilities, and despite my close relationship

[Ivan Hernandez]

with this landlord in particular, I was opposed, at least ideologically, to the existence of of landlords in general and did not want to appear allied with her by suggesting that the man at the desk was adding to the electrical bill.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I closed the kitchen curtains and cooked my dinner.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The following morning I walked into the kitchen and was surprised to see the third bedroom's light already on and its new inhabitants seated in the same spot. Had he slept at all? Light didn't reach the third room until

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

almost noon, and by the early evening

[Ivan Hernandez]

the room would begin to darken. One fluorescent bulb running 19 hours per day represented a negligible contribution to the electrical bill, which, as I had already decided, was really none of my business. It was his devotion to his work

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

that had begun to irk me.

[Ivan Hernandez]

I couldn't imagine him writing anything so important as to compel him to remain seated at all hours of the day.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I described the scene in a message to my landlord the day after her departure.

[Ivan Hernandez]

My Spanish had become rigid after living

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

outside of the country for several years.

[Ivan Hernandez]

In casual conversation I could come across as stilted, to the point that people struggled to understand me, and I reasoned that the landlord may have misinterpreted my initial messages. I emphasized that the man had been in the apartment, her apartment, for a month, and showed no signs of leaving.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

Her reply a gif of an orangutan

[Ivan Hernandez]

running in circles with its hands on its head. I'll get to it as soon as

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I'm back, she added. She didn't plan to return until February at the earliest.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The only other person aware of the

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

man's presence was my girlfriend.

[Ivan Hernandez]

From the beginning, she had been of little help. After three years of dating, these kinds of stories simply didn't interest her. Don't tell me about people trapped in apartments anymore, please, she had said when I called to inform her of the man's sudden appearance. I didn't bore her, and she didn't bore me, exactly.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

But the relationship bored both of us,

[Ivan Hernandez]

that was clear. It was something I had come to accept. I would never again be excited about love, but I wouldn't be discontent either,

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

except in fleeting conversations, in bars, or in flirtatious gazes from across the room at parties instead of calling my girlfriend, I met a writer for coffee.

[Ivan Hernandez]

This writer was 15 years older than me, spoke little Spanish, and had recently moved to Mexico for while a reasons that remained unclear. The writer was from New York and had written books about nameless protagonists who abandoned their lives and flee to comfortably defamiliarized places. Their sites of refuge weren't exotic in the traditional sense of the word.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

They were cities where everyone spoke English and that people from New York were recognized at least by name.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The idea was that the characters lost

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

their identities upon entering these uncanny realities

[Ivan Hernandez]

or arrived at them with aspirations of non existence meant to comment, I suppose, on a pervasive homogenization and disintegration of identity in our the readers lives. But the settings of these stories were so plainly removed from the world of economic and political exigencies that they became paradoxically comfortable and familiar to New York

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

literary audiences, and thus I often fell asleep reading this writer's books. Nonetheless, given his experience in matters of

[Ivan Hernandez]

people willfully disappeared, nameless or otherwise effaced, I thought the writer might have suggestions for how to best rid myself of the man in the third room.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I described the man's arrival to the writer, who listened patiently and occasionally interjected to clarify certain sequences of events.

[Ivan Hernandez]

After reaching the end of my story, I began silently questioning the fundamental nature of the problem. Could I reasonably argue that the man

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

was doing any harm? His presence unnerved me, that was clear. But part of the reason I was in Mexico was to investigate material conditions

[Ivan Hernandez]

and social organizations that my peers had

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

ignored in their own art.

[Ivan Hernandez]

In material terms, I didn't use a third bedroom. The man had no effect on my daily life. There was only one bathroom in the apartment, for example.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

That must be where he went to relieve himself.

[Ivan Hernandez]

But even so, the man left the bathroom immaculate, and he must have only

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

used it while I was out of the house or asleep so as not to disturb me. The same went for food.

[Ivan Hernandez]

If he was eating my food, he replaced whatever he consumed down to the crumbs at the bottom of the bread box. In this regard he took far less than any previous guest had.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

A number of friends had visited me since I moved back to Mexico, and

[Ivan Hernandez]

I had always refused their offers of payment or reimbursement, saying, my house is your house. Any food, anything you need, don't worry about it. More than once I had even hosted strangers Central and South American migrants en route to the United States. Hadn't I told these people to stay as long as they needed?

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The new York writer asked if I had tried confession.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Religious confession? I asked. Have you tried sitting the man down and telling him about yourself? He's already sitting. And why would I need to make things about me?

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

In a way you already have, the writer replied. The man in the third room could

[Ivan Hernandez]

make for an interesting audience. I've been exploring monologues in my work lately.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I admitted that I hadn't entered the third room more than a handful of times, and not once since the man's arrival. It wasn't an option. To enter. The room was as implausible as trapping oxygen with my hands.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Why?

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

Because the man was in the room and I wasn't. It seemed obvious. If he had invited me in, then perhaps things would be different, but for the time being, he was inside the

[Ivan Hernandez]

room and I was outside.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

You've only seen the man from a distance then? The writer asked. Through the kitchen window, I replied. The window isn't far from the third room, I added at the sight of the writer's furrowed brow, his mouth twisting into a smile. In that instant I had trouble recalling the man's features. I'd seen him only from behind. I knew that his hair was short and black and that he wore a green flannel shirt nearly every day.

[Ivan Hernandez]

How do you know it's a man in there?

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

Or anyone at all?

[Ivan Hernandez]

Maybe you left the light on, the

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

writer said, his smile now undisguised. These were possibilities I had already considered and discarded, I explained. I invited the writer to come see for himself. It was a 30 minute walk from the cafe to my apartment.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The writer spent most of that time

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

outlining the plot of his latest book.

[Ivan Hernandez]

He planned to return to New York the following month to attend a conference or maybe to speak on a panel. The details were unclear because the writer had transitioned so abruptly into the descriptions of his winter plans that for several minutes I thought he was describing deeds

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

accomplished by the narrator of his novel. We arrived at my apartment. I led the writer into the kitchen and pulled back the curtain to show him the man in the third room. For a fleeting instant I worried that the man wouldn't be there. I'd never shown him to anyone. If he were gone, or if I saw him but the writer didn't, it would mean I was at last losing purchase on reality. All my life that had been a

[Ivan Hernandez]

possibility, and indeed I considered it an inevitability. I'd come close a number of times

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

before returning to Mexico, and it was part of the reason I'd moved back. To lose my mind alone, away from family and friends. I looked out the kitchen window and into the windows of the third room. The man was seated at the desk, as before. There, I said to the writer, who was out the kitchen door before I could say more. Through the kitchen window I watched the writer knock on the door to the third room, enter and close the door behind him. I waited. The writer was standing in a spot that obscured almost my entire view into the room, and it was just possible

[Ivan Hernandez]

to distinguish the seated man. He hadn't stood to greet the writer or to expel him from the room. It appeared as though his hand was still moving across the desk.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

If I knew anything about the man

[Ivan Hernandez]

after nearly six weeks living together, it

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

was that his work ethic was unwavering.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The writer could blabber for hours about

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

defamiliarized cities and nameless characters, and the seated man's hand would continue moving, filling the pages before him at a rate

[Ivan Hernandez]

nearly equivalent to the the rate of his breath or the beat of his heart was then I witness to an exhaustive transcription of the totality of a single life, each page a record of his thoughts at that exact instant, each paragraph a digression into the texture of each of those thoughts, and each sentence a description of the shadows cast by the texture of every variegated vanity and anxiety.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

With the arrival of the writer in the room, the relative homeostasis of his work was likely to be disrupted.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Now he would have to account for

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

two bodies, or at the very least, he would have to account for the influence exerted on his body by an additional foreign body. Would his project survive such a cataclysmic event? Night fell, and the rider hadn't returned. No sound escaped the third room. The rider wasn't screaming for help, nor was he arguing with the man at the desk.

[Ivan Hernandez]

This wasn't a hostage situation. It was a case of two adult

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

men in a room, plain and simple. Better to let them be, I thought. The writer could show himself out when the time came, and maybe by then he and the man at the desk

[Ivan Hernandez]

would be on such good terms that they would exit my life together.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

That night I dreamt of the third bedroom. I dreamt that I had followed the writer's advice and entered the room to tell the man about myself. But the man sat there without responding. His face was simple and familiar. It was the face of any person in a crowd, anonymous and inoffensive. He blinked and breathed, turned away from me and continued writing. I looked over his shoulder to read the text, surreptitiously at first, and then brazenly after he made no effort to hide it. The papers were covered in Ulipo nonsense words continuously reorganized in adherence to the dream's fickle logic. Next I tried narrativizing a bit.

[Ivan Hernandez]

I hung a rope from the piping and told the man how inevitable this moment was. This rope reminds you of your uncle, I said tearfully. Remember the one who used to hide under the bed and scare you as a joke, and who later hung himself in the shed?

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The man at the desk continued writing.

[Ivan Hernandez]

All ropes remind you of that, uncle. I shouted. And now that you have tied this rope, this is the closest you will come to imitating your uncle's act.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

He continued writing like a robot on a circuit. The doorbell cut my dream short. The phone was also ringing.

[Ivan Hernandez]

I looked at its screen and saw

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

several missed calls from my girlfriend.

[Ivan Hernandez]

In my concern for the man in the third room, I had forgotten that her boss had granted her a few days vacation. I ran downstairs and let her in. On the walk up, I explained the

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

latest developments with the man, now men in the room. I pulled back the curtain in the

[Ivan Hernandez]

kitchen and pointed to the writer from New York. He was standing in exactly the same position as the night before. Through the gap between his midsection and arm, I spied the man at the desk riding away. One man, I explained to her, was manageable. But the addition of the writer complicated my responsibilities to the third room.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I wasn't sure what he would need materially. For example, should I bring him meals and toilet paper? The man at the desk had shown himself to be self sufficient. He attended to his bodily functions without fuss.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The writer, by contrast, was only a

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

writer, a New York writer at that, meaning.

[Ivan Hernandez]

He was accustomed to a certain style of praise and luxury, luxury behind a

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

facade of working class grit. I wasn't sure how much grit I had to offer. Over the last decade I had come to accept the conspicuous luxury of my labor, sitting at home all day, reading,

[Ivan Hernandez]

annotating, doing work not much different than

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

that of the man in the third room.

[Ivan Hernandez]

In that way I was similar to

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

him, albeit, albeit far less productive. I was Mexican, that's true, and on the tanner side, which lends itself to interpretations of impoverished grit. Maybe that would suffice.

[Ivan Hernandez]

When will you stop worrying about this?

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

My girlfriend said, turning from the window and continuing down the hall to my bedroom. I followed her into the room and apologized. She sat on the bed and undressed. I lifted my shirt over my head and unbuttoned my pants. She watched me, shrugged, and left the room wrapped in towel.

[Ivan Hernandez]

It was her ritual to take long

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

showers after the three hour bus ride into the city. Today she was in a rush to meet friends for lunch.

[Ivan Hernandez]

You've been so busy with research lately, I didn't think you'd want to come, she said.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

It's true. She hadn't arrived at the most opportune moment. The men in the third bedroom aside,

[Ivan Hernandez]

the Mexican government was funding my work.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The selection committee had called the research very promising and its members expected a

[Ivan Hernandez]

stellar mid year report.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

But I was having trouble finding the information I needed. I worried about the months to come. I worried they would make me leave Mexico again. My girlfriend dressed and rushed downstairs. From the balcony I watched her cross the street and hail a cab. She waved up to me before getting in. I returned to the kitchen to watch the man in the third room. I sent another message to my landlord.

[Ivan Hernandez]

In it I explained that my girlfriend was visiting and that it would infinitely improve her stay if we resolve the issue of the man in the third

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

room in less than a minute. The landlord replied with a gif of two heart spinning spirals around one another. I drafted a long response accusing her of breaking the terms of the lease

[Ivan Hernandez]

and then deleted it. The apartment was too good to lose. It was fully furnished in an enviable location near major transit lines, far but not too far from the hip areas populated by tourists and rich Mexicans, and

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I paid half of what anyone in the neighborhood paid. I also couldn't deny that there were pleasant memories between us, the landlord and me.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The German vacuum cleaner, the king sized bed, both gifts from her.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

It would be childish to abandon so much comfort on a whim, I told myself. In the evening I left to join my girlfriend and her friends for dinner.

[Ivan Hernandez]

On the bus ride to the restaurant,

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I read a short essay on my phone, written by the writer who now inhabited the third room.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The essay, published that very week, discussed the writer's relationship to Mexico and the

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

country's influence on his upcoming novel.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Prior to his arrival in Mexico, the work had been a disordered mess of shapeless characters and ideas. Now it had direction. He all but repudiated his previous four novels as amateurish drivel.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The essay's publication had been timed to

[Ivan Hernandez]

the release of his book, which was receiving advance praise.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The only voice missing was his. No one had heard from the writer for a couple of days, although this wasn't yet cause for alarm, he had

[Ivan Hernandez]

a reputation for entering into periods of

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

monkish solitude after finishing his novels. We returned from dinner just past midnight. I showered, then spent some time spying on the third room. Through the window in the kitchen, everything appeared as before, the man seated at

[Ivan Hernandez]

the desk and the writer standing above him. Perhaps the rider and the seated man had become each other's most trustworthy collaborators and confidants. Maybe they needed each other now. For the first time since the man's

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

arrival, I felt happy for him. Had this been what he had sought all along? I didn't believe that my girlfriend, or anyone I knew would ever offer me that kind of companionship.

[Ivan Hernandez]

She praised and supported me, but I was certain that she couldn't be counted

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

on to fight to her last breath to preserve my work if I were to disappear suddenly and forever from the earth. Before falling asleep, I asked her if I should alert anyone to the writer's whereabouts. My girlfriend said there was no point drawing so much attention to myself. We were lying in bed with the lights off. I wasn't sure what she meant by that statement. She rolled to her side with her back to me. I touched the nape of her neck and waited. Remember when we used to tell secrets before bed?

[Ivan Hernandez]

I asked.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

We were younger then, she replied. The next morning she was gone. I've written here exactly what I told those who came looking. Her bags and clothing were exactly where she'd left them. There was still a small depression in the pillow where she'd rested her head, and scattered around that depression, like trampled foliage, were little tangles of her hair. I went straight to the window in the kitchen. The man at the desk was no longer visible. I saw her, my girlfriend, standing next to the rider. Her shoulders rounded forward and a braid unraveled down the line of her neck. The rest of her body was hidden from sight. Like the rider, she faced the seated man. They fully obscured my sight of him. But I knew in the days that

[Ivan Hernandez]

followed, I asked myself what could have

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

compelled her to enter the third room.

[Ivan Hernandez]

My initial guess was uncreative, reductive, and debased.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

An inventory of her clothing left in

[Ivan Hernandez]

the bedroom left me to conclude that she had entered the third room with what little she had worn to bed,

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

a thong and a loose tank top.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The three hour bus rides between cities were becoming exhausting, and for several months we had been in an open relationship. I suspected she had waited for me

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

to fall asleep and then crept into

[Ivan Hernandez]

the third room to seek the affections

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

of the two men. Then her apparent disinterest. A ruse all along.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Fine, you can have her.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I shouted into the building. Shaft. I abandoned my plan to race into the room to save her, a plan that I must admit was only a delusion of bravery. That very day, I fell back into old habits. I didn't leave my apartment for a week. Each morning I undertook a head to toe inventory of my body's asymmetries.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Along the right thigh had arisen two

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

new ingrown hairs and the left shoulder, a small lipoma. I prodded the lipoma until the skin bruised.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Twice a day I looked out the

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

window to check on the third room.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Initially, I left small plates of food

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

in the exterior walkway outside the kitchen door. A week had passed, and it appeared

[Ivan Hernandez]

that my girlfriend was losing weight.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

Maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe I wanted reason to believe she was suffering and that I could end that suffering, given the security situation in the country. Her disappearance soon caused a minor media sensation.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Another young woman missing after decades of

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

so many others, lost. One day her phone rang non stop, as did mine.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The calls were so insistent that the

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

phone batteries eventually drained.

[Ivan Hernandez]

The writer's book, meanwhile, was being discussed as a major contender for several literary awards.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

I asked myself who would arrive first, my girlfriend's parents or the police? As it happened, they arrived together. When the doorbell rang, I was lying

[Ivan Hernandez]

in bed, prodding a small mole on my scalp. My girlfriend's mother was in tears. She and my girlfriend's father were just off a 12 hour flight. I was determined to remain civil. I answered everyone's questions and gestured toward the third room. One police officer stayed with me while two others escorted the parents into the room. When he saw that they weren't coming

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

back, he unholstered his gun and charged out the kitchen door. I remember thinking he looked like a hero in an action movie.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Since that day, the number of people in the third room has increased far past a point permissible by the fiscal bounds of the space. First, more police arrived, and eventually government officials and members of the military. This attracted protesters and counter protesters whose disappearances hastened and the arrival of volunteer organizations devoted to searching for Mexico's missing.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The ranks of the vanished grew, but I couldn't stop counting my lipomas.

[Ivan Hernandez]

Within a month, journalists arrived to interview the writer. I'm not sure how they found out he was here. Later, a friend of his came to present him a medal awarded for his novel. Then his ex wife showed up with his twin sons, followed by a string of old lovers. Despite increasing disruptions to civil services as

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

more people in the country disappear, the

[Ivan Hernandez]

committee funding my work still expects a progress report in March.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

It is now January. Every so often, I return to the kitchen window and gaze out at the Third Room I assume the light is still on and the man continues writing,

[Ivan Hernandez]

although within a week of the police's arrival, the room had become so full that the windows went completely dark. This hasn't brought me the relief I would have expected.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

The man has disappeared from sight, but I can never be certain of his definitive departure. His writing task has become gargantuan, perhaps impossible. For the time being, I have holed up in this, the apartment's second room, to focus on drafting my report for the committee.

[Ivan Hernandez]

I have kept the landlord abreast of the situation. Earlier today I informed her that a Cuban reggaeton star had entered the third room to shoot a music video.

[Narrator/Story Voice (Third Room)]

She replied with a gif of a man in purple pants gyrating beneath a disco ball. Then my rent payment cleared and she sent another video of rosy, joyous people linked in a conga line.

[Meg Wolitzer]

Ivan Hernandez performed Third Room By Julian Robles I'm Meg Wolitzer. It's easy to credit Franz Kafka for the whole genre of delusional fiction, but it may be more accurate to acknowledge that modern life has produced such a pattern of shifting realities that it would be surprising if it was not reflected in contemporary fiction. What makes Third Room so compelling is the way the narrator leads us to step by step down the rabbit hole of obsession. I am a fan of the shifting reality genre, but I found this story, in which a character has an obsessive belief in his own elastic reality, really unusual, and it creates a Mary Poppins bag type of elasticity when it comes to thinking about the room, too. We start to consider the difference between observation and experience, and we even think about the writer's task, which is, after all, to create rooms and then to look at them and live in them, inviting the reader to do the same. While we generally define our best American programs only by their relationship to the contents of each year's volume, the two stories on this program do have some elements in common, and with Celeste Ng's criteria for finding them exceptional and worthy of a place in the anthology, in each a familiar aspect of everyday life, long standing family relationships in an early departure, and professional and domestic lives in Third Room is dramatically altered abruptly in the case of an early departure, slowly and corrosively in Third Room. So things that were certain in the lives of the characters in each of these worlds become uncertain. Happily, one thing we can be relatively certain of is that there will be a new volume of the best American short stories in 2026, and we look forward to meeting those writers and their Worlds. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Thanks for joining me for Selected Shorts. Selected Shorts is produced by Jennifer Brennan and Sarah Montague. Our team includes Matthew Love, Drew Richardson, Mary Shimkin, Vivienne Woodward, and Magdalene Robleski. The readings are recorded by Myles B. Smith. Our programs, presented at the Getty center in Los Angeles are recorded by Phil Richards. Our mix engineer for this episode was Joe Plourd. Our theme music is David Peterson's that's the Deal, performed by the Dierdorf Petersen Group. Selected Shorts is supported by the Dungannon Foundation. This program is also made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Selected Shorts is produced and distributed by Symphony Space. Hey, if you've ever wanted to do Selected Shorts in your own home, I have a suggestion. I have a novel coming out for kids and since kids do like to be read too, maybe you could read aloud to them from this book. I co wrote it with my son Charlie Panick and it's one of those scavenger hunt books with a lot of really cool clues in it. Great for ages 7 to 11. That's found sound. Read it aloud. Let your kid read it. Let your grandkid read it. Let adults read it, whatever this episode

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[Ivan Hernandez]

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