Love and UFOs
Selected Shorts
Two short stories explore the mysterious connections between love and unexplained phenomena—romantic longing and UFOs—through whimsical fabl
Key takeaways
- Love often defies logic, manifesting in unexpected forms like a rock or an abstract yearning.
Main topics
- Romantic love as metaphor
- UFOs as symbols of the inexplicable
Notable quotes
"I love you more than the stars in the sky. I love you more than the fish in the river."
Conclusion
Both stories suggest that some truths—about love, loss, and self—are r
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:07) Love and UFOs. Hard to imagine two topics further apart from one another. One is a feeling. One is the reason your Uncle Joe won't stand in an open field. And yet, on this week's Selected Shorts, love and UFOs go together in strange and wonderful ways. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Stay with me. You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the magic of fiction, one short story at a time. Part of the fun of fiction is its elasticity. A story can be any length, all descriptive action, or just one long inner monologue. It can be realistic, absurd, heart-wrenching, funny, or all of the above. Also, while fiction itself stretches into many shapes and sizes, it can also stretch or change or even clarify our sense of shared reality. For instance, Fiction can bring new meaning to objects we encounter every day. Think of all the writers who make us associate specific things with big, universal feelings. Like Washington Irving, who made us correlate pumpkins with some terrifying existential threat in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I read in sixth grade and which changed Halloween for me forever. Or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who tied our impressions of home decor to the state of our sanity in The Yellow Wallpaper. I read that story in college, and it cemented both my feminism and my belief in the soothing power of the paint color Paperwhite, number OC55 in the Benjamin Moore catalog. The authors on this week's Selected Shorts do just this sort of thing, create new and unusual connections in our heads and hearts. While Ben Lurie and Haruki Murakami are very different writers, and these stories are naturally quite disparate, there is a thread here. Both in some way connect our universal human need for love with, wait for it, UFOs. No little green men show up, but there are strange flying things tied to a love, lost or found, in each story. One piece is a modern fable about a duck with very peculiar tastes. The other is about a journey full of ramen, loss, and one important saucer sighting. Our first story in this program is by Ben Lurie. He's our kind of writer, someone who reveres the short form and has published two collections, Tales of Falling and Flying and Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day. His smart, funny fables have a kind of timeless feel, and this story of unlikely infatuation is no different. Performing it is Sonia Manzano, an actor we all know and love from a lifetime of playing Maria on Sesame Street. She has also remained incredibly active in the years since, including writing the memoir Becoming Maria and a novel, The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano. Now, Sonia Manzano reads The Duck by Ben Lurie. Speaker 1 (3:20) The Duck. A duck fell in love with a rock. It was a large rock, about the size of a duck, actually, that was situated off the bank of the river a little past the old elm. Every day after lunch, the duck would saunter over to admire the rock for a while. Where are you going, said the other ducks. Nowhere, said the duck, just around. But the other ducks knew exactly where he was going, and they all laughed at him behind his back. Stupid duck is in love with a rock, they snickered. Wonder what kind of ducklings they'll have. But there was one duck, a girl duck, who did not laugh. She had known the strange duck for a long time and had always found him to be a good and decent bird. She felt sorry for him. It was hard luck to fall in love with a rock. She wanted to help, but what could she do? She trailed after the duck and watched him woo the rock from behind a tree. Speaker 2 (4:30) I Speaker 1 (4:31) love you. The duck was saying, I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you more than the stars in the sky. I love you more than the fish in the river. I love you more than, more than. There he stopped, for he could think of nothing else that existed. Speaker 1 (4:56) Life itself, said the girl duck from behind the tree. She hadn't meant to pipe up. The words just sort of leapt out of her. The duck spun around to look at her. He was terrified. It's okay, said the girl duck waddling out from behind the tree. I know you're in love with the rock. In fact, everyone knows. They do, said the duck. Yes, said the girl duck. Yes, they do. The duck sighed and sat down on the ground. If he had had hands, he would have buried his head in them. What am I going to do, he said. What am I going to do? Do, the girl duck said. How can they go on like this, said the duck. I love a thing that cannot speak, cannot move, cannot... I don't even know how it feels about me. The girl duck looked at the rock. She didn't know what to say. I know, said the duck. You think I'm crazy. You think it's just a rock. But it isn't just a rock. It's different. It's very different. He looked at the rock. But something has to happen, he said, and soon, because my heart will break if this goes on much longer. That night, the girl duck had a hard time sleeping. She kept paddling around in circles, thinking about the rock and the duck and his heart that might break. She thought long and hard, and before morning, she had an idea. She went and woke up the strange duck. Things happen when they must, she said, as if it were an extremely meaningful statement. Speaker 1 (6:39) So, said the duck, so I have a plan, said the girl duck, and I think it will work. Well, what is it, said the duck, nearly bursting with excitement. We will need help, said the girl duck, and it will take some time, and also we will need a cliff. Two days later, they set out. It took four ducks to carry the rock. They worked in teams and traded off every 15 minutes. Everyone joined in, even though they'd laughed, for ducks are all brothers when it comes right down to it. The cliff is over that hill and then quite a ways to the south, said the most elderly duck. I remember flying over it when I was a fledgling. It looked like the edge of the world. The ducks. trudged on under their rocky weight for hours, for hours, and then for days. At night, they camped under the hedges and strange trees and ate beetles and frogs. Do you think it'll be much farther, said one of the ducks? Maybe, said the old duck. My memory is not so good anymore. On the sixth day, the ducks began to tire. I don't believe there is a cliff, said one of them. Me neither, said another. I think the old duck is crazy. My back hurts, said a third duck. I want to go home. Me too, said a fourth. In fact, I'm going to. And then all the ducks began to turn for home. The rock fell to the forest floor and lay there. Speaker 1 (8:15) The strange duck looked imploringly at the girl duck. Don't worry, she said. I won't leave you. They watched all the other ducks flee homeward, and then they hoisted the rock onto their backs and trudged on. What do you think will happen when we throw it off the cliff, said the duck. I don't know, said the girl duck. I just know it will be something. Speaker 1 (8:45) Finally, they came to the edge of the cliff. The drop-off was so great they couldn't see the ground. Just great white clouds spread out before them like an endless rolling cotton blanket. It looks so soft, said the duck. Yes, it does, said the girl duck. Are you ready? The duck looked at the rock. This is it, my love, he said. The moment of truth. And whatever happens, please remember, always remember, I love you. and the two ducks hurled the rock off the cliff together. At first, the rock simply fell, like a rock, one might say, like a stone. Speaker 1 (9:27) But then something began to happen. It began to slow. It began to grow. It began to change. It narrowed. It elongated. And it also spread sideways. It's becoming a bird, the girl duck said. And it was. It was becoming a beautiful gray bird, really. Not that unlike a duck. Its wings began to move slowly up. and down, up and down, and it dove down and then coasted up. It looked back over its shoulder at the two ducks on the cliff, and it called out just once, goodbye. And then it was going, going, getting smaller and smaller, flying off over the blanket across the sky. The ducks did not speak much on the way home. Do you think it will be happy, said the duck. I hope so, said the girl duck, and that was all. They really didn't say any more. When they reached the pond, the other ducks gathered around and clamored to hear what had happened. The duck and the girl duck glanced at each other. Nothing, said the girl duck. It fell. Speaker 1 (10:48) In the days that followed, the duck stayed to himself. The girl duck went and swam around in circles. She thought about that rocky bird flying off into the sky. She saw it over and over in her mind. And then one day, not too many days later, she looked and saw the duck come swimming up. He was carrying a small salamander in his bill. For me, the girl duck said, and the duck smiled. Speaker 3 (11:32) That was The Duck by Ben Lurie, performed by Sonia Manzano. I'm Meg Wolitzer. I love the choice Lurie made for the object of the duck's affections. What screams, sorry, I can't love you back, more than a rock? Of course, it's kind of a fable, so we've got a very clear moral. But the fun part is the way Lurie's imagination leads us to it. We wanted to know more about how this sweet and funny story came to be. Here's Ben Lurie. I Speaker 2 (11:59) never really know what prompts the stories. They just kind of come onto the page. The only way I've ever found to successfully write a story is to sit down with no ideas, no plans, absolutely nothing in mind, and then just take whatever thought or image is that pops into my head. So I sat down that night, and a duck came to mind. So I wrote a story about a duck. I grew up... across the street from a park that had a river running through it and had a lot of ducks. And so I was fascinated by ducks from a very early age. I was always out there running around trying to catch a duck. Now I live in Echo Park by the Echo Park Lake, which is also full of ducks. So I've just been a big duck person my whole life. I think of him as an alert. I noticed that at some point the word rock has the word rock, R-O-C, in there, and there is that image hidden inside the word. And that's something that I noticed as I was writing the story, but not something that I thought of ahead of time. And I find that's something that happens a lot when I'm writing stories, is that they end up being a lot more complicated than I consciously envisioned. They sort of contain these multitudes that I didn't know were going to be there. I always loved the story of the