Lance's Confession and Harper's Dilemma

Train Dreams

by Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar

A husband and wife discuss their future and the possibility of building a more stable life together on their land. Gladys expresses her desire for Grainier to work closer to home to break a cycle of unhappiness she saw in her mother, while Grainier weighs the financial reality of their dreams.

Mrs Warren's Profession

by George Bernard Shaw

Mrs Warren passionately defends her life choices to her daughter, Vivie. She explains how the systemic poverty of the Victorian era left her with no choice but to enter the sex trade to survive and provide a better future for her child.

Finer Noble Gases

by Adam Rapp

In the library at my junior high they have these huge computer monitors. The size of small refrigerators. Three-feet high some of them. The most beautiful screen savers you’ll ever see. Mountains. Waterfalls. Pictures of magic cities. Colors that haven’t even been invented yet. If you stand next to the hard drives and listen real close you can hear them singing. Like hummingbirds. A gazillion megahertz of ram just whirling away. Sometimes I go real early in the morning. When nobody’s there. And I just listen. I listen for a while and then for some reason I hug each monitor. One by one. There’s like fifty of them. I hug each one and I get a little part of that song inside me. It’s the most beautiful way to start the day. I think those birds on the rhinos are so cool. In the library, there’s this one African Grassland screen saver with little birds. They ride around on this elephant and eat the bugs off its back. There’s a lion, too, but he doesn’t do anything. The elephant walks around and drinks water out of the wallows. That’s where the rhinos play with their kids.