Hi, I'm LeVar Burton fiction and I read it to me.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too. You know I never have a theme in mind when I start choosing stories for a new season of the podcast,

but something always emerges and season 12, it feels

like it has two themes that actually overlap quite a bit. One is about belief and disbelief. Now whether that's

belief in magic or angels or religion or as in today's story in psychic readings.

And the other through line of this season

is loss and grieve. That might be losing a loved one or losing and grieving a way of life.

A lot of the stories this season deal with how we move forward.

Those fantastic lives is about a young boy and his grandmother Nellie, who is his guardian.

Nellie is also an old school psychic with very strong feelings about TV psychics and what they're doing to degrade her chosen profession.

When we meet her, Nellie is about to retire,

about to perform her very last reading

for a woman who's lost her son. This story was written by Bradley Sides, and it's from his debut collection entitled Those Fantastic Lives and other strange stories.

His writing appears in the Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Millions,

and the Rumpus, among other places. He lives in Florence, Alabama with his wife and can be found

on most days teaching creative writing and English in southern Tennessee.

Please check out the written content advisory in the episode description if you are so inclined and now.

If you're ready, let's take a deep breath. Yeah.

And let's begin.

And let's begin.

Those fantastic lives by Bradley's sides. besides. One mistake is what separated Nellie from the others, the fakeies as she called them.

Nellie was no Miss Francine, and she certainly wasn't part of the even worse psychic sisters network.

...