Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote “Things are against us” (“les choses sont contre nous”), and you can determine whether that’s the case in the two works on this program—all about the stuff in our lives.

In the first story, “Counting the Ways,” by Susan Perabo, a blue-collar couple blows an inheritance on a dress once owned by Diana, Princess of Wales, and the act precipitates a crisis in their marriage. Perabo is the author of the collection Who I Was Supposed to Be, which includes this story.

Reader Robert Sean Leonard, a Tony Award winner for The Invention of Love and regular on the television series House, talks about the story with SHORTS literary commentator Hannah Tinti in this interview:

Next, essayist Sloane Crosley lets us in on a dirty little secret—she has a drawer full of plastic ponies inveigled from various discarded boyfriends, and she’s beginning to worry about it. Crosley’s best-selling collection of essays is called I Was Told There’d Be Cake. Her most recent book is How Did You Get This Number?

“The Pony Problem” is read by Criminal Minds star Kirsten Vangsness. LISTEN TO THE SHOW