It is the day after Christmas, and Dee Kowalczyk has worked the returns counter at Brannigan's Store One for thirty-one years. No manager is in the building. At two minutes after nine, a man sets a laundry basket on her counter and asks to return a live goose.

So Dee does what the 1958 store manual tells her to do. She calls the district manager, Brent Ackerly, and files a report. Then she files another, and another. The goose, whom Dee names Receipt, honks at every lie told at the counter. A returns counter hears a lot of lies, and a few of them are kinder than the truth.

No Receipt is a comedy told in eight voicemail messages and one live scene. It runs about 52 minutes, and it is warm underneath the jokes.

Level Nine is a ghost story told by Walt Odum, a guide at the Kessler Colliery Museum. On the last night before the state seals the mine, he leads eight guests underground for the final tour. Each came for one man who died in the 1953 roof fall.

Walt counts his group at every stop, because in a mine a guide who miscounts can lose a person. Tonight, the count does not always agree with his ears.

The story is told in order, one stop at a time, in nine short chapters. Walt says only what he knew at each place, and nothing more. The whole story runs about 48 minutes. It is best heard in the dark.

Alder Peak, Montana, August 1978. Cole Decker watches for forest fires from a steel tower in the Bitterroot, seven miles from the end of the trail. His only company is the radio, and Helen at the ranger district, who calls twice a day. Then, late one night, a flat voice comes through the static and begins to read numbers: groups of five, one digit at a time, to a listener somewhere far away. Cole writes them down. The voice reads again the next night, and the night after. Then it says one word. Alder. The Reader is a Cold War horror story told in the first person, in six chapters.

Fill the Air is a comedy-drama in seven chapters, about an hour in all. The lights go out at the ballpark in the last inning of the championship game. Gus Tanner, the engineer at a failing small-town station in Delmar Falls, Ohio, has not spoken on the air in thirty years. Tonight he has no choice. The announcer has lost his voice, the power company says it will be about an hour, and Gus has to tell the town how the season got here while the game waits in the dark.

A work of fiction. The people, the places and the station are made up.