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The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 3: Missing Rita

Rita in a leafy bower
Rita in a leafy bower

If political news is too much right now, we’ve got a solution. It’s a story we aired a while back: The Third Time Rita Left. You can find the first two chapters here and here. The story takes place in the fall of 2016. Another election season. In Chapter 3: Missing Rita, things are not looking good. Kayte’s partner thinks Rita was probably eaten by a coyote. Kayte’s boss says cats just have their own plans. But reports are coming in from a neighborhood near where Rita was lost. Has she been sighted? Will Kayte be able to coax her home? What if she doesn’t want to come home? How do you deal with a lost cat and a lost election at the same time? It doesn’t hurt to work in a place that takes your missing cat seriously.

Alex Chambers runs WFIU’s arts desk, and produces and hosts WFIU’s Inner States, a weekly podcast and radio show about arts, culture, and ideas from southern Indiana and beyond. He’s the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about the present, produced in partnership with Indiana Humanities. He has a PhD in American Studies, with a dissertation called Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, and a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. In his spare time, he teaches audio storytelling at the IU Media School. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.