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The Third Time Rita Left Chapter 4: Rita’s Village

Rita in a spinal twist
Rita in a spinal twist

This is the last chapter of our 4-part saga about the lengths to which a person will go when their cat is missing. If you missed them, here are Chapters One, Two, and Three. (You can also find them in our podcast feed.)

At the beginning of this chapter, it’s getting to be winter, and Rita still hasn’t been found. The odds of her surviving another few months are dropping with the temperature. Kayte feels increasingly desperate. Is Rita still alive out there? Could that be her, the cat people have been seeing in the neighborhood near where Rita got lost? Or is it, as Kayte suspects, another imposter? How does Kayte really feel about that carrier that fell apart so many months ago, letting Rita escape? All those questions will, at last, be answered, in Rita’s Village, this final chapter of The Third Time Rita Left.

Music

Most of the music in this episode is by Ramón Monrás-Sender, with other music from the artists at Universal Production Music.

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.