Fiction and fact meet uncannily in this piece, a full minute shorter than described. Not enough of this kind of fantasy reportage has hit public radio. Producer Hillary Frank's hauntingly beautiful interview has what it takes to be a "This American Life" segment.

For one, it features Lucy sans surname, a married 28-year old woman (though she's referred to as a "girl" in the description) and a cystic fibrosis sufferer who lives in a "tiny box of a house on the corner of two alleys in Philadelphia." Like a character out of a fairy tale, Lucy contacts or else invents -- it's never totally clear -- a friend, an alter ego who also has CF. Considering her long red braid, freckles and striped socks, Lucy's friend "rides a powder-blue bike and looks like Pippi Longstocking." With unflagging pace, accompanied by intervals of poignant, spacey electronic music, a believable story unfolds in which Lucy and her "Bike Girl" friend meet, in an Internet chat room for people with CF, to discuss getting pregnant, having babies.

You don't have to be a fan of the recent flick, "Juno," to understand Lucy's urge to have a child. Neither do you need to have an overactive imagination to appreciate the way appearance and reality come together here.

This piece illuminates the dim reaches of CF, with differently timed pounds on Lucy's mucus-clogged chest that are as acoustically vivid as her discussions of the CF bacteria, B cepacia, are shocking. Lucy lets us know about her tiny box of a world, which opens out onto bleak alleyways.

I don't think I've ever heard the sounds of a bicycle bell used as a segue to a phantasmagoria -- a series of great radio moments.