This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Debra Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Ishikol Savash read her story, Future

Selves, from the March 29th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Savash's first novel, Walking on the Sealing, was published in 2019, and her second novel,

White on White, will come out later this year.

Now here's Ishikol Savash.

Future Selves Some years after we moved to the city,

my husband and I started looking for an apartment to buy.

We were renting a small place past the southern boulevard that marked the end of the historic

neighbourhoods.

On weekends, we'd usually take walks, always in the direction of the finer quarters that

had first stewardess to the city with their old-world charm.

We lived on an unremarkable street, without cafes or shops.

At the corner was a large glass building on whose steps teenagers congregated at every

hour, smoking, laughing, playing music.

Those with skateboards rode up and down the boulevard, dodging out of the way of old women

who frowned at them.

During our first year, we learned that the building was a youth centre, founded by a journalist

couple whose own daughter's suffering had gone unnoticed in the midst of the parents'

careers.

We'd been happy in our flat.

...