This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Aishigal 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 Aishigl 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 neighborhoods. On weekends, we'd usually take

walks, always in the direction of the finer quarters that had first steward us 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 center, 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.

At the time we moved in, it presented itself as a perfect space to play out our still elusive adulthoods.

We bought paintings, all ones from flea markets, distinguishing our new home from the studio we'd lived in as graduate students, which we had decorated with framed posters.

Now we had our sights set on a real kitchen, made of quality materials, a bathroom without chip tiles or mold.

Our weekends, once taken up by those long walks, after which we would meet our friends

Samia to wine bar, were spent on the metro going from one end of the city

...