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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Ben Marcus read his story, Blueprints for

St. Louis, from the October 2nd, 2017 issue of the magazine.

Marcus has published two novels and two-story collections, including the Flame Alphabet and Leaving

the Sea, which came out in 2014, and was shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International

Short Story Award. Now here's Ben Marcus.

Blueprints for St. Louis.

It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land,

or maybe just across Roy and Ida's apartment.

And in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness,

just shy of visible flinching when they passed each other in the halls,

or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they'd splurged on.

Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you've

long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no

longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer or the prior spring,

and well, didn't the seasons and the years just dogpile

one another when he tried to solve math like that?

Ida wasn't particularly concerned because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right?

And screw Roy if he'd fallen down a brightly colored porn hole, pummeling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around in grown-up crotch gear in a cartoon fairyland.

Browser histories weren't her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them.

Anyway, if her husband's use case of viability on the marital graph had taken a nosedive,

...