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 Caleb Crane read his story Easter, which appeared in the September 26, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Crane is the author of one book of nonfiction and two novels, necessary errors and overthrow, which was published in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Now here's Caleb Crane.

Easter.

On the plane from Houston to Fort Worth, 21 F turned out to be a window seat.

Jacob shrugged out of his backpack and swung it down the row.

He wasn't stoned, but he had been stoned recently and still had the residual exhausted dissociated calm of someone who had recently been stoned.

A state of mind that was milder and lacked any spasms of paranoia. Kind of better, actually.

He kept being reminded because every flight echoes every other flight on account of the sameness of the costumes and rituals.

Of how thickly, blockally stoned he had been on the plane he had taken from Massachusetts to Houston a few days earlier.

And the memory dropped another light scrim of defamiliarization between him and the world.

During that flight, everyone seemed to be aware that he was thinking about the black plastic film canister of weed.

Its rubbery gray cap, hopefully airtight, that he had tucked in among the socks in his suitcase just before leaving his dorm.

Would the authorities find it?

Was a police officer going to come shoving down the aisle?

He had tried not to care that the workings of his mind were visible.

Even if people could see, most of them would be constrained from saying that they could by its being impolite to say so.

As impolite as saying, you can see a stranger's underwear.

And people would be especially constrained on an airplane, where a custom seems to have preserved, as if in amber, the manners that obtained when air travel first became common.

The 1940s probably.

No one had sat down in the seat next to him, and the cabin doors were shut now, so it looked like he was going to have some privacy.

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