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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 Claire Sustanovich read her story,

Natural History, from the July 21st, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Sistanovic is the author of the story collection Objects of Desire, which came out in 2021 and was a finalist for the Penn Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the novel, Ask Me Again, which was published last year.

Now here's Claire Sustanovich.

Thank you. was published last year. Now here's Claire Sustanovich. Natural History

He walked out of the precinct and wondered immediately what time it was.

He didn't have his phone, never wore a watch.

It was dark when they took him in and dark when they let him out.

Darkness in the city always contained its own confusion.

You could never really escape the light, beams and squares and cones of it, white and

orange and blue. Looking up, he tried to decide if the sky was a night sky or a morning sky,

a before or an after. He thought, is it still yesterday? A thought that didn't make any sense. Yesterday,

the most important day of his life, unless it was today. He paused for a moment at the threshold

of inside and outside. He hadn't really been inside, of course, not the way some people were, for months, for years,

waiting for a trial or a plea or death.

He faced a huge parking lot, lined with police cars, and surrounded by an imposing fence.

There were a few police buses, too, which looked like school buses, except they were white

instead of yellow, and the windows were covered with metal grates. Some of the other protesters

...