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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Colin Barrett read his story,

a shooting in Rathwardong, from the December 13th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Barrett is the author of the story collection Young Skins,

which won the Franco Conner International Short Story Award,

and the Guardian First Book Award in 2014.

A new collection, Home Sickness, will be published in May.

Now here's Colin Barrett.

A shooting in Rathwardong.

Sergeant Jackie Noonan was squaring away paperwork when the call came in,

just her and the Gosling, crunches Swift, in Balanagarta station.

The third officer on duty, Sergeant Dennis Crane,

had run out to oversee the extraction of a renom again,

that some young lad, sober apparently, just a nervous non-local,

negotiating the cat's cradle of backroads around Karabagan,

had nosed into a ditch, half-mile out from the national school.

The car was a write-off, but the lad had got away without a scratch,

according to Crane, and he was a lucky lad,

because Noonan knew the roads out that way, and they were wicked,

high-ditched, hilly, and altogether too narrow,

scantily sign-posted, and laced with half-hidden,

...