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 Colin Barrett read his story,

Whoever is There, Come on Through, from the January 1st, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Barrett is the author of the story collection Young Skins, which won the Frank O'Connor International

Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award in 2014. Now here's Colin Barrett.

Whoever is there, come on through.

Eileen watched the bus pull into the depot and the passengers debark,

stiff and groggy, into the crisp November air,

their breath flashing like handkerchiefs in front of their faces.

She was in her car, the window rolled all the way down,

her arm slung out. She was smoking a

cigarette, but the cigarette had gone out and her arm had turned numb, not from the cold,

but from the ligature of its own hanging weight. Eileen liked the sensation, as if her arm were holding

its breath. The crowd dispersed, leaving one man lurking under the eve of the shelter.

He had a slasinger sports bag bunched against his ribs, long wrists, dangling from his coat cuffs

and a pink, animate nose twitching like a dog's.

It was Mertz's gate and it was Mertz's head.

Eileen had known Mertz since they were both thirteen, a dozen years now, and his frame had never lost the stringy, unfinished quality of adolescence, though he had since acquired a little belly.

Eileen dropped the dead smoke and hauled her sleeping arm inside the car and onto her lap.

She jabbed her other thumb into the crease of her palm.

The flesh was cool, waxen, but already she could feel it coming on, the reviving fizz of

...