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 David Gilbert read his story, Fungus, from the June 4th and 11th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Gilbert is the author of the Story Collection, Remote Feed, and two novels, and Sons and the Normals.

Now here's David Gilbert.

Fungus

The insurance check came in the mail, from Geico, with its big-eyed lizard mascot, a cockney gecko,

as though disaster should appeal to ironic children.

There are no geckos in Portland, Oregon, or in East London, for that matter, not their natural habitat.

But there are geckos in South Carolina.

Andrew remembered them. In the winter, they would sneak indoors and hide near curtains,

frozen like novelty rubber until roused, and then such speed. Of course, the goal was to catch one,

to hold it in your palms, a brief warm home until

boredom set in, after which you'd release it on the porch.

The crueler boys did worse, with tennis rackets, with wind-ups into trees followed by whoops.

Geckos lose their tails, if captured endwise, probably their most

famous trait. Otto Tommy is the term, Greek for self-severing, which Andrew had misread

last week as serving. Self-serving? No, no. Severing, as in divide by cutting, certainly an effective means of survival,

to lose what has been caught. But why a gecko should come to represent an insurance company

baffled him, beyond the obvious wordplay, which seemed weak even for advertising, and was

outdone only by the Affleck Duck.

In the darkness before the dawn, the dawn.

...