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 Means read his story, Two Nurses Smoking,

from the June 1st 2020 issue of the magazine. Means is the author of the novel

Histopia and five-story collections, including the spot and instructions for a funeral, which was

published last year. Now here's David Means.

Two nurses, smoking.

From a wide vantage, two hospital workers, somewhat lonely-looking figures,

taking a smoke break back behind a trailer, leaning towards each other as they talk softly beside a row of

neatly trimmed bushes. One had long hair and thin, pale arms that dangled from her scrubs.

The other was big, burly, with a tattoo on his arm. Even that day in June, if you paid close attention driving past, you might have seen desire

in the way she pointed her toe and dug it into the dusty concrete while she listened to him.

Or you might have noticed the way he swayed as he talked, because he liked to riff on the subject at hand. And lately,

the last few times, when she visited the trailer, he had expounded upon the recent news.

A serial killer nurse who had confessed to murdering somewhere in Pennsylvania at least a dozen

patients. She, for her part, added a little

commentary here and there because it was a shared story that somehow seemed to make the job a bit

easier. The kind of bullshit story you tell to kill time. And she liked his deep, no-nonsense

tone, which, she thought, might have come from his stint in the army.

He had green eyes that became deeply serious when he was listening.

The bond began to form in the way they both moved during the breaks, in the solitude they sought between the bushes and the long flank of the trailer, a dirty sliver of parking lock curb where cigarette butts and litter had blown up.

Between them was a secretive energy, a conspiracy formed out of a mutual history.

...