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 David Rabe read his story, Suffocation Theory,

from the October 12th, 2020 issue of the magazine.

Rabe is the author of more than a dozen plays, including the Tony Award-winning sticks and bones,

in the Boom Boom Room, and Hurley Burley. His novels include Recital of the Dog and Girl by the Road at Night. Now here's David Rabe.

Suffocation theory.

Amanda surprised me when she said we had to move.

I barely got in the door, barely been in the hallway of our apartment a second, when she passed in and out of my peripheral vision, catching sight of me, I guess, and making her announcement.

I've been planning to take off my shoes and flopped down on the couch with a cup of coffee

to watch the news on TV. One blast of terrible news after another. I didn't know

what the terrible news would be today, but I knew it would be terrible. Car crashes would

be the least of it, accidental ones anyway. It had become common for people in cars to mow

other people down.

But that wasn't the only thing.

There were terrorists at gun battles and shopping malls.

Locals and tourists in Malaysia and Mali and London and Paris fleeing, stampeding as soldiers

ducked behind jewelry displays and fast food counters, hunting down

militants in one boutique after another. Bombs were often involved. We'd all become familiar

with acronyms like IED. Long guns. That was another term we were necessarily familiar with. Boom, they'd go, those IEDs,

in churches, synagogues, mosques, concert halls, and the aforementioned shopping malls. Movie

theaters, too, strip malls, scattered in main bodies, and outward gyre victims propelled from the explosion.

...