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 Wright-Falladay read his story,

The Sandbank's 1861 from the August 31st, issue of the magazine. Wright-Falladay is the

author of a non-fiction book, Fire on the Beach, recovering the lost story of Richard

Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, and a young adult novel, Away Running. This story was

adapted from his novel in progress, Nihanna Brother, which will be published in 2022.

Now here's David Wright-Falladay.

The Sandbanks, 1861.

We were just boys, 10, 11, and 12-year-olds, five colored and one white.

But for our small clothes, each of us was most all naked.

We stood on the rickety reach of the pier, its planks care laid but well-used, us colored boys black glistening in the noontime bright, the white one,

not yet leathered like the sun beat beefs that free range the island.

Our breeches and cover owls and burlap shirts lay pell-mell near the spot on the shore

where Ebo Joe Meekins knelt, inspecting the line of the skiff he was refitting.

The old negro was either fifty or a thousand, the one age as imponderable to us as the other, and he paid us no more mine than we did him. On the water, cleat hitched to the pier, rocked the dugout full of oysters that we were supposed to be faring over to Ashby's harbor. Up and down it rolled with each leap or dive as we plunge into the water one at a time or in twos

and sometimes all six at once i was young square-shouldered but elseways long of limb with knots for knees and

elbows and i climbed from the croixen sound up onto the dugout straddling it a foot on each gunwale, I began walking its edge.

The woods rough grain dug into the pads of my feet with each shuffle stepped forward.

The other boys waited nearby, wandering at my balancing act.

You look like one of Uncle John's barn cats, Patrick, the white one, shouted up, and he

splashed water to challenge my progress.

...