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 Han Ong read his story, The Monkey Who Speaks,

from the September 13th, 2021 issue of the magazine.

Ong, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Berlin Prize, is the author of more than a dozen plays in two novels, Fixer Chow, and The Disinherited.

Now here's Han Ong. The Monkey Who Speaks

Roscow could stand to lose 20 pounds.

Closer to 30 would be even better.

It would ease the burden on his heart. One blessing, though, he's still

ambulatory. At his most intrepid, he makes do with an aluminum cane. Not for him, the suave

models, he and Flavia marveled over in a catalog for the dapper older gentleman, which had appeared

in Roscoe's mailbox, but with somebody else's name on the address label. One cane had a detachable

metal eagle handle and a tapered body whose tip was sheathed in copper. Another had a concealed dagger that you accessed by unscrewing

the head, which was of a beagle, deceitfully hapless. Most days, Flavia takes him for a walk,

circling the two or three blocks around his Ridgewood home, and he uses a

walker. The only exception is when there is ice on the sidewalk. Then they sit on the porch to

inhale the exhaust of passing cars, Roscoe under a couple of wool blankets, and Flavia, her down jacket, zipped up all the way to her chin.

They have been together for just over a year.

It was for Rosco that Flavia left her job with the safe dispatch nurse services,

for which she'd given up her previous stint at the Blessed Rest retirement home in Jackson Heights,

where she was frequently scheduled on the night shift with Artung and Lusing, and also on the weekends with Lorene and Wanda.

It feels like a lifetime ago,

...