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 J. Robert Lennon read his story, The Loop,

from the August 26th, 2019, issue of the magazine. Lennon is his story, The Loop, from the August 26th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Lennon is the author of 10 books of fiction, including the novel Broken River and the story collection, See You in Paradise.

Now here's J. Robert Lennon.

The Loop.

Divorced, fired from adjunct teaching after a botched attempt to unionize, and her only child lost to college. Bev had, for the first time in decades, more freedom than she knew what to do with.

The empty house, hers alone, disgusted her.

She sold it against her daughter's wishes

and moved to a two-bedroom apartment in a new building downtown.

Between the house money and the monthly support payments from her ex,

he was fucking his assistant, and had signed these things away

with the heedless joy of a rabbit

sprung from a trap. She'd been given the opportunity to think carefully about what to do with the rest

of her life. This quickly came to seem like torture. So she volunteered for moving on up.

This was the charity she donated her ex-husband's study desk to,

a nonprofit whose volunteers drove a big yellow truck around town,

collecting the cast-offs of the well-to-do and delivering them to people in need.

After her move, settled into her newly purposeless life, she realized that she actually

missed the moving. She was good at it, enjoyed the physical effort, the strategic tetracing

of bureaus and bookshelves and chairs and lamps, the packing and unpacking. She recalled the energetic

...