This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from New Yorker. I'm Deborah Triesman, fiction editor

at The New Yorker. On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Joan Silber read her

story Evolution, which appeared in the September 12, 2022 issue of the magazine. Silber is the

author of nine books of fiction, the most recent of which are Secrets of Happiness and Improvement

for which she won the Penn Falkner Award in 2018. Now here's Joan Silber.

Evolution, I was 10 when my mother had to take me to the emergency room. I'd sort of skidded

on our fire escape while I was recklessly dancing around on it, showing off for the kid

in the apartment across the way. I'd done a bump to bump and I was singing whoop-do-whoop-dee

and starting a foxy little move while waving the ends of my bathroom sash when I slipped

on the rusted flooring that was splashwood snow and collapsed on it's see-through slats

in an unnatural crumple. The backyard was three floors below, two visible. I screamed

when I tried to get up. I wanted my mother to hear me. She was watching TV. She thought

I was asleep. How would she guess where I was? I knew I had done something very bad to

my leg. Fortunately, Neenie Sidenbaum, for whom I'd been showing off, screamed for her

own mother. In the frozen air between our buildings, I heard her whale that I was dead.

Every part of me was shaking. It was winter in New York and I'd been fluttering around

in my nightclothes. And now I'd gone from entertainment greatness to being a heap of cracked

bones in the wind. When my mother finally appeared, she carefully dragged me over the black

metal slats and lifted me through the window. I was still trembling too much to speak,

but I could see that my mother's face was pale and weird. I understood the dying, which

I might be about to do, was something I'd have to manage alone and no one had taught

me how. I was angry about this. I'm fine, I said, not that nicely, either. Because this

...