This is The Author's Voice, New Fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Author's Voice, we'll hear Lauren Groff read her story, The Midnight Zone, from the May 23rd, 2016 issue of the magazine.

Groff has been publishing fiction in The New Yorker since 2011.

She's the author of one story collection and three novels, including Arcadia and Fates and Puries.

Now here's Lauren Groff.

The Midnight Zone The Midnight Zone.

It was an old hunting camp shipwrecked in 20 miles of scrub.

Our friend had seen a Florida panther sliding through the trees there a few days earlier.

But things had been fraying in our hands and the camp was free and silent, so I walked through

the resistance of my cautious husband and my small boys who had wanted hermit crabs and kites

and wakeboards and sand for spring break. Instead, they got ancient sinkholes filled with ferns,

potential death by cat.

One thing I liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.

Even in the sleeping bag with my smaller son, the golden one, the March Chills seemed to blow

through my bones.

I loved eating, but I'd lost so much weight by then that I carried myself delicately, as if I'd gone translucent.

There was sparse electricity from a gas-powered generator and no internet, and you had to climb out through the window in the loft and stand on the roof to get a cell signal.

On the third day, the boys were asleep and I dimmed the lanterns when my husband went up and out,

and I heard him stepping on the metal roof, a giant brother to the raccoons that woke us thumping

around up there at night, like burglars.

Then my husband stopped moving and stood still for so long I forgot where he was.

...