This is the writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Louise Erdrick read her story, The Hollow Children,

which appeared in the November 28, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Erdrick is the author of more than 2,000 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Most recently, the novels The Sentence and The Night Watchmen, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2021.

Now here's Louise Erdrick.

The Hollow Children.

At the taper bar, around beer number four, the men sometimes got into history farming,

trading stories of their antecedents, exploits, and agonies.

In the long ago, wheat prices had plunged, and most of the bananas of farms had broken up.

That was when their great-grates had bought the land.

The men talked about old plagues, old equipment, old swaps of ownership, crops, land, and dire weather.

John Pavlucky's great-grandmother, at the age of nine, had survived the blizzard of 1923 by burrowing into a nearby haystack,

when the school bus didn't show up.

Diz remembered his grandfather telling stories about an uncle Ivac, who had also endured that blizzard,

which was particularly lethal because it happened on a misty and mild April day.

Around eight that morning, the bus had been almost full of children and headed toward the school,

when out of the northwest, a wind of 60 miles per hour had dropped the temperature instantly to minus 20,

and filled the air with a blistering cold curtain of powder.

Such a snow could blind your eyes and scour the features off your face.

Ivac was a farmer, a part-time schoolteacher, and one of the bus drivers.

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