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 Margaret Atwood read her story,

Old Babes in the Wood, from the April 26th and May 3rd 2021 issue of the magazine.

Atwood has published more than two dozen books of fiction, including the story collection

stone mattress, and the novels The Handmaid's Tale, and the Testaments, which won the Booker Prize in 2019.

Now here's Margaret Atwood.

Old Babes Now here's Margaret Atwood.

Old Babes in the Wood.

Pants or dead leaves, Lizzie says.

My guess is pants, Nell says.

The two of them stand on the dock in their age inappropriate bathing suits and stare at the dark patch under the water.

An hour earlier, Nell was toasting her laundry on the dock, which was the best place to dry it.

It had been the best place for 70 years.

But she didn't put rocks on top of her cotton yoga pants, though she ought to have known better, and then she went back up the hill to the house through the sighing and

rustling trees. The pants are lightweight, and they seem to have blown away. Logic dictates

that they must be somewhere in the lake.

Other pants, she might have kissed goodbye, but she's fond of these.

I'll go in, she says.

Maybe it's not pants, Lizzie says dubiously.

Waterlogged leaves accumulate on the sandy, rocky lake bottom. Their older brother, Robbie,

sometimes rakes them out as a courtesy to others, along with the tiny water weeds that grow up

...