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 Mary Grimm read her story back then from the June 24th, 2019 issue of the magazine. Grimm, a professor of English

at Case Western Reserve University, is the author of the novel Left to Themselves and is currently

at work on a historical novel. Now here's Mary Grimm.

Back then. Every year the Perseids came, splashing down from the top of the sky,

and every year we begged our parents to let us go down to the lake by ourselves to see them.

Every year they said no, and we sat on the narrow beach at the end of the ferry parking lot.

Our parents, my sister and I, and some of

our girl cousins, whichever of them, had come with us that year. The lake would be black and the

sky blacker. If there were waves, the curl of the foam was gray. The summer colors of our clothes

were bleached out as if we were in an old movie, and we sat there waiting for the next shooting star,

the next, the next.

We'd read about the Perseid's myth in the encyclopedia, but we pretended that they were sisters

instead of brothers.

The water sucked and slopped against the rocks.

Sometimes there was the low rumble of thunder or the hum of a motorboat, its tiny

lights crossing far out from west to east. Some years there were only 20 or 30 falling

stars for our trouble, but other years they came hard and fast, as if someone were throwing

them at the lake like handfuls of pebbles. In our private mythology, this meant that something

wonderful was going to happen, that there would be a marvel if we were ready to see it.

One summer, when my sister was little, still a baby, but beginning to walk and making sounds

...