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 Miranda July read her story, The Metal Bowl,

from the September 4th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

July is a writer, artist, film director, and actor.

She's the author of the story collection,

No One Belongs Here More Than You,

and a novel, The First Badman, which was published in 2015.

Now here's Miranda July.

The Metal Bowl.

He cupped the two halves of my tush and spoke directly to them.

Run away with me, girls, he whispered.

She doesn't understand our love.

I lay still staring out the window, letting them have their time together.

If I protested, I'd only make his case stronger. I'm less fun than my own butt, which is not

untrue. In my essence, I am a stone. I'm moving for 10,000 years unless picked up and moved.

It's not just sex. I find this whole experience,

life, gratuitously slow and drawn out. See it crawl second by fucking second. If I'm a workaholic,

it's only because I hate work so much that I'm trying to finish it, all of it, once and for all, so I can just ride out

the rest of my life in some kind of internal trance state, not a coma but like a step above that.

Our son Sam trotted in sleepily, and I warned him not to get in the bed. It's all bloody.

Alex quietly removed his hands from my body.

...