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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Pat Barker read her story, Medusa,

from the April 15th, 2019 issue of the magazine.

Barker is the author of 14 novels, including Regeneration, The Ghost Road,

which won the Booker Prize, and most recently The Silence of the Girls,

which was published in 2018.

Now here's Pat Barker.

Medusa. By the time I left the cathedral, it was already dark, misling, the kind of rain that looks like mist

but drenches you in minutes.

I walked quickly, head down.

In the marketplace, the Friday night Bonanza was well underway, girls in tight dresses

and vertiginous heels, teetering along in noisy groups, watched by boys who pretended indifference

and turned back to their mates laughing. How did girls walk in those things?

I could barely manage in the heels I was wearing, and they were nowhere near as high.

Mind, I don't normally wear heels, jeans and trainers, that's me.

Only that afternoon I'd felt the need to make an effort because I'd been supervising the

hanging of my paintings in the Galilee Chapel, my first solo exhibition.

As I turned into Silver Street, I was hardly aware of my surroundings. I was still walking around

the exhibition in my head. All recent

work, all on the theme of metamorphosis, women turning into hairs, foxes, crows, cows, fish, seals,

trees. I'd been looking at these paintings for so long I couldn't see them anymore.

...