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 Patricia Lockwood read her story, The Winged Thing,

from the November 30th, 2020 issue of the magazine. Lockwood has published two collections

of poetry and the memoir, Priest Daddy, which came out in 2017. Her first novel, No One Is

Talking About This, from which this story was adapted, will come out next year. Now here's

Patricia Lockwood.

The Winged Thing Everyone at Gate B-6 was bathed in gold. She sat there with one foot off the edge of the

earth, close to falling, until she saw the couple with matching extravagant

mullets that hung down past their shoulder blades.

The man took out a brush and began to fight through his mullet until it was free.

And then he handed the brush to his wife, and she began to fight through hers with the same

consecrated look.

These mullets were their acre, and when God came down,

he would not find a rock, a stump, a weed. They shook out their hair together, as if it were

all in the same head, joined hands and rested. She sat in the gold that made them the same and

felt a little less like dying.

The cursor blinked where her mind was.

She put one true word after another and put the words in the portal.

All at once they were not true, not as true as she could have made them.

Where was the fiction?

Distance, arrangement, emphasis, proportion? Did they become untrue only when they entered someone else's life and butted up, trivial, against its bigness? A 23-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body. His skin seemed to have

...