This is the writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker. I'm Deborah

Treisman, 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 the story was adapted, will come out next year.

Now here's Patricia Lockwood.

The Winged Thing Everyone at Gate B Six 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 no pores whatsoever.

Did you read?

They said to each other again and again.

...