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

Rian Amilcar Scott read his story Shape Ups at Delilas

from the October 7th 2019 issue of the magazine. Scott is the author of two story

collections, Insurections, which was awarded the 2017 Pen Bingham Prize for

debut fiction, and the world doesn't require you, which was published earlier this year.

Now here's Rion Emilcar Scott.

Shape up said Delilas.

The night after Jerome's brother turned up on a south side sidewalk,

bloodied in babbling in and out of consciousness,

Tiny took Jerome's hand, sat him on a stool, wiped tears from his cheeks, draped the towel over his shoulders and whispered,

Relax, baby, you can't go to the hospital like that.

Your brother will wake up to that damn bird's nest on your head

and fall right back into another coma. For the next two hours, tiny shared away

drones knotty beads until his head appeared smooth and black with orderly hairs laid prone by her soft smoothing hand.

Back when they met, she told him she cut hair, said she was damn good too

Jerome had nodded

Smiled a bit as if to say how cute and changed the subject

But now the way his eyes danced in the mirror, the joy that broadened his face,

it all said, where in the hell did a woman, a W-O-M-A-N, learned a cut like that.

She circled him as she did her work, looking at every angle of his head.

...