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 Rion and Melkar Scott read his story,

Shape Ups at Delilah's from the October 7th 2019 issue of the magazine.

Scott is the author of two story collections, Insurrections, which was awarded the 2017 Penn

Bingham Prize for debut fiction, and the world doesn't require you, which was published earlier this

year. Now here's Rion Emelkar-Scott.

Shape-up said Delilah's.

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

bloodied and babbling in and out of consciousness,

Tiny took Jerome's hand, sat him on a stool,

wiped tears from his cheeks, draped a 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 Dr Jerome's knotty beads until his head appeared smooth

in 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.

She lathered up the front and went at it with a straight razor so that his hairline sat as crisp and sharp as the beveled edge of the blade that cut it.

...