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

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

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Sherman Alexi read his story,

Clean, Cleaner, Cleanest from the June 5th and 12th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

Alexei has published 25 books of fiction and poetry, including the novel Flight and the

story collections, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, and War Dances.

Now here's Sherman Alexey.

Clean, cleaner, cleanest.

The used condoms stopped bothering Marie after a while.

At least the people were being safe during their motel sex.

She was Catholic and didn't believe in abortion,

but she was more flexibly Catholic than strictly Catholic. So she did believe in birth control, pills, devices, procedures. That's good

science, she thought. And God created everything, including science. One of God's other names

is Big Bang. Sometimes, when she prayed, she said, dear Big Bang, and she was half certain that God

enjoyed the inside joke. Nobody was allowed to be fully certain about God,

and she'd never trusted anybody who claimed to be certain about God. You cannot be confident

and faithful at the same time, she thought. Marie's fear of used hypodermics had lessened over the years.

She got needle stuck once when she was pulling off a pillowcase.

The next day, she went to the free clinic and got tested for HIV.

For days, Marie prayed.

Then her prayer received the response. Negative is sometimes a good thing.

She rarely saw a needle when crack and crystal meth had become more popular and cheaper than any

...