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 T. Corragason Boyle read his story,

I Walk Between the Rain Drops from the July 30th, 2018 issue of the magazine.

Boyle is the author of more than two dozen books of fiction, including the novels The Terranauts and The Harder They Come. A new novel,

Outside Looking In, will be published next year. Now here's T. Corraguson Boyle.

I walk between the raindrops.

Valentine's Day This past Valentine's Day I was in Kingman, Arizona, with my wife, Nola, staying in the motel six there, just off the I-40.

He might not think of Kingman as a prime location for a romantic getaway.

Who would?

But Nola and I have been married for 15 years now,

and romance is just part of the continuum. Sometimes it blows hot, sometimes cold. And we certainly

don't need a special day or place for it. We're not sentimentalists. We don't exchange heart-shaped

boxes of chocolates or glossy cards with manufactured endearments inside. And we don't go around kissing in public or saying, I love you, 20 times a day. To my mind, couples like that are always suspect. Really, who are they trying to fool? Besides which, we were there to pay a visit to Nola's father, who's in his 80s and living in a trailer park, a mile down the road from the motel, which made it convenient not only for seeing him but for strolling into Old Town, where there are a handful of bars and restaurants and the junk shops my wife loves to frequent, looking for bargains. Were we slumming? Yes, sure. We could have stayed anywhere we liked. But this, at least when we're in Kingman, is what we like.

And if it's not ideal, at least it's different.

The local police creeped through the parking lot and the small hours running license plates,

and once in a while you'll wake to them handcuffing somebody outside one of the rooms,

which is not a sight we see every day back in California.

Plus, there are a couple of lean white bums living in the wash just behind the place,

and they sometimes give me a start looming up out of the darkness when I step outside at night for a breath of air.

But nothing's ever happened, not even a request for spare change or a cigarette.

The afternoon of Valentine's Day, after we'd visited my father-in-law,

...