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 Tessa Hadley read her story,

Funny Little Snake, from the October 16th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

Hadley has published six novels and four-story collections, including Sunstroke and other stories and married love. Last year, she

won the Wyndham Campbell Prize for fiction. Now here's Tessa Hadley. Funny Little Snake

The child was nine years old and couldn't fasten her own buttons.

Valerie knelt in front of her on the carpet in the spare room

as Robin held out first one cuff and then the other without a word, then turned around to present

the back of her dress, where a long row of spherical chocolate brown buttons was unfastened over a grubby

white petticoat edged with lace. Her tiny, bony shoulder blades flickered with repressed movement.

And although every night since Robin had arrived a week ago, Valerie had encouraged her into a bath, foamed up with bubbles,

she still smelled of something furtive, musty spice from the back of a cupboard.

The smell had to be in her dress, which Valerie didn't't dare wash "'because it looked as though it had to be dry cleaned, "'or in her lanked, licorice-coloured hair "'which was pulled back from her forehead "'under an even grubbier stretch Alice band. "'Trust Robin's mother to have a child who couldn't do up buttons

and then put her in a fancy plaid dress with hundreds of them

and frogging and leg of button sleeves like a Victorian orphan

instead of ordinary slacks and a t-shirt so that she could play.

The mother went around apparently in long dresses and bare feet

and had her picture painted by artists.

Robin at least had tights and plimsels with elastic tops,

though her green coat was too thin for the winter weather.

Valerie had tried to talk to her stepdaughter.

...