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 Thomas McGuain read his story,

Wide Spot from the September 23rd, 2019 issue of the magazine.

McGuain has published 14 books of fiction, including the story collections Galatin Canyon, Crow Fair, and cloudbursts which came out last year.

Now here's Thomas McQuain. Wide Spot.

The small boar politics that I've been caught up in for the past 30 years has provided beyond the usual attractions of

grafting corruption, a vivid lesson in regional geography, as I've had to make sure my constituents would keep showing up to vote.

Still, it had been a very long time since I last visited Prairie Dale.

Back then, the town was known as Wide Spot.

It wouldn't have had a name at all if it weren't for the filling station there,

and had anyone thought about it,

would have been called something more dignified

like Fort Lauderdale.

In the old days, the Indians led their cattle

to the freight yards, many miles away on horseback.

Their wives awaited them in Model T. Ford, pulled their saddles off the horses, and drove them back to the reservation.

The horses turned up on the res within a week, grazing their way north on unfenced grass. But when the Northern Pacific laid a

spur from the east-west line to pick up cattle and grain, Widespot boomed, became the

county seat. It got a courthouse, a sprawl, frame houses, a fire

station in a quansit hut, a baseball diamond, and its unative name.

...