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 Yee and Lee read her story Wednesday's

child, from the January 23rd, 2023 issue of the magazine.

Lee is the author of two story collections and five novels, including Must I Go and the

Book of Goose, which was published last year.

She won the Wyndham Campbell Literature Prize in 2020.

Now here's Yee and Lee.

Wednesday's child.

The difficulty was waiting, Rosalie thought, is that one can rarely wait in absolute

stillness, that part of herself, which was in the habit of questioning her own

thoughts as they occurred, raised a mental eyebrow.

No one waits in absolute stillness, absolute stillness is death, and when you're dead you

no longer wait for anything.

No, not death, Rosalie clarified, but stillness, like hibernation or estivation waiting for,

before she could embellish the thought with some garden variety clichés, the monitor

nearby rode out a schedule change.

The 1135 train to Brussels, Medi, was cancelled.

All morning, Rosalie had been migrating between platforms in Amsterdam Central, from track

four to track ten, then to track seven, to track eleven, and back to four.

The trains to Brussels, both expressed in local, had been cancelled one after another.

A family, tourists judging by their appearance as Rosalie herself was, materialized that

...