This is The writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction

at the New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Andre Alexis read his story

Consolation from the May 20th, 2024 issue of the magazine.

Alexis, a playwright and fiction writer, received the

Wyndham Campbell Prize in Fiction in 2017. His novels include 15 dogs which

won the Giller Prize and Days by Moonlight. His story collection, The Night Piece, was published in 2020.

Now here's Andre Alexis. Consolation.

Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument,

a thing that had never happened before.

She was in her early 80s and still driving,

and because I'm an inveterate backseat driver on one of our outings I suggested that she take a road

she did not want to take. She resented it and I could feel her anger growing.

When we got to her house she came came at me all 110 pounds of her, flailing, screaming, and cursing.

It was like being assaulted by a very short scarecrow.

I shouted back at her, pushed her away and left the house, resolved

never to see her again. I did not speak to her for almost two years. A mistake, because in the time it took for me to overcome my hurt feelings,

dementia gradually took hold of her, so that the woman I made up with was no longer the one I had angered.

The argument between us had been, I now think, a signal moment in her decline,

a manifestation of the irrationality and confusion, characteristic of the vascular dementia that erased her before she died.

At my mother's funeral, three years after we'd made up, and not long after she'd forgotten my name, I was overcome

by emotion. Not the emotion I'd expected, however, as her coffin rested on a beer in the

...