This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deppra Treesman, Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this week's episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear David Pismoskis read his story, From, 2 from the April 14th 2025 issue of the writer's voice, we'll hear David Bismoskis read his story From 2 from the April 14th

2025 issue of the magazine. Bismoskis is the author of two novels and two story collections,

Natasha and Other Stories, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book,

and Immigrant City, which was a finalist for the Giller Prize in 2019.

Now here's David Bismoskis.

From 2. At 10 o'clock on a Wednesday night, he gets a call from his aunt's number.

It's late to get a call from his aunt,

but his mother is often with his aunt, and it's not unusual for her to call at that hour.

But it's his aunt on the line, her voice pained, then disintegrating. And that's it. He feels a plummet

and a deletion commensurate with the space his mother occupied in his life. Nothing will fill it.

He knows this from his father's death. He'll go around with another amorphous blank until he

himself becomes one in the consciousnesses of his children. There are immediate tangible demands

that require a clarity of mind that alludes him.

Normally he prides himself on precisely this kind of ability. His work, in real estate law,

consists almost entirely of accurately doing things in the proper sequence. But at first,

he can't even make sense of what his aunt tells him. His mother has

died, but his aunt is not with her. His mother is on the roof of her condominium. She was playing

Rummy Cube with other Russian Jewish women. The paramedics came. He must go to his mother's

condominium. He must call the funeral home.

It is his week with his younger daughter and she is asleep.

...