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 David Means

read his story Chance the Cat from the January 22nd, 2024 issue of the magazine.

Means is the author of the novel Histopia and Six Story Collections,

including Instructions for a Funeral

and Two Nurses Smoking, which was published in 2022.

Now here's David Means.

Chance the cat. Does it matter that a cat story resides solely in the body of a cat,

remaining neutral as the creature moves through the landscape,

operating on pure instinct and no matter what,

embodying the projected will of the human, there is little else that the cat can do. All one can do is attempt to watch the animal as it performs

its actions with time suspended and meaningless. As it does, the painful history from the first to the last, the dirtback roads, the chains, and the

rattle of iron are voided in the cat. That dusty old symbol, the red open mouth at the end of a post story, a freakish shadow,

razor teeth crying behind a wall.

What matters is that they were walking that day in opposite directions along the same path

with the neo-Gothic buildings of the university framing a somber Chicago sky.

There was William's smile and then a somber Chicago sky.

There was William's smile and then his voice as Kayla heard it for the first time.

She was from a place called Sparks not far from Reno,

a neat little bungalow house on a street snaked with asphalt seam sealer. There was an exchange of words, an adjusting of bodies into casual positions and a forward movement slightly dance-like as they talked.

It was his freckles and the frankness of his eyes and the commonality of the place where they

met too,

...