This is The Writers Voice, New Fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treisman, Fiction Editor at the New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writers Voice, we'll hear David Means read his story

Two Nurses Smoking from the June 1st 2020 issue of the magazine.

Means is the author of the novel Histopia and Five Story Collections, including The Spot

and Instructions for a Funeral, which was published last year.

Now here's David Means. Two nurses smoking.

From a wide vantage, smoking.

From a wide vantage, two hospital workers, somewhat lonely looking figures, taking a smoke break back behind a trailer,

leaning towards each other as they talk softly beside a row of

neatly trimmed bushes.

One had long hair and thin pale arms that dangled from her scrubs.

The other was big, burly, with a tattoo on his arm.

Even that day in June, if you paid close attention driving past, you might have seen desire in the way

she pointed her toe and dug it into the dusty concrete while she listened to him.

Or you might have noticed the way he swayed as he talked because he liked

to riff on the subject at hand. And lately the last few times, when she visited visited the trailer he had expounded upon the recent news.

A serial killer nurse who had confessed to murdering somewhere in Pennsylvania at least a dozen patients.

She, for her part, added a little commentary here and there because it was a shared story

that somehow seemed to make the job a bit easier, the kind of bullshit story you tell to kill time.

And she liked his deep no-nonsense tone, which she thought might have come from his stint in the army.

He had green eyes that became deeply serious when he was listening.

...