This is the writer's voice, new fiction from the New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker.

On a special archival New Year's episode, a the July 21st, 2014 issue of the magazine, in which a group of old friends convene in

Palm Springs for the week between Christmas and New Year's.

Jackson, a winner of the National Book Foundation's Five under 35 award is the author of the story collection

Prodigals and the novel The Dimensions of a Cave, which was published in October.

Now here's Greg Jackson.

Vogner in the desert.

First we did Molly lay on the thick carpet touching it, ourselves one another.

We did edibles, bathed dumbly in the sun, took naps on swayed couches.

Later we did blow off the keys to ecologically responsible cars.

We powdered glass tables and bathroom fixtures.

We ate mushrooms, ate and waited, ate and waited, then we just ate, emptied the ziplocks into our mouths

like chipbags. We smoked cigarettes and joints, sucked on lozenges, lacquered, and hash oil.

We tried one another's benzo's and antiviral, avidard, yaz, and

dexterous, looking for contraindications.

We ate well, casulets, steak-freat, squitting fresado with porcini, spices from Andra,

Pradesh, Kyoto, Antwerp. Of course we drank two pure agavas, rye whiskeys,

Saint-Germain, Old Scotch. We spent our hot December afternoons next to the custom

saltwater pool or below the parasol of palm fronds, waiting, I suppose, to feel at peace,

to baptize our minds in an enforced nullity, to return to a place

from which we could begin again.

...