This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Debra Triesman fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice we'll hear Joshua Ferris read his story The Boy Up Stairs from the June 6, 2022 issue of the magazine.

Joshua Ferris is the author of one story collection and four novels, including To Rise Again at a decent hour, which won the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2014, and a calling for Charlie Barnes which was published last year.

Now here's Joshua Ferris.

The Boy Up Stairs.

She was tempted to be done. She was tempted, but she would never do it.

She had principles and she had pleasures too, sources of dumb joy. She had her husband and her dog. She had her books.

True books were also a source of anguish as was her husband, but on the whole there was more upside than downside to books and husbands.

She taught two classes as a semester and in her spare time made sense of her thoughts and papers submitted to journals of philosophy.

She dispaired over her low acceptance rate. The adjuncting gig was necessary, but paid next to nothing. With her husband, she owned a small, clappered house with green shutters and a decaying front porch where a sat a pair of teal, adorondack chairs made of plastic. They had no children.

She was tempted, but never would. To her, the temptation was not a sign of despair, but a sane acknowledgement of the world we live in, and sane acknowledgement was its own source of comfort.

She would carry on. She would put gas in the car. She would park and feed the meter. When she couldn't find any coins under the floor mats to feed the meter, she would go from shop to shop with her dollar bill, asking the clerks to make change.

Life was made up of these little hassles and of big tragedies too, incalculable cruelties, things that no right-thinking person should abide.

She was not a stoic and far from a saint. She was willful and morally pliable. Her thoughts and actions half unknown to her even now at 40.

That was no excuse for bad behavior, but it was an explanation and she was more interested in clarity than in forgiveness.

Under the right circumstances, she was capable of anything, as are we all.

She had no respect for the small-minded comfort thinkers who believed in the essential and immutable self, the one that would never war or pillage or eat another human being because it had been born a Christian and buffalo.

Let's not be naive, she liked to say. That was her favorite phrase. Let's not be naive.

She had eight credit cards. She could remember applying for maybe two of them. They all had different interest rates and payment due dates and fee schedules, and one day it occurred to her that she could quit her adjuncting job and dedicate herself entirely to managing the payment of her monthly debt.

And managing her debt was child's play, compared with keeping her house clean. The minute she folded the laundry, which was like one of the 12 labors of Hercules, another slag heap of dirty clothes appeared in the bathroom hamper.

Over night it appeared, and here she would think of a second mythical figure, Sisyphus, and of Camo, her hero. She could never find a fucking stamp when she needed one.

Her weight, her hormones, her minor addictions to sex and alcohol in marijuana. Her brain's requirement that her body assume the pose for 20 minutes and go as quiet as possible.

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