This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker. I'm Deborah Triesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The writer's voice, we'll hear Kevin Barry, read his story, The Pub With No Beer, from the April 11th, 2022 issue of The magazine.

Barry is the author of six books of fiction, including the novel City of Bohain, for which he won the International Dublin Literary Award.

And most recently, the story collection that old country music which was published in 2020. Now here's Kevin Barry.

The Pub With No Beer.

He hadn't noticed a voice at first.

In the endless stretch of the afternoon, he entered The Pub through the side door with a soft, hushed aspect as if broaching a place of burial.

It was late March by now, the clock's about to change, and the first heat of the year was intimated when he raised the blinds a few inches to allow the sunlight through.

He did so as to show the place up. The effect of the light was to insinuate life. The modes of dust in the sunbeams were life.

He opened the windows of fraction to freshen the air and looked out. The bay was filling on a neep tide, and the stags of broad haven thrust at the clear white skies in raucous appeal.

Saftly, saftly, tarn the wheel saftly, Michael Bad said.

Until I'm blue in the face, I'm telling that by the tarn the wheel saft. But will he listen to me? In my sweet hall, he will.

Boy took down each tree from the mother's side. He sits in behind that wheel, and it's like he's wrestling a fucking gorilla.

The boy was long since raised and driving temperately. Long dead was Michael Bad, the father.

But the corner stool at the bar was still vaguely Bad's terrain. At an L to it sat six companion stools to face the optics, and the hung spirits arranged beyond the row of taps.

The Serbian taps his own father had called him. For Cerberus he would cartily explain he who had guarded the gates of hell.

At the other end of the bar was the curtain hatched to the back kitchen, then the sorrowful passageway to the jacks.

At Michael Bad's words, the air of long sufferance that was hard-practiced for effect, the lines that were rehearsed as bat walked the shore road turned the lights of the pub all those last evenings ago.

He stepped behind the bar, and placed his hands upon it lightly and looked out to the room and moved his eyes slowly left, and then slowly right across the empty stage of it.

Now, he said, he took up the cloth and dampened it in the sink and ran it along the bar-top. He brought up a quiet shine.

The intention of the polishing was to approximate soft labor. Daily the bar-top was polished to show its grain and the nicks and scratches of its great age.

The pub had been his father's for the long shift of four decades. His father, in turn, had taken it from a bachelor uncle.

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