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

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction Editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice,

we'll hear Susan Choi read her story flashlight

from the September 7th 2020 issue of the magazine.

Choi is the author of five novels including My Education and Trust Exercise,

which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019.

Now here's Susan Choi. flashlight. One thing I will always be grateful to your mother for, she taught you to swim.

Why?

Not asked as a question, but groaned as a protest.

Louisa does not want her father to talk about her mother.

She is sick of her mother.

Her mother can do nothing right.

This is the theme of their new life in Louisa's opinion,

that Louisa and her father are two fish who should leave her beached mother behind.

They're making their way down the breakwater,

each careful step on the heaved granite blocks, one step farther from the shore. Her mother's not even on the shore, seated smiling on the

sand. Her mother is shut inside the small almost waterfront house there renting,

most likely in bed. All summer Louisa has played in the

waves by herself because her mother isn't well and her father is invariably

dressed in a jacket and slacks.

Every day since they got here four weeks ago, she's asked her father to walk the breakwater

...