Cutting in All Directions

I'm thinking about Cut by Catherine Lacey again (If you haven’t read it, just go read it, really, and if you stop halfway, text me and I’ll come talk about exactly how you could stop reading, and where, because I have 63 short stories to read, but I couldn’t stop reading hers, if you can’t use the New Yorker’s website walk down to the library, it’s in the periodicals on the right before you get to the Solarium, don’t waste another second here, go find it) I thought about the drapes of her labia, and the “general region of her asshole.” I thought about her dream and I thought about how her city-half moves. I thought about her friend, and her student, and the sanitizing effect of chlorine.

It occurred to me that I was moving through Cut the way Alice Munro describes:

I can start by reading them anywhere; from beginning to end, from end to beginning, from any point in between in either direction...It’s more like a house….I want to make a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from being inside that structure… I’ve got to build up, a house, a story, to fit around the indescribable “feeling” that is like the soul of the story.

Well, maybe I’m just too legalistic? Always starting at the beginning, but my memory of stories can work this way. I do get a certain feeling from Cut, and I can explore it in any direction, every sentence is so rich and connected. This is why I’m curious if you, or anyone, stopped reading, because where? Let’s pick that sentence and move in any direction, it’s interesting, no matter how you explore that house every step is interesting.