This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Catherine Lacey read her story cut from the April 22nd, 2019 issue of the magazine. Lacey has published two novels,

Nobody is Ever Missing, and The Answers, as well as a story collection, certain American

States, which came out last year. Now here's Catherine Lacey.

Cut. There's no good way to say it. Peggy woke up most mornings oddly sore, sore in the general

region of her asshole. She felt an acute burn when she used the toilet and found traces of blood

in the crotch of her pajamas. Later, clots. This may be unpleasant to consider, maybe even a bad place to begin,

but if there were a nicer way to tell this story, it wouldn't be this story.

There's this cut.

I don't know where it came from, she told her husband one morning, after several weeks of pain.

This tear between my legs on the, maybe on the, I can't

remember what it's called. Peggy's inability to make a direct statement about the wound had less

to do with shame over its location than with the fact that she could see the wound only if she used a

hand mirror and crouched at just the right angle under the correct lighting.

And she could accomplish such a task only if her hamstrings, shoulders, and lower back had been well limbered before the attempt.

And even then her eyesight had never been so great.

Yet even if her eyesight had been that of a healthy teenager,

her groin region was still that of a middle-aged woman, and thus not as strictly delineated

as it had once been. And when she did locate the cut, a smile slit of blood varying from day

to day in length and depth, it seemed to change position often, creeping forward

and backward, as if the wound concealed an intent to mystify. Still, despite the unforgiving angle,

...