This thing is anything, or it is nothing, and you see it be nothing.' Because her narrators are generally so vague and share many of the same thinking patterns, it can be difficult to remember which stories are which. You push something back so the other thing can come forward. In 'The Beating of My Heart,' she writes, 'This is the place where your life unfolds. This might be obsession, but if it is, it is a new kind of obsession, a new way for me of being obsessed with something.Ĭain's narrators are usually this vague, talking about things as things and avoiding specifics. I sat and thought about a thing in so many different ways that I was able to turn it in various directions and look at it. To revisit Cain's fixation on thought itself, here is an excerpt from 'Attached to a Self': Because they are so focused on the ways her characters think and because thinking does not end, there is no logical conclusion for most of these pieces. Cain's narrative structure owes little to Freytag, especially in the last lines of her stories, which don't often have a sense of finality.

Most of the stories could, in fact, be that minimalist in plot if not in tone. 'Myself, alone in my bed, is a story,' she later notes. 'So much happens when I am inside my mind, but I still haven't left the floral shop,' the same narrator says, summing up much about Creature's plotlines. 'I am trying to show the mind,' Cain writes in 'Words Come to Me.' And so she does. In 'I Will Force This' and the thirteen other prose pieces that comprise Cain's second book, the stories largely exist within the mind of the narrator, yet still manage to reveal very little about that speaker. The caveat, however, holds true for readers seeking insight into all of Cain's narrators in Creature. If you read all of this text, you'll still only know a little about her,' Amina Cain's nameless narrator in 'I Will Force This' thinks as she mounts a text on a gallery wall. 'If you read part of this text, you'll only know a little about her.

Creature by Amina Cain