The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes though, for the women, they’re for a nun who recants. Most of that happened earlier, when they were rounding them up, but they still unearth a few these days, dredge them up from underground, where they’ve been hiding, like moles. They have that look about them too: weak-eyed, stunned by too much light. The old ones they send off to the Colonies right away, but the young fertile ones they try to convert, and when they succeed we all come here to watch them go through the ceremony, renounce their celibacy, sacrifice it to the common good. They kneel and the Commander prays and then they take the red veil, as the rest of us have done. They aren’t allowed to become Wives though; they’re considered, still, too dangerous for positions of such power. There’s an odor of witch about them, something mysterious and exotic; it remains despite the scrubbing and the welts on their feet and the time they’ve spent in Solitary. They always have those welts, they’ve always done that time, so rumor goes: they don’t let go easily. Many of them choose the Colonies instead. None of us likes to draw one for a shopping partner. They are more broken than the rest of us; it’s hard to feel comfortable with them.