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Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.
The flame of my life is subsiding, more slowly than some of those around me might like, but faster than they may realize.
Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn’t that freedom of a sort?
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.
“You were a damn fine judge,” she whispered to me on the third day. “Thank you. So were you,” I whispered back. Were was chilling.
All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.
One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.
I will get you back for this. I don’t care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it.
People might be looking for a Daisy, and I certainly couldn’t be Nicole. So I said I’d be Jade. I wanted something harder than a flower.
My larger fear: that all my efforts will prove futile, and Gilead will last for a thousand years.
We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.
“But sins must not be overlooked simply because the sinner is skilled.”
“I can say them to you, Agnes,” she said. “I’d trust you with my life.” “Don’t,” I said. “I’m not a good person, not like you.”
“I’m training to be an Aunt,” I said. “I’m not really supposed to like anyone.”
Becka said that spelling was not reading: reading, she said, was when you could hear the words as if they were a song.
In one case, Commander Judd had refused permission to operate when an Unbaby with two heads had lodged in the birth canal. Nothing could be done, he’d said piously, because there had still been a fetal heartbeat.
It was gruesome; it was terrifying. It added a whole new dimension to my picture of Handmaids. Maybe my mother had been like that, I thought: feral.
“You will go later,” said Aunt Lydia. I suspected it was a lie, even then.
“Under the circumstances, a dead Baby Nicole is much more useful to us than a living one,”
Fly well, my messengers, my silver doves, my destroying angels. Land safely.
