My Evil Mother

by Margaret Atwood

Our kitchen was large and sunlit, with a canary-yellow linoleum floor, a breakfast nook, and a white dresser with rows of blue plates and bowls.

If you pointed at a cow and it got sick, everyone knew you were neck-deep in the Black Arts.

I’d never smelled a singed cat, but she had.

When I was four or five, my mother told me she’d changed him into the garden gnome that sat beside our front steps; he was happier that way, she said.

cadaverous

The image of my mother in her baggy T-shirts and lumpy sandals wrestling in midair with Miss Scace, still possibly with her umpire’s whistle around her neck, was too much for me.

“You were such a sensitive child. So easily wounded. So I told you those things. I didn’t want you to feel defenseless in the face of life. Life can be harsh. I wanted you to feel protected, and to know that there was a greater power watching over you. That the Universe was taking a personal interest.”