Old Babes in the Wood

by Margaret Atwood

The exact same thing has almost happened to her. The choking, the going to the washroom, the not wanting to make a fuss. Embarrassment can be lethal, she sees now.

We resist the notion that we’ll become mere handfuls of dust, so we wish to become words instead.

garotte

He was upset by the heart operation—why François, who was younger than John? If anyone ought to have a rotten heart it should be him! He appeared to expect us to do something, or to be in some way responsible. His tone was reproachful: How had Tig and I allowed this to happen? Perhaps his grip on reality was already slipping. Had it ever been altogether firm? According to him it had. Reality was shite! Stuff reality, he could see it plainly, and the rest of us, living our banal, tawdry little lives and enjoying ourselves with our snouts in the trough, were wearing rose-coloured blinkers. Stuff enjoying yourself! He had more serious concerns, he was writing a novel. Why weren’t we doing anything about François?

“Aw, sweetie, it will be all right,” Nell would say falsely as Smudgie growled and drooled, glaring at her through the bars.

How helpless the dead are, Nell thinks. What humiliations occur to them. Not that they care.

Maybe that was why she was rewriting Tennyson, though as she moved slowly through the text, transmuting a word here, a phrase there, she became more unsure of the therapeutic value of what she was doing. Was this an act of commemoration or simply a mutilation? Not that there was always a difference.

burdocks

aspic,

fracas.

George Orwell: Not at all. The kindness is yours. I so seldom have the opportunity to talk with someone still in their meat envelope.

apparatchik

once a single choice is made it excludes the alternatives.

carbuncle

theremin

leitmotif.

palimpsest?

gypsobelum,”

Leonie, with a 20 per cent probability of being alive in three months, plus her partner of forty-six years is in a care facility and thinks he’s a bomber pilot, and we’re discussing hair?

harridans

fogies,

privation.

soffit;

Kodachrome

You can recognize whole songs, whole symphonies, from just a few notes, if you know the music well.

lieder

Blancmange,

A picture in a magazine: two teenage girls, long hair parted to the side and held in place with barrettes in the shape of bows, oven-mitted, dark-lipsticked, with dimpled smiles, holding out their pans of brownies toward two appreciative teenage boys in shirts and jackets and ties, hair slicked down with water, also smiling. Very polite, the four of them. The kids who’d posed for the shot must be dead by now.

Nell’s injury is good for a few distracting conversations. They both examine the victimized toe with interest: how blue, how purple, will it become? Such observations of the wounded body are cheering: you don’t get bruises or pain unless you’re still alive.