Read Online Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online

of an impression on her, except the one who looked like his mother. That one she took out with rubber gloves on and slipped into the incinerator in the garden.
Maybe it was his mother
, she thought.
If so, good riddance
.
    She read through his large collection of cook-books, and prepared the dishes on the most-thumbed pages. At dinner he was politeness itself, pulling out her chair and offering more wine and leading the conversation around to topics of the day. She saidgently that she wished he would talk more about his feelings. He said that if she had his feelings, she wouldn’t want to talk about them either. This intrigued her. She was now more in love with him and more curious than ever.
    Well
, she thought,
I’ve tried everything else; it’s the small door or nothing. Anyway, he gave me the key
. She waited until he had gone to the office or wherever it was he went, and made straight for the small door. When she opened it, what should be inside but a dead child. A small dead child, with its eyes wide open.
    It’s mine
, he said, coming up behind her.
I gave birth to it. I warned you. Weren’t you happy with me?
    It looks like you
, she said, not turning around, not knowing what else to say. She realized now that he was not sane in any known sense of the word, but she still hoped to talk her way out of it. She could feel the love seeping out of her. Her heart was dry ice.
    It is me
, he said sadly.
Don’t be afraid
.
    Where are we going?
she said, because it was getting dark, and there was suddenly no floor.
    Deeper
, he said.
7.
    Those ones. Why do women like them? They have nothing to offer, none of the usual things. They have short attention spans, falling-apart clothes, old beat-up cars, if any. The cars break down, and they try to fix them, and don’t succeed, and give up. They go on long walks from which they forget to return. They prefer weeds to flowers. They tell trivial fibs. They perform clumsy tricks with oranges and pieces of string, hoping desperately that someone will laugh. They don’t put food on the table. They don’t make money. Don’t, can’t, won’t.
    They offer nothing. They offer the great clean sweep of nothing, the unseen sky during a blizzard, the dark pause between moon and moon. They offer their poverty, an empty wooden bowl; the bowl of a beggar, whose gift is to ask. Look into it, look down deep, where potential coils like smoke, and you might hear anything. Nothing has yet been said.
    They have bodies, however. Their bodies are unlike the bodies of other men. Their bodies are verbalized.
Mouth, eye, hand, foot
, they say. Their bodies haveweight, and move over the ground, step by step, like yours. Like you they roll in the hot mud of the sunlight, like you they are amazed by morning, like you they can taste the wind, like you they sing.
Love
, they say, and at the time they always mean it, as you do also. They can say
lust
as well, and
disgust;
you wouldn’t trust them otherwise. They say the worst things you have ever dreamed. They open locked doors. All this is given to them for nothing.
    They have their angers. They have their despair, which washes over them like gray ink, blanking them out, leaving them immobile, in metal kitchen chairs, beside closed windows, looking out at the brick walls of deserted factories, for years and years. Yet nothing is with them; it keeps faith with them, and from it they bring back messages:
    Hurt
, they say, and suddenly their bodies hurt again, like real bodies.
Death
, they say, making the word sound like the backwash of a wave. Their bodies die, and waver, and turn to mist. And yet they can exist in two worlds at once: lost in the earth or eaten by flames, and here. In this room, when you re-say them, in their own words.
    But why do women like them? Not
like
, I mean to say:
adore
. (Remember that despite everything, despiteall I have told you, the rusted cars, the greasy wardrobes, the lack of breakfasts, the hopelessness, remain the