Stone Mattress: Nine Tales Read online

  A collection of highly imaginative short fiction that speaks to our times with deadly accuracy. Vintage Atwood: creative, intelligent, and humorous.

  Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, with nine tales of acute insight, turbulent relationships, and psychological aberration that bring to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace. A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through an ice storm by the voice of her late husband in “Alphinland,” the first of three stories about the romantic entanglements of a group of writers and artists. In “The Freeze-Dried Groom,” a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a gruesome surprise. In “Lusus Naturae,” a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In “Torching the Dusties,” an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome attempts to cope with the little people she sees while a newly formed populist group prepares to burn down her retirement residence. And in “Stone Mattress,” a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

  Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood; and her most recent, MaddAddam. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award, and lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

  Published by Nan A. Talese 2014.

  ALSO BY MARGARET ATWOOD

  • • • • • • • • •

  FICTION

  The Edible Woman

  Surfacing

  Lady Oracle

  Dancing Girls

  Life Before Man

  Bodily Harm

  Murder in the Dark

  Bluebeard’s Egg

  The Handmaid’s Tale

  Cat’s Eye

  Wilderness Tips

  Good Bones

  The Robber Bride

  Alias Grace

  The Blind Assassin

  Good Bones and Simple Murders

  Oryx and Crake

  The Penelopiad

  The Tent

  Moral Disorder

  The Year of the Flood

  MaddAddam

  POETRY

  Double Persephone

  The Circle Game

  The Animals in That Country

  The Journals of Suanna Moodie

  Procedures for Underground

  Power Politics

  You Are Happy

  Selected Poems: 1965–1975

  TwoHeaded Poems

  True Stories

  Interlunar

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New, 1976–1986

  Morning in the Burned House

  Eating Fire: Selected Poetry, 1965–1995

  The Door

  NONFICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

  Days of the Rebels 1815–1840

  Second Words

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

  Two Solicitudes: Conversations [with VictorLévy Beaulieu]

  Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

  Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose 1983–2005

  Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

  In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination

  FOR CHILDREN

  Up in the Tree

  Anna’s Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse)

  For the Birds

  Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut

  Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes

  Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda

  Wandering Wenda

  This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 O.W. Toad, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Toronto

  Book design by Pei Loi Koay

  [Jacket credit to come]

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  [to come]

  ISBN 978-0-385-53912-8

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First American Edition

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About This Book

  By Margaret Atwood

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Alphinland

  • • • • • • • • •

  Revenant

  • • • • • • • • •

  Dark Lady

  • • • • • • • • •

  * * *

  Lusus Naturae

  • • • • • • • • •

  The Freeze-Dried Groom

  • • • • • • • • •

  I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth

  • • • • • • • • •

  The Dead Hand Loves You

  • • • • • • • • •

  Stone Mattress

  • • • • • • • • •

  Torching the Dusties

  • • • • • • • • •

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALPHINLAND

  • • • • • • • • •

  The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice. In the streetlights it looks so beautiful: like fairy silver, thinks Constance. But then, she would think that; she’s far too prone to enchantment. The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies. She ought to be considering the dangers, the hazards, the grief this ice storm is going to bring to many; is already bringing, according to the television news.

  The TV screen is a flat high-definition one that Ewan bought so he could watch hockey and football games on it. Constance would rather have the old fuzzy one back, with its strangely orange people and its habit of rippling and fading: there are some things that do not fare well in high definition. She resents the pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can’t ignore them the way you would in real life. It’s like being forced to act as someone else’s bathroom mirror, the magnifying kind: seldom a happy experience, those mirrors.

  Luckily, on the weather show the personnel stand well back. They have their maps to attend to, their broad hand gestures, like those of waiters in glamorous films of the ’30s or magicians about to reveal the floating lady. Behold! Gigantic swaths of whiteness plume across the continent! Just look at the extent of it!

  Now the show moves outside. Two young commentators – a boy, a girl, both of them wearing stylish black parkas with ha
los of pale fur around their faces – hunch under dripping umbrellas as cars grind slowly past them, windshield wipers labouring. They’re excited; they say they’ve never seen anything like it. Of course they haven’t, they’re too young. Next there are shots of calamities: a multiple carcrash pileup, a fallen tree that’s bashed off part of a house, a snarl of electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleetcovered planes stranded in an airport, a huge truck that’s jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone’s been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It’s no joke, he tells the viewers. Don’t think you can brave the elements! His frowning, frosted eyebrows are noble, like those on the wartime bonddrive posters from the 1940s. Constance remembers those, or believes she does. But she may just be remembering history books or museum displays or documentary films: so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately.

  Finally, a minor touch of pathos: a stray dog is displayed, semi-frozen, wrapped in a child’s pink nap blanket. A gelid baby would have been better, but for lack of one the dog will do. The two young commentators make Aw cute faces; the girl pats the dog, which wags its sodden tail feebly. “Lucky guy,” says the boy. This could be you, it’s implied, if you don’t behave yourself, only you wouldn’t get rescued. The boy turns to the camera and solemnifies his face, even though it’s clear he’s having the time of his life. There’s more to come, he says, because the main part of the storm hasn’t even hit! It’s worse in Chicago, as it so often is. Stay tuned!

  Constance turns off the TV. She crosses the room, dims the lamp, then sits beside the front window, staring out into the streetlight-illuminated darkness, watching the world turn to diamonds – branches, rooftops, hydro lines, all glittering and sparkling.

  “Alphinland,” she says out loud.

  “You’ll need salt,” says Ewan, right in her ear. The first time he spoke to her it startled and even alarmed her – Ewan having been no longer in a tangibly living condition for at least four days – but now she’s more relaxed about him, unpredictable though he is. It’s wonderful to hear his voice, even if she can’t depend on having any sort of a conversation with him. His interventions tend to be onesided: if she answers him, he doesn’t often answer back. But it was always more or less like that between them.

  She hadn’t known what to do with his clothes, afterwards. At first she left them hanging in the closet, but it was too upsetting to open the door and see the jackets and suits ranged on their hangers, waiting mutely for Ewan’s body to be slipped inside them so they could be taken for a walk. The tweeds, the woollen sweaters, the plaid work shirts … She couldn’t give them away to the poor, which would have been the sensible thing. She couldn’t throw them out: that would have been not only wasteful but too abrupt, like ripping off a bandage. So she’d folded them up and stored them away in a trunk on the third floor, with mothballs.

  That’s fine in the daytimes. Ewan doesn’t seem to mind, and his voice, when it turns up, is firm and cheerful. A striding voice, showing the way. An extended index finger voice, pointing. Go here, buy this, do that! A slightly mocking voice, teasing, making light: that was often his manner towards her before he became ill.

  At night, however, things get more complex. There have been bad dreams: sobbing from inside the trunk, mournful complaints, pleas to be let out. Strange men appearing at the front door who hold out promises of being Ewan, but who are not. Instead they’re menacing, with black trench coats. They demand some garbled thing that Constance can’t make out, or, worse, they insist on seeing Ewan, shouldering their way past her, their intentions clearly murderous. “Ewan’s not home,” she’ll plead, despite the muted cries for help coming from the trunk on the third floor. As they begin to tromple up the stairs, she wakes up.

  She’s considered sleeping pills, though she knows they’re addictive and lead to insomnia. Maybe she ought to sell the house and move to a condo. That notion was being pushed at the time of the funeral by the boys, who are not boys any more and who live in cities in New Zealand and France, too conveniently far for them to visit her much. They’d been backed up in spades by their brisk but tactful and professionally accomplished wives, the plastic surgeon and the chartered accountant, so it was four against one. But Constance stood firm. She can’t abandon the house, because Ewan is in it. Though she’d been smart enough not to tell them about that. They’ve always thought she was slightly borderline anyway because of Alphinland, though once such an enterprise makes a lot of money the whiff of nuttiness around it tends to evaporate.

  Condo is a euphemism for retirement home. Constance doesn’t hold it against them: they want what is best for her, not merely what is simplest for them, and they were understandably perturbed by the disorder they’d witnessed, both in Constance – though they’d made allowances because she was in the throes of mourning – and in, just for example, her refrigerator. There were items in that refrigerator for which there was no sane explanation. What a swamp, she could hear them thinking. Awash in botulism, a wonder she hasn’t made herself seriously ill. But of course she hadn’t, because she wasn’t eating much in those final days. Soda crackers, cheese slices, peanut butter straight from the jar.

  The wives had dealt with the situation in the kindest way. “Do you want this? What about this?” “No, no,” Constance had wailed. “I don’t want any of it! Throw it all out!” The three little grandchildren, two girls and a boy, had been sent on a sort of Easter egg hunt, searching for the half-drunk cups of tea and cocoa that Constance had left here and there around the house and that were now covered with grey or palegreen skins in various stages of growth. “Look, Maman! I found another one!” “Ew, that’s gross!” “Where is Grandpa?”

  A retirement home would provide company for her, at least. And it would take away the burden from her, the responsibility, because a house like hers needs upkeep, it needs attention, and why should she be saddled with all those chores any more? That was the idea set forth in some detail by the daughters-in-law. Constance could take up bridge-playing, or Scrabble, they suggested. Or backgammon, said to be popular again. Nothing too stressful or exciting to the brain. Some mild communal game.

  “Not yet,” says Ewan’s voice. “You don’t need to do that yet.”

  Constance knows this voice isn’t real. She knows Ewan is dead. Of course she knows that! Other people – other recently bereaved people – have had the same experience, or close. Aural hallucination, it’s called. She’s read about it. It’s normal. She isn’t crazy.

  “You’re not crazy,” Ewan says comfortingly. He can be so tender when he thinks she’s having some anguish.

  He’s right about the salt. She ought to have stocked up on some form of ice melt earlier in the week but she forgot, and now if she doesn’t get some, she’ll be a prisoner inside her own house because the street will be a skating rink by tomorrow. What if the layer of ice doesn’t melt for days and days? She could run out of food. She could become one of those statistics – old recluse, hypothermia, starvation – because, as Ewan has pointed out before now, she can’t live on air.

  She’ll have to venture out. Even one bag of salt mix will be enough to do the steps and the walk and keep other people from killing themselves, much less herself. The corner store is her best bet: it’s only two blocks away. She’ll have to take her two wheeled shopping bag, which is red and also waterproof, because the salt will be heavy. It was only Ewan who drove their car; her own licence lapsed decades ago because once she got so deeply involved in Alphinland she felt she was too distracted to drive. Alphinland requires a lot of thought. It excludes peripheral details, such as stop signs.

  It must be quite slippery out there already. If she tries this escapade, she might break her neck. She stands in the kitchen, dith
ering. “Ewan, what should I do?” she says.

  “Pull yourself together,” Ewan says firmly. Which isn’t very instructive, but which was his habitual way of responding to a question when he didn’t want to be pinned down. Where’ve you been, I was so worried, did you have an accident? Pull yourself together. Do you really love me? Pull yourself together. Are you having an affair?

  After some rummaging, she finds a large zip-lock freezer bag in the kitchen, dumps out the three shrivelled, whiskery carrots inside it, and fills it with ashes from the fireplace, using the little brass fireplace shovel. She hasn’t lit a fire since Ewan ceased to be present in visible form, because it didn’t seem right. Lighting a fire is an act of renewal, of beginning, and she doesn’t want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

  There’s still a stack of wood and some kindling; there are still a couple of partially burnt logs in the grate from the last fire they had together. Ewan was lying on the sofa with a glass of that disgusting chocolate nutrient drink beside him; he was bald, due to the chemo and the radiation. She tucked the plaid car rug around him and sat beside him, holding his hand, with the tears running silently down her cheeks and her head turned away so he couldn’t see. He didn’t need to be distressed by her distress.

  “This is nice,” he’d managed to say. It was hard for him to talk: his voice was so thin, like the rest of him. But that isn’t the voice he has now. The voice he has now is back to normal: it’s his voice of twenty years ago, deep and resonant, especially when he laughs.

  She puts on her coat and boots, finds her mittens and one of her woolly hats. Money, she’ll need some of that. House keys: it would be stupid to lock herself out and be turned into a frozen lump right on her own doorstep. When she’s at the front door with the wheeled shopping bag, Ewan says to her, “Take the flashlight,” so she trudges upstairs to the bedroom in her boots. The flashlight is on the nightstand on his side of the bed; she adds it to her purse. Ewan is so good at planning ahead. She herself never would have thought of a flashlight.