The Tent Read online

  At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter's tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they'll come up, you have faith in that, and they'll look like the picture in the catalogue. In the brown earth there were already hundreds of small green shoots. You didn't know what they were - some sort of little bulb - but they were intending to grow, despite everything. What would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren't in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.

  Acknowledgements

  Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:

  "Our Cat Enters Heaven" in Brick; "Warlords" and "Voice" in The Walrus; "Take Charge," "King Log in Exile," "Salome Was a Dancer," and "Post-Colonial" in Daedalus; "Life Stories" and "Resources of the Ikarians" in Short Story; and "Chicken Little Goes Too Far" and "The Tent" in Harper's Magazine.

  In addition, "Bottle," "It's Not Easy Being Half-Divine," and an earlier version of "Nightingale" appeared in a limited-edition booklet published in aid of the Harbourfront Reading Series; these three and "Take Charge," "King Log in Exile," "Thylacine Ragout," "Post-Colonial," "Faster," and "Bottle II" were published in a limited-edition booklet called Bottle, in aid of the Hay-On-Wye Festival in Wales; "Tree Baby," "But It Could Still," and "Something Has Happened" appeared in New Beginnings, an anthology published in support of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake charities; "Bottle" appeared in a German-language literary advent calendar called Das Geschenk; and "Chicken Little Goes Too Far" was auctioned in a holograph-illustrated edition of one, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund.

  Books 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

  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

  NONFICTION

  Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

  Days of the Rebels 1815-1840

  Second Words

  Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature

  Negotiating with the Dead:

  A Writer on Writing

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

  POETRY

  Double Persephone

  The Circle Game

  The Animals in That Country

  The Journals of Susanna Moodie

  Procedures for Underground

  Power Politics

  You Are Happy

  Selected Poems

  Two-Headed Poems

  True Stories

  Interlunar

  Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986

  Morning in the Burned House

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2007

  Copyright (c) 2006 by O.W. Toad, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atwood, Margaret Eleanor, 1939-

  The tent / Margaret Atwood--1st ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR9199.3.A8T46 2006

  813'.54--dc22 2005043729

  www.anchorbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-30738694-6

  v3.0