Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

and his Beloved Wife Liliana. Edgar and Percival, They Shall Not Grow Old As We Who Are Left Grow Old.
    And Laura, as much as she is anywhere. Her essence.
    Meat dust.
    There was a picture of her in the local paper last week, along with a write-up about the prize—the standard picture, the one from the book jacket, the only one that ever got printed because it’s the only one I gave them. It’s a studio portrait, the upper body turned away from the photographer, then the head turned back to give a graceful curve to the neck.A little more, now look up, towards me, that’s my girl, now let’s see that smile. Her long hair is blonde, as mine was then—pale, white almost, as if the red undertones had been washed away—the iron, the copper, all the hard metals. A straight nose; a heart-shaped face; large, luminous, guileless eyes; the eyebrows arched, with a perplexed upwards turning at the inner edges. A tinge of stubbornness in the jaw, but you wouldn’t see it unless you knew. No makeup to speak of, which gives the face an oddly naked appearance: when you look at the mouth, you’re aware you’re looking at flesh.
    Pretty; beautiful even; touchingly untouched. An advertisement for soap, all natural ingredients. The face looks deaf: it has that vacant, posed imperviousness of all well-brought-up girls of the time. A tabula rasa, not waiting to write, but to be written on.
    It’s only the book that makes her memorable now.
    Laura came back in a small silver-coloured box, like a cigarette box. I knew what the town had to say about that, as much as if I’d been eavesdropping.Course it’s not really her, just the ashes. You wouldn’t have thought the Chases would be cremators, they never were before, they wouldn’t have stooped to it in their heyday, but it sounds like they might as well just have gone ahead and finished the job off, seeing as she was more or less burnt up already. Still, I guess they felt she should be with family. They’d want her at that big monument thing of theirs with the two angels. Nobody else has two, but that was when the money was burning a hole in their pockets. They liked to show off back then, make a splash; take the lead, you could say. Play the big cheese. They sure did spread it around here once.
    I always hear such things in Reenie’s voice. She was our town interpreter, mine and Laura’s. Who else did we have to fall back on?
    Around behind the monument there’s some empty space. I think of it as a reserved seat—permanently reserved, as Richard used to arrange at the Royal Alexandra Theatre. That’s my spot; that’s where I’ll go to earth.
    Poor Aimee is in Toronto, in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, alongside the Griffens—with Richard and Winifred and their gaudy polished-granite megalith. Winifred saw to that—she staked her claim to Richard and Aimee by barging in right away and ordering their coffins. She who pays the undertaker calls the tune. She’d have barred me from their funerals if she could.
    But Laura was the first of them, so Winifred hadn’t got her body-snatching routine perfected yet. I said, “She’s going home,” and that was that. I scattered the ashes over the ground, but kept the silver box. Lucky I didn’t bury it: some fan would have pinched it by now. They’ll nick anything, those people. A year ago I caught one of them with a jam jar and a trowel, scraping up dirt from the grave.
    I wonder about Sabrina—where she’ll end up. She’s the last of us. I assume she’s still on this earth: I haven’t heard anything different. It remains to be seen which side of the family she’ll choose to be buried with, or whether she’ll put herself off in a corner, away from the lot of us. I wouldn’t blame her.
    The first time she ran away, when she was thirteen, Winifred phoned in a cold rage, accusing me of aiding and abetting, although she didn’t go so far as to saykidnapping. She demanded to know if Sabrina had come to me.
    “I don’t believe