The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

think about it, the grunt says, in her own sweet time. She undoes the string on the chicken, and the glazed paper. She prods the chicken, flexes a wing, pokes a finger into the cavity, fishes out the giblets. The chicken lies there, headless and without feet, goose-pimpled as though shivering.
    â€œBath day,” Rita says, without looking at me.
    Cora comes into the kitchen, from the pantry at the back, where they keep the mops and brooms. “A chicken,” she says, almost with delight.
    â€œScrawny,” says Rita, “but it’ll have to do.”
    â€œThere wasn’t much else,” I say. Rita ignores me.
    â€œLooks big enough to me,” says Cora. Is she standing up for me? I look at her, to see if I should smile; but no, it’s only the food she’s thinking of. She’s younger than Rita; the sunlight, coming slant now through the west window, catches her hair, parted and drawn back. She must have been pretty, quite recently. There’s a little mark, like a dimple, in each of her ears, where the punctures for earrings have grown over.
    â€œTall,” says Rita, “but bony. You should speak up,” she says to me, looking directly at me for the first time. “Ain’t like you’re common.” She means the Commander’s rank. But in the other sense, her sense, she thinks I am common. She is over sixty, her mind’s made up.
    She goes to the sink, runs her hands briefly under the tap, dries them on the dishtowel. The dishtowel is white with blue stripes. Dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick. I see the dishtowel, out of context, and I catch my breath. For some, in some ways, things haven’t changed that much.
    â€œWho’s doing the bath?” says Rita, to Cora, not to me. “I got to tenderize this bird.”
    â€œI’ll do it later,” says Cora, “after the dusting.”
    â€œJust so it gets done,” says Rita.
    They’re talking about me as though I can’t hear. To them I’m a household chore, one among many.
    I’ve been dismissed. I pick up the basket, go through the kitchen door and along the hall towards the grandfather clock. The sitting-room door is closed. Sun comes through the fanlight, falling in colours across the floor: red and blue, purple. I step into it briefly, stretch out my hands; they fill with flowers of light. I go up the stairs, my face, distant and white and distorted, framed in the hall mirror, which bulges outward like an eye under pressure. I follow the dusty-pink runner down the long upstairs hallway, back to the room.
    There’s someone standing in the hall, near the door to the room where I stay. The hall is dusky, this is a man, his back to me; he’s looking into the room, dark against its light. I can see now, it’s the Commander, he isn’t supposed to be here. He hears me coming, turns, hesitates, walks forward. Towards me. He is violating custom, what do I do now?
    I stop, he pauses, I can’t see his face, he’s looking at me, what does he want? But then he moves forward again, steps to the side to avoid touching me, inclines his head, is gone.
    Something has been shown to me, but what is it? Like the flag of an unknown country, seen for an instant above a curve of hill, it could mean attack, it could mean parley, it could mean the edge of something, a territory. The signals animals give one another: lowered blue eyelids, ears laid back, raised hackles. A flash of bared teeth, what in hell does he think he’s doing? Nobody else has seen him. I hope. Was he invading? Was he in my room?
    I called it
mine
.

CHAPTER NINE
    M y room, then. There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.
    I’m waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go to bed it’s a bedroom. The