There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians. I didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. Melanie and Neil being murdered made me angry, and so did remembering nice things they’d done when they were alive. But things that should have made me angry, such as why Gilead was being allowed to get away with it, only made me sad.
My mother said Aunt Pauline meant kindly but had standards, which were all very well for those that could afford them.
All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognized this, or to have capitalized on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it.
Illness had an element of shame to it; no one wanted to be contaminated by the illness of another. So the father of Oryx was pitied, but also blamed and shunned. His wife tended him with silent resentment.
All this will happen because people have neglected the basic lessons of Science, they have gone in for politics and religion and wars instead, and sought out passionate excuses for killing one another. Science on the other hand is dispassionate and without bias, it is the only universal language. The language is numbers. When at last we are up to our ears in death and garbage, we will look to Science to clean up our mess.
Who can fathom the secrets of the human soul?” I said. “None of us is exempt from sin”.
What touches you is what you touch.
I don’t need that fluff on my coffee. Looks like shaving cream. One swallow and you’re foaming at the mouth.
A momentary psychotic break,” I’d said. “The strain of being in a strange and debilitating environment, such as Canada, can have that effect.
The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend – a madman, say – Lies, perhaps, Merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint.
But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity.
Part of the life she should have had is just a gap, it isn’t there, it’s nothing.
I’m training to be an Aunt,” I said. “I’m not really supposed to like anyone.
No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die. Because you are not a fish.
What is it that I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don’t prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
Never trust a man with new clothes.
There’s a lot of people dying,” I said. “The Quakers, and Neil and Melanie, and that Pearl Girl.” “Gilead’s not shy about killing,” said Ada. “They’re fanatics.” She said they were supposed to be dedicated to virtuous godly living, but you could believe you were living virtuously and also murder people if you were a fanatic. Fanatics thought that murdering people was virtuous, or murdering certain people. I knew that because we’d done fanatics in school.
This was the story of the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces.
Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement.
Calling a piece of short fiction a “tale” removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales.