The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9780770428211
Publisher: Seal Books
Published: 1999-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

After breakfast Karen's grandmother says to her, "Are you sick?"

"No," says Karen. Her legs are still hurting but that isn't a sickness, it's nothing because her mother says it's nothing. She doesn't want to be put to bed, she wants, to go outside. She wants

to see the chickens.

Her grandmother looks at her sharply but only says, "Don't you want to put on your shorts? Today'll be a scorcher," but Karen says no again and they go to collect the eggs. The

dogs and the pig aren't allowed to come with them, because the dogs would try to herd the hens, and the pig likes eggs. The three of them lie on the kitchen floor, the dogs' tails thumping

slowly, the pig looking thoughtful. Karen's grandmother takes a sixquart basket with a dishtowel in it, to put the eggs in.

The sky is bright, bright blue like a fist pushed into an eye, that puddle of hot colour; the thin piercing voices of the cicadas go straight into Karen's head like wires. The edges of her

grandmother's hair catch the sunlight and burn like fiery wool. They walk along the path, tall weeds beside them, this

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tles and Queen Anne's lace, smelling deeper and greener than anything Karen has ever smelled

before, mixing in with the sweet pungent barnyard smells so that she doesn't know whether it

smells good or bad or just so powerful and rich it's like being smothered. The henhouse is near the chicken-wire and rail fence that's around the garden; inside the fence are potato hills, and lettuce in a frilly row, and tripods of poles with climbing beans on them, their red flowers humming with bees. "Potatoes, lettuce, beans," Karen's grandmother

says, to Karen, or possibly to herself: "Hens," she says, when they get as far as the henhouse.

The hens are two kinds: white with red wattles, and reddish brown. They scratch and cluck, and peer at Karen with their yellow lizards' eyes, one eye and then the other; sparkles of manycoloured light run off their feathers, like dew. Karen looks and looks at them, until her grandmother takes her arm. "No eggs out here," she says. The henhouse is musty inside, and dim. Karen's grandmother gropes in the straw-filled boxes, and under the two hens still inside, and puts the eggs into her basket. She gives Karen

one egg to carry, for herself. A tender glow comes from inside it. It is a little damp; there are bits of henshit and straw clinging to it. Also it's warm. Karen feels the backs of her legs throbbing and the heat running from the egg up into her head. The egg is soft in her hands, like a beating heart with a rubber shell around it. It's growing, swelling up, and as they walk back past the garden through the sun's glare and the vibration of the bees it gets so large and

hot that Karen has to drop it.

After that she was in bed, lying on her stomach. Her grandmother was washing off her legs.

"I

wasn't the right mother for her," said the grandmother.

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