Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online Page A

debris of the back garden, clearing away dry stalks and fallen leaves, but that’s about as far as I go. I can’t kneel very well any more, I can’t shove my hands into the dirt.
    Yesterday I went to the doctor, to see about these dizzy spells. He told me that I have developed what used to be calleda heart, as if healthy people didn’t have one. It seems I will not after all keep on living forever, merely getting smaller and greyer and dustier, like the Sibyl in her bottle. Having long ago whisperedI want to die, I now realize that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I’ve changed my mind about it.
    I’ve wrapped myself in a shawl in order to sit outside, sheltered by the overhang of the back porch, at a scarred wooden table I had Walter bring in from the garage. It held the usual things, leftovers from previous owners: a collection of dried-out paint cans, a stack of asphalt shingles, a jar half-filled with rusty nails, a coil of picture wire. Mummified sparrows, mouse nests of mattress stuffing. Walter washed it off with Javex, but it still smells of mice.
    Laid out in front of me are a cup of tea, an apple cut into quarters, and a pad of paper with blue lines on it, like men’s pyjamas once. I’ve bought a new pen as well, a cheap one, black plastic with a rolling tip. I remember my first fountain pen, how sleek it felt, how blue the ink made my fingers. It was Bakelite, with silver trim. The year was 1929. I was thirteen. Laura borrowed this pen—without asking, as she borrowed everything—then broke it, effortlessly. I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else.
    For whom am I writing this? For myself? I think not. I have no picture of myself reading it over at a later time,later time having become problematical. For some stranger, in the future, after I’m dead? I have no such ambition, or no such hope.
    Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for, when they scrawl their names in the snow.
    I’m not as swift as I was. My fingers are stiff and clumsy, the pen wavers and rambles, it takes me a long time to form the words. And yet I persist, hunched over as if sewing by moonlight.
    When I look in the mirror I see an old woman; or not old, because nobody is allowed to beold any more.Older, then. Sometimes I see an older woman who might look like the grandmother I never knew, or like my own mother, if she’d managed to reach this age. But sometimes I see instead the young girl’s face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face, which seems—especially in the afternoons, with the light on a slant—so loose and transparent I could peel it off like a stocking.
    The doctor says I need to walk—every day, he says, for my heart. I would rather not. It isn’t the idea of the walking that bothers me, it’s the going out: I feel too much on show. Do I imagine it, the staring, the whispering? Perhaps, perhaps not. I am after all a local fixture, like a brick-strewn vacant lot where some important building used to stand.
    The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighbourhood children regard with derision and a little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthen and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained—an urn in daylight.
    Perhaps I should not have moved back here to live. But by that time I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. As Reenie used to say,Better the devil you know.
    Today I made the effort. I went out, I walked. I