Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online

the skull, searching for the other half, the twin who could complete him.
    Then it comes to him: he’s lost the Female Body! Look, it shines in the gloom, far ahead, a vision of wholeness, ripeness, like a giant melon, like an apple, like a metaphor for
breast
in a bad sex novel; it shines like a balloon, like a foggy noon, a watery moon, shimmering in its egg of light.
    Catch it. Put it in a pumpkin, in a high tower, in a compound, in a chamber, in a house, in a room. Quick, stick a leash on it, a lock, a chain, some pain, settle it down, so it can never get away from you again.

COLD-
BLOODED
    To my sisters, the Iridescent Ones, the Egg-Bearers, the Many-Faceted, greetings from the Planet of Moths.
    At last we have succeeded in establishing contact with the creatures here who, in their ability to communicate, to live in colonies, and to construct technologies, most resemble us, although in these particulars they have not advanced above a rudimentary level.
    During our first observation of these “blood creatures,” as we have termed them—after the colorful red liquid that is to be found inside their bodies, and that appears to be of great significance to themin their poems, wars, and religious rituals—we supposed them incapable of speech, as those specimens we were able to examine entirely lacked the organs for it. They had no wing casings with which to stribulate—indeed they had no wings; they had no mandibles to click; and the chemical method was unknown to them, since they were devoid of antennae. “Smell,” for them, is a perfunctory affair, confined to a flattened and numbed appendage on the front of the head. But after a time, we discovered that the incoherent squeakings and gruntings that emerged from them, especially when pinched, were in fact a form of language, and after that we made rapid progress.
    We soon ascertained that their planet, named by us the Planet of Moths after its most prolific and noteworthy genus, is called by these creatures
Earth
. They have some notion that their ancestors were created from this substance; or so it is claimed in many of their charming but irrational folktales.
    In an attempt to establish common ground, we asked them at what season they mated with and then devoured their males. Imagine our embarrassment when we discovered that those individuals with whom we were conversing
were
males! (It is very hard to tell the difference, as their males are not diminutive, as ours are, but if anything bigger. Also, lacking natural beauty—brilliantly patterned carapaces, diaphanous wings, luminescent eyes, and the like—theyattempt to imitate our kind by placing upon their bodies various multicolored draperies, which conceal their generative parts.)
    We apologized for our faux pas, and inquired as to their own sexual practices. Picture our nausea and disgust when we discovered that it is the male, not the egg-bearer, which is the most prized among them! Abnormal as this will seem to you, my sisters, their leaders are for the most part male; which may account for their state of relative barbarism. Another peculiarity which must be noted is that, although they frequently kill them in many other ways, they rarely devour their females after procreation. This is a waste of protein; but then, they are a wasteful people.
    We hastily abandoned this painful subject.
    Next we asked them when they pupated. Here again, as in the case of “clothing”—the draperies we have mentioned—we uncovered a fumbling attempt at imitation of our kind. At some indeterminate point in their life cycles, they cause themselves to be placed in artificial stone or wooden cocoons, or chrysalises. They have an idea that they will someday emerge from these in an altered state, which they symbolize with carvings of themselves with wings. However, we did not observe that any had actually done so.
    It is as well to mention at this juncture that inaddition to the many species of moths for which it is justly