#534 Torching the Dusties- Margaret Atwood

#534 Torching the Dusties- Margaret Atwood

This is kind of a morbid story. Inside an assisted living home, Ambrosia Manner, Wilma suffers with Charles Bonnet’s Syndrome, a condition with very lively hallucinations. Her manifestations are benign however, and all she sees are little people climbing around her things.

One day there appears outside her window a protest of people wearing baby masks and signs saying “Our Turn.”

“Our Turn is a movement, it’s international, it appears aimed at clearing away what one of the demonstrators refers to as ‘the parasitic dead wood at the top’ and another one terms ‘the dustballs under the bed.”

Old age homes across the world are being attacked and burned to the ground, alleviating the world of an aging population that is selfishly draining resources when they should acknowledge that their time has come. At Ambrosia Manner, they have surrounded the compound, removed the staff and plan on starving them out. When it seems like they plan on escalating the action to arson, Wilma and Tobias head for an adjoining structure hoping to avoid the attack. The Manner burns with them looking on.

Whether this happens for real or whether it’s a manifestation of her Syndrome, it's still pretty morbid. This is the last of this collection. I enjoyed some of it. There being a majority of stories about woman in the advanced stages of their lives, I didn’t find much to connect with personally. I’m not sure I see why the subtitle of this collection calls them “nine wicked tales.”

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#499 Stone Mattress- Margaret Atwood

#499 Stone Mattress- Margaret Atwood

Verna was wronged deeply by her first “love,” Bob. She was sexually assaulted, shamed, and sent away when she showed to be pregnant. When her child was taken from her, she decided not to return to het family but take control of her life and never let anyone control or damage her again.

“It was Bob who’d taught her that only the strong can win, that weakness should be mercilessly exploited. It was Bob who turned her into—why not say the word?—A murderer.”

She turned herself into a black widow, seducing, marrying and eventually killing her husbands—at least four—ad getting the only thing that has ever given her comfort:

“All she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money.”

“She had no regrets. She did those men a favor: Surely better a swift exit than a lingering decline.”

Now all these years later, financially secure, and essentially out of the game, she comes across her old attacker, Bob and sets out on a plan for revenge. This is a good story, violent but not graphic. Very satisfying.

Notable Passage: “When it came to love, wasn’t believing the same as the real thing? Such beliefs drain your strength and cloud your vision.”

Rating: 8-8-9-8 Total= 33

#457 I Dream of Zenia With the Bright Red Teeth - Margaret Atwood

#457 I Dream of Zenia With the Bright Red Teeth - Margaret Atwood

I read the title and immediately thought of the Stephen Foster song: I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair, but the title is where the similarities end. Charise, Roz, and Tony are three friends battling their coming middle-age. Each has had mid-life crises symptoms, some of them as innocuous as regressing to watch vampire movies.

“Why are the three of them indulging in these adolescent pursuits…They seem to have thrown away all the maturity and experience and wisdom they’ve collected like Air Miles over their middle years; just tossed them out, in favor of irresponsible buttery and salty munching and cheesy, adrenaline-soaked time wasting.”

Charise however, is having a more serious reaction to aging. She has been having vivid dreams about their deceased friend Zenia. Zenia was the wild-card of their group and one-by-one stole a boyfriend from each of them. Just as the dreams begin, Charise has re-kindled a relationship with Billy, the boyfriend taken by Zenia.

Her new dog, doesn’t like Billy at all, and like an old friend that knows some secrets, does what it can to ward off the dangerous bad decision Charise is about to make.

Notable Passage: “In dreams the time is always now.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#436 The Freeze Dried Groom- Margaret Atwood

#436 The Freeze Dried Groom- Margaret Atwood

We’ve seen a lot of short stories the past 435 days or so that involve a cold, loveless marriage. They generally aren’t my favorite stories. This one however, is better than most. Atwood adds a little noir to the mix.

Sam eats breakfast while Gwyneth tells him that their marriage is over. Without much discussion he packs and leaves. He is after all used to transience, having a career in shady dealings:

“He’s relied on them all his life, those big blue eyes of his. Round, candid eyes. Con-man’s eyes.”

“If anyone could fix him, she could…But she’s failed.”

Sam runs an antique shop, one that has at least two secrets. His partner is an expert at faking antiques, artfully distressing newer cheaper furniture to look older and more valuable. His second secret is drugs. A different silent partner drops drugs in a piece of furniture stowed in a storage unit up for auction. He bids on the unit, and “sells” the furniture to a knowing third party. He’s merely a go-between.

On one of his auctions he finds something very strange in the unit, and finds someone very interesting wanting to buy it from him.

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

This is a much different story than the first few in the collection. The narrator is going through a change, a Kafka-esque metamorphosis, turning slowly into a werewolf. They call it a disease, but they also think of it as a curse. The town is steps away from pitch-forks and torches, so the family stages her death, for their own sake, especially to protect their other daughter.

Now she lives hidden, but with anonymity comes a little more freedom to roam about at night. A funny moment is when she comes stumbles across a couple having sex in the woods, she thinks they are of her kind because they have fits and scream like she does. But when she approaches to give them a friendly kiss, all she knows how to do it bite.

Like the Kafka tale this is a worthy homage to, it’s about alienation, and being isolated and ostracized because of ones differences; being made to feel like a burden and the cause of other’s feeling of resentment.

“However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.”

Lusus Naturae is Latin meaning: freak of nature.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#388 Dark Lady- Margaret Atwood

#388 Dark Lady- Margaret Atwood

Jorrie and Tin are fraternal twins, and life partners. “The truth is…the twins never loved anyone except each other.”

That have had a somewhat dis-functional life, dealt with abuse and death. Tin is the level headed one,  Jordie, the impetuous one. Tin is always there to try and save her from herself, but he’s not always able:

“it was his calling from childhood to defend her when possible from her own impetuousness.

“Push and she pushes back. He hasn’t forgotten her childhood tantrums and the fights she used to get into, flailing her long arms ineffectually as the other children laughed and jeered her on. He’d watch, almost in tears himself: he couldn’t extricate her, confined to the boy’s side of the schoolyard as he was. So he avoids confrontation.”

Their lives connect with the previous two stories in this collection. Jorrie likes attending funerals of people she knows, to kind of dance on their graves. She attends the funeral of Gavin, the poet. She was the Dark Lady in some of his works.

Notable Passage: “Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.”

Rating: 7-7-6-6 Total= 26