Margaret Atwood

Stories

Old Babes in the Wood

Laura Dobie

Then she wiped the blood off the kitchen floor and, after a pause, Off the carrot. It was a perfectly good carrot; no need for it to go to waste.

How much waiting we used to do, she thinks. Waiting without knowing. So many blanks we couldn't fill in, so many mysteries. So little information. Now it's the first decade of the twenty-first century, space-time is denser, it's crowded, you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that. You can't get away from people: they're in touch, they're touching, they're only a touch away. Is that better, or worse?

It hadn't really been about Smudgie. It had been about Tig. She must already have known on some level that he was bound to set sail first, leaving her stranded in the harsh frost, in the waste land, in the cold moonlight.

My father was a pleasant-looking older man, fairly tall, neither obese nor cadaverous--nothing out of the ordinary, which was a disappointment; when you've spent your infancy believing your father has been magically transformed, there are expectations.

"Appearances can be deceptive. She only looks dead."

Csilla's own teeth are childishly small, geometrically even, blamelessly white, and all accounted for, though she must be pushing seventy. She never tells her age, whereas Lynne flourishes hers. Clock up enough years, she's in the habit of saying, and you can dance on a table provided you can still clamber up there. You can have sex with the mailman and nobody will care. You can flush away your push-up bras--not literally, you wouldn't want plumbers involved, asking how the bra got into the toilet-but you get the idea. You don't have to hold in your stomach anymore. You make six kinds of a fool of yourself because you're a fool just for being old. You're off the hook for almost everything.

She'd been an award-winning poet in her extreme youth, by which she means twenty-seven. Poet by its nature is minor, and award- winning is now a common adjective: it might be applied to a beer or a cow. Many of the major celebrities of the 1960s are dead, and Lynne can barely remember who they were, let alone the minor ones. After a while evervthing that was once major is minor.

She checked herself over, starting with the shoes. Bride of Frankenstein shoes, she called them-orthopaedic to the point of despair-but she was well past breaking her neck for vanity. No laces undone; too bad about the puffy ankles, but what could you expect at eighty?

Sharmayne favoured antiques; they gave her nostalgia, an emotion she'd brusquely repressed in midlife but now felt free to indulge.

This cover had been a disaster, according to Leonie. Naturally she'd been attacked by a few academic pedants over the ahistorical lettering, but some ordinary bookstore customers had mistaken Thermidor! for a seafood cookbook with an emphasis on lobsters--the favourite crustacean of Toulouse-Lautrec--and were upset to be confronted with a drawing of Olympe de Gouges being guillotined for demanding liberty, equality, and fraternity for women, a full-colour painting of Robespierre as he was shot in the face, and an etching of vengeful counter-revolutionaries massacring Jacobin prisoners with sabres, cudgels, and pistols. What sort of bloodthirsty monster was she, to be interested in such depraved material?

Leonie snorts a laugh, which Chrissy ignores. “It was Darlene who set this whole thing up for us," she says. “She put so much work into it! We can't let her down, we need to follow through. Maybe now we can hire an executive director."

"Good," says Myrna. “It's time we got someone who knows what she's doing. People with money should die more often."

It couldn't last, of course. Not for Tig's mother. It was like being married to a psychopathic murderer whơ's using you for window dressing while keeping a dozen severed heads in the freezer.

Should they endow him with a cat? Probably not, he would trip over it.

She makes it to the bottom of the hill without mishap, an achievement. But, once she's on the dock, she can't follow through. She's not feeling any amazement or joy, only grief and more grief. The old griddle hanging on the wall above the stove is one thing easy enough for the gaze to avoid it-but the stars? Will she never be able to look at the stars again? 

No stars, not for you, not ever, she mourns. And in the next breath: Don't be so fucking maudlin.

The photos of Tig that Nell is throwing out are sad ones. In them he looks lost, or empty Tig on the wane. She doesn't want to remember him looking like that, or being like that. She keeps only the smiling ones: when he was pretending that nothing was wrong, that he was still his usual self. He did pull that off a lot of the time. What an effort it must have cost him. Still, they managed to squeeze in some happiness, from hour to hour.

Eva Ströberg

What can I say? I’m an Atwood fan 🤷🏻‍♀️ I’m possibly biased when I say she’s a great storyteller. This book is somewhat a collection of stories, divided in 3 parts, the first and last about a married couple called Tig and Nell, and by the time you got to the end of part 3, you felt like you know them forever. The second part, called my Evil Mother is more like a concoction of different stories about women, relationship, monologues that are intriguing. I can’t sadly say more without giving spoiler. Anyway, I enjoy this book thoroughly.

Rochelle Butcher

Old Babes in the Woods

This is Margaret Atwood’s first book of short stories in a decade, and it doesn’t disappoint. Old Babes in the Woods has a short story for everyone. 

Some stories are pretty personal. The ones about Nell and Tig mirror the author’s own life and experiences with her late husband, Graham Gibson.

Some stories are pretty clever. My Evil Mother is my favourite story in the collection. It’s about a mother-and-daughter relationship where the mother thinks she is a witch. I also loved The Dead Interview, where Margaret Atwood, as a character, interviews a dead George Orwell, who she channels through a medium. This one was laugh-out-loud funny. 

Some stories are pretty strange. Take Impatient Griselda, for example, a tale told to us by an alien who looks like an octopus. Based on the story of Griselda in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Metempsychosis: or, The Journey of the Soul, is another strange story. The story's narrator is a snail whose soul jumped to a human after being sprayed with a homemade, environmentally friendly pesticide. It was pretty entertaining.

The stories in this collection explore love, grief and survival. Some stories have deep imagination, and some stories explore what makes us human. Overall an enjoyable compilation of stories. 

Did you hear that Ms. Atwood is writing a memoir right now? After getting a glimpse of her life in short story form, I am highly anticipating her memoir.

Amna A.

Collection of short stories, some random, and some featuring the same married couple at different stages of life -and after. Some of my favourite stories were about: an alien retelling an earth fairytale, a confused snail that finds itself trapped in a woman's body and is disgusted by the transformation, a reverse handmaids tale type dystopian matriarchal society, a daughter trying to figure out if her mother is a witch, and an interview between Margaret Atwood and George Orwell via séance. The ones about the couple later in life were heartbreaking but beautiful, one of them navigates old age while grieving the loss of their life partner. Overall a 3/5 rating.

Having enjoyed several of Atwood's novels, I was curious about her short stories. Such stories are an ideal format for authors to let their imagination run wild. Or, serve up diverse but always poignant slices of life. In my opinion, 'Old Babes in the Wood' delivers on neither promise.

Old Babes in the Wood Stories

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