Bodily Harm

Bodily Harm Read Free Page A

Book: Bodily Harm Read Free
Author: Margaret Atwood
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were still possible. He’s the only white man in the group.
    When the hole is finally unchained, Rennie follows the others towards the plane, which is tiny and looks alarmingly homemade. Rennie tells herself that you stand a better chance in a small plane like this than in a jumbo jet. Jake has a joke about planes. He says they can’t really fly, it’s absurd to think a heavy piece of metal like that can fly; what keeps them up is the irrational belief of the passengers, and all plane crashes can be explained by loss of faith.
    He’d have a job with this one, she thinks, anyone can see it’ll never get off the ground. St. Antoine isn’t a rich country, they probably buy their planes fourth-hand from other countries, then stick them together with Band-Aids and string until they fall apart irreparably. It’s like the fat trade in restaurants. Rennie knows a lot about the fat trade in restaurants: the good ones selling their used fat to the second-rate ones, and so on down the line until the fat reaches the chipworks of cheap hamburger stands. Rennie’s piece on the fattrade was called, “By Their Fats Ye Shall Know Them.” The editor’s title, not hers. She wanted to call it “Fat City.”
    She climbs the wobbling metal steps through the dark heat which is doubled by the heat of the plane. The camera bag strap cuts into her shoulder and the flesh above her left breast; the scar is pulling again. When it feels like this she’s afraid to look down, she’s afraid she’ll see blood, leakage, her stuffing coming out. It isn’t a very big scar as such things go; worse things happen to other people. She’s lucky. Why then doesn’t she feel lucky?
    I don’t want to have the operation, she said. She believed two things at once: that there was nothing wrong with her and that she was doomed anyway, so why waste the time? She had a horror of someone, anyone, putting a knife into her and cutting some of her off, which was what it amounted to no matter what they called it. She disliked the idea of being buried one piece at a time instead of all at once, it was too much like those women they were always finding strewn about ravines or scattered here and there in green garbage bags. Dead but not molested. The first time she’d seen that word, in a Toronto newspaper when she was eight, she’d thought a molester was someone who caught moles. A molester is someone who is indecent, said her grandmother. But since that was what her grandmother said about almost everyone, it wasn’t much help. Rennie still used that word sometimes, for fun, where other people would use
gross
.
    Daniel, who at that point was still Dr. Luoma, looked at her as if he was disappointed in her: other women no doubt said similar things. This embarrassed her, since even such a short time ago she still assumed she was unique.
    You don’t have to, he said. Or, well, you don’t
have
to do anything. Nobody’s forcing you, it’s your own decision. He paused here,letting her remember that the alternative he offered her was death.
Either/or
. Multiple choice: which was not what it said.

    During the morning of the day on which she had her routine, once-a-year appointment at the gynecologist’s, Rennie was working on a piece about drain-chain jewellery. You could get it for pennies at your local Woolworth’s, she wrote. Buy as many lengths as you need, make the chains as long as you like with those cunning little peanut-shaped connectors, wear them on any part of your anatomy: wrists, neck, waist, even ankles, if you wanted the slave-girl effect. It was the latest Queen Street thing, she wrote, a New Wave sleaze put-on of real jewellery. Or beyond New Wave even:
nouveau wavé
.
    In fact it wasn’t the latest Queen Street thing. It wasn’t a thing at all, it was an embellishment Rennie had spotted on one of her friends, Jocasta, who ran Ripped Off, a second-hand store on Peter Street that specialized in violently ugly clothes from the fifties,

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