Young Writers Society

Note: You don't have to have read The Handmaid's Taleby Margaret Atwood to understand this (although I highly reccommend it) but if you have it might clear things up a bit. In the dystopian society of Gilead, The Marthas are essentially household maids and cooks, who serve a Commander and his Wife. The Commander has a handmaid, who wears red, who lives in the house with the purpose of bearing him a child as the Wife cannot. The book is told from the handmaid's perspective, but I thought I would try to think like a Martha.

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When I was a child I had a surgery done, just routine, removing some abscess flesh. After the procedure I was to lie in bed and they fed me through a tube, pumped in regulated amounts of this and that. It will make you feel better, they said. You need to eat.

There is no longer any tube, and yet it feels very much the same. Only now I am the practitioner. I create the saline and oat mashes and glucose solutions. There is no plastic running down her throat, but I bring up bread and eggs on a plastic tray. She hates me, I’m sure. And I never asked for this patient, never asked to pump full the red balloon that refuses to inflate. I wish I had a tube with a needle on the end. Food into the mouth and air into the ball so the children may play.

The Wife I hate as well. Her lips remind me of rose petals, the thin pink ones that curl in at the ends. I used to soak them in water, dab it on my neck. Tear them apart and let the oils sink into my fingers. Now we are not allowed that; nobody is any more. Even the Wife, she smells only of deeply synthetic purples and ethyl fluids, the kind that clean wounds and dry quickly.

When I serve the evening meal, sometimes she smiles. This too dries quickly. When I make sugared desserts, her teeth are always the colour of frosting. Soft greens and yellows and pinks. When she eats them, that is. Once she mashed it all into a thick, ambrosial paste without a bite.

The greens remind me of arsenic, which I have some small amount of. They scattered it, months ago, for ridding the parlour of rats. The bottle was left out accidentally, and I slipped some into a handkerchief. It would be easy to poison her. A dusting over the lamb shank, a pinch in the stew—carefully over time. I would not be caught. They may not perform autopsies anymore; there is no way of testing. They would say she simply fell ill.