A libel action, that’s what I’m thinking. Put an end to this nonsense. Just because I’m old and live alone and can’t see very well, they accuse me of all sorts of things. Cooking and eating children, well, can you imagine? What a fantasy, and even if I did eat just a few, whose fault was it? Those children were left in the forest by their parents, who fully intended them to die. Waste not, want not, has always been my motto.
Anyway, the way I see it, they were offering. I used to be given grown-ups, men and women both, stuffed full of seasonal goodies and handed over to me at seed-time and harvest. The symbolism was little crude perhaps, and the events themselves were –some might say- lacking in taste, but folks’hearts were in the right place. In return, I made things germinate and grow and swell ripen.
Then I got hidden away, stuck into the attic, shrunken and parched and covered up in fusty draperies. Hell, I used to have breasts! Not just two of them. Lots. Ever wonder why a third tit was the crucial test, once, for women like me?
(…)
God knows all about it. No Devil, no Fall, no Redemption. Grade Two Arithmetic.
You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can do dump millstones on my heart and drown me into the river, but you can’t get me out of the story. I’m the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it.
Unpopular Gals (from parts 2 & 3) in Good Bones, Margaret Atwood
(Unpopular Gals - part 1, traduzido pela Lebre)
