“There are authors we turn to because they can uncannily predict our future; there are authors we need for their skillful diagnosis of our present; and there are authors we love because they can explain our past. And then there are the outliers: those who gift us with timelines other than the one we’re stuck in, realities far from home. If anyone has proved, over the course of a long and wildly diverse career, that she can be all four, it’s Margaret Atwood. Long may she reign...If you consider yourself an Atwood fan and have only read her novels: Get your act together. You’ve been missing out.”
―Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review
“These fifteen stories are a master class in how to write, a rollicking good time, and a deep exploration of human relationships―the damage we do to each other and the ways we come together. Delving into Atwood’s work feels a bit like coming home―you can trust her to tell a good story and not make any gaffes along the way.”
―Brooklyn Rail
"Atwood explores love and loss in this brilliant collection that mixes fantastical stories about the afterlife with realism...She’s writing at the top of her considerable powers here."
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"The celebrated author’s first collection of short fiction since Stone Mattress (2014)...Honest and artful depictions of aging and loss."
―Kirkus
Chapter 1
i
TIG & NELL
first aid
Nell came home one day just before dinnertime and found the front door open. The car was gone. There was a trail of blood splotches on the steps, and once she was inside the house, she followed it along the hall carpet and into the kitchen. There was a knife on the cutting board, one of Tig’s favourites, Japanese steel, very sharp―and beside it, a bloodstained carrot, one end severed. Their daughter, nine at the time, was nowhere to be found.
What were the possible scenarios? Desperadoes had broken in. Tig had tried to defend himself against them, using the knife (though how to explain the carrot?), and had been wounded. The desperadoes had made off with him, their daughter, and their car. Nell should call the police.
Or else Tig had been cooking, had sliced himself with the knife, had judged that he needed stitches, and had driven himself to the hospital, taking their daughter with him to avoid leaving her by herself. This was more likely. He must have been in too much of a hurry to leave a note.
Nell got out the bottle of carpet cleaner and sprayed the blood spots: they would be much harder to get out once they’d dried. 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.
Time passed. Suspense built. She was at the point of phoning all the hospitals in the vicinity to see if Tig was there when he came back, hand bandaged. He was in a jovial mood, as was their daughter. What an adventure they’d had! The blood was just pouring out, they reported. The tea towel Tig had used for wrapping the cut had been soaked! Yes, driving had been a challenge, said Tig―he didn’t say dangerous―but who could wait for a taxi, and he’d managed all right with basically just one hand since he’d needed to keep the other one raised, and the blood was trickling off his elbow, and they’d sewn him up quickly at the hospital because he was dripping all over everything, and anyway, here they were! Luckily not an artery, or it would be a different story. (It was indeed a different story when Tig told it a little later, to Nell: his bravado had been an act―he hadn’t wanted to frighten their daughter―and he’d been worried that he would pass out if the blood loss got out of control, and then what?)
“I need a drink,” said Tig.
“So do I,” said Nell. “We can have scrambled eggs.” Whatever Tig had been planning to do with the carrot was no longer on the agenda.
The tea towel had been brought back in a plastic bag. It was bright red but beginning to brown at the edges. Nell put it to soak in cold water, which was the best way to deal with bloodstained fabrics.
But what would I have done if I’d been here? she wondered. Not a Band-Aid: insufficient. A tourniquet? She’d had perfunctory instruction in those at Girl Guides. They’d done wrist sprains too. Minor emergencies were her domain, but not major ones. Major ones were Tig’s.
That was some time ...ago. Early autumn, as she recalls, a year in the later 1980s. There were personal computers then, of a lumbering kind. And printers: the paper for them came with the pages joined together at top and bottom, and had holes along the sides, in perforated strips that you had to tear off. No cellphones though, which was why Nell hadn’t been able to text or call Tig and ask him where he was, and also what had caused the blood?
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?
She switches her attention to the room the two of them are in right at this moment. It’s in a nondescript high-rise on Bloor Street, near the viaduct. She and Tig are sitting in chairs that are something like schoolroom chairs―there is in fact a whiteboard at the front―and a man called Mr. Foote is talking. The people in the other chairs, who are also listening to Mr. Foote, are at least thirty years younger than Tig and Nell; some of them perhaps forty years younger. Just kids.
“If it’s a motorcycle crash,” says Mr. Foote, “you don’t want to take off the helmet, do ya. Because you don’t know what’s gonna be in there, eh?” He moves his hand in front of him, circularly, as if cleaning a window.
Good point, thinks Nell. She imagines the glass of a helmet, smeared. Inside, a face that is no longer a face. A face of mush.
Mr. Foote has a talent for conjuring up such images. He has a graphic way of speaking, being from Newfoundland. He doesn’t tiptoe around. He’s built on a square plan: wide torso, thick legs, a short distance between ear and shoulder. It’s a balanced shape, with a low centre of gravity. Mr. Foote would not be easy to upend. Nell expects that’s been tried, in bars―he looks as if he’d know his way around a bar fight, but also as if he wouldn’t get into any of those he couldn’t win. If pushed too hard he’d throw the challenger through a window, calmly―“You needs to keep calm,” he has already said twice―then check to make sure there were no bones broken. If there were, he’d splint them, and treat the victim for cuts and abrasions. Mr. Foote is an all-in-one package. In fact, he’s a paramedic, but that does not come out until later in the day.
He’s carrying a black leather binder and wearing a long-sleeved zip-fronted sweatshirt with the St. John Ambulance logo on it, as if he’s a team coach, which in a way he is: he’s teaching them first aid. At the end of the day there will be a test and they will each get a certificate. All of them are in this room because they need this certificate: their companies have sent them. Nell and Tig are the same. Thanks to a family connection of Tig’s, they’re giving talks on a nature-tour cruise ship, birds for him, butterflies for her: their hobbies. So they are technically staff, and all staff on this ship have to get the certificate. It’s mandatory, their ship contact has told them.
What hasn’t been said is that the majority of the passengers―the guests―the clientele―will not be young, to put it mildly. Some of them will be older than Nell and Tig. Truly ancient. Such people can be expected to topple over at any minute, and then it will be certificates to the rescue.
Nell and Tig are unlikely to be doing any actual rescuing: younger people will leap in, Nell’s counting on that. In a pinch, Nell will dither and claim she’s forgotten what to do, which will be true. What will Tig do? He will say, Stand back, give them room. Something like that.
It’s known―it’s been rumoured―that these ships have extra freezers on them, just in case. Nell pictures the distress of a server who opens the wrong freezer by mistake, to be confronted by the appalled, congealed stare of some unlucky passenger for whom the certificate has not proved sufficient.
Mr. Foote stands at the front of the room, running his gaze over today’s crop of students. His expression is possibly neutral, or faintly amused. Bunch of know-nothing softies, he’s most likely thinking. City people. “There’s what to do, and there’s what not to do,” he says. “I’ll be telling you both. First, ya don’t go screaming around like a headless chicken. Even if buddy’s minus his own head.”
But headless chickens can’t scream, Nell thinks. Or she assumes they can’t. But she takes the meaning. Keep your head in an emergency, they say. Mr. Foote would add, “If ya can.” He would definitely want them to keep their heads.
“You can fix a lot of things,” Mr. Foote is saying. “But not if there’s no head. That’s one thing I can’t teach ya.” It’s a joke, Nell guesses, but Mr. Foote does not signal jokes. He’s deadpan.
“Say you’re in a restaurant.” Mr. Foote, having dealt with motorcycle cra
마거릿 애트우드 [저]
1939년 캐나다에서 태어나 자랐다. 곤충학자인 아버지를 따라 매년 봄이면 북쪽 황야로 갔다가 가을에는 다시 도시로 돌아오곤 했다. 이런 생활로 어울릴 친구가 별로 없었던 애트우드에게는 독서가 유일한 놀이였다. 토론토대학교와 하버드대학교에서 영문학을 공부했다. 1961년 자비로 시집을 내며 시인이 되겠다는 어린 시절의 다짐을 실행에 옮겼고, 1964년 정식으로 낸 첫 시집 『서클 게임』으로 ‘캐나다 총리상’을 수상했다. 1969년 첫 장편 소설을 발표한 후, 『시녀 이야기』, 『고양이 눈』, 『도둑 신부』, 『그레이스』, 『미친 아담』 시리즈, 『도덕적 혼란』, 『증언들』 등 소설을 꾸준히 발표하며 소설가로 알려지게 되었다. 그러나 그의 글쓰기는 다양한 장르에 분포해 있으며 그 경계를 자유롭게 넘나든다. 무엇보다도 현재까지 출간한 시집은 총 열여섯 권으로, 시인으로서 작가적 정체성이 확고하다. 영미 문학계에서 변방으로 여겨지는 캐나다 작가로서의 한계를 자신의 개성으로 뛰어넘어, 독특한 문학적 성취를 이루었다는 평가를 받는다. 2000년 『눈먼 암살자』로 부커상을 수상했고, 2019년 『증언들』로 다시 한 번 부커상을 수상했다. 페미니즘, 국제 관계, 환경, 인권, 예술, 과학 기술 등 다양한 주제를 폭 넓게 다루고 있다. 많은 대학 강단에서 영문학을 가르쳤고, 국제사면위원회, 민권운동연합회 등에서 활동한다. ‘토론토 예술상’, ‘아서 클라크 상’, 미국 PEN협회 평생 공로상, 독일도서전 평화상, ‘프란츠 카프카 상’ 등을 수상했다.
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알아두세요!!!
도매상 및 제작사 사정에 따라 품절/절판 등의 사유로 취소될 수 있습니다. 오픈마켓업체의 배송지연시 주문이 자동으로 취소될 수 있습니다. 출고가능 시간이 서로 다른 상품을 함께 주문할 경우 출고가능 시간이 가장 긴 기준으로 배송됩니다. 유통의 특성상 출고기간은 예정보다 앞당겨지거나 늦춰질 수 있습니다. 택배사 배송일인 서울 및 수도권은 1~2일, 지방은 2~3일, 도서, 산간, 군부대는 3일 이상의 시간이 소요됩니다.
;)
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교환 및 반품이 가능한 경우 
상품을 공급 받은 날로부터 7일이내 가능 
상품은 월~토요일 오전 10시 이전 주문분에 대하여 당일 출고/당일 배송완료를 보장하는 상품입니다.
상품은 서울지역/평일 주문분은 당일 출고/익일 배송완료를 보장하며,
상품은, 입고예정일(제품출시일)+택배사배송일(1일)에 배송완료를 보장합니다.
~ 
상품은 유통특성상 인터파크에서 재고를 보유하지 않은 상품으로
상품은 업체가 주문을 확인하고, 출고하기까지 걸리는 시간입니다.
