Sublime

Let me guess. Saint George for England? Dragon-slayer? Spare my blushes. I was young and enthusiastic. I didn’t realize that dragons always grow new heads.

as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight.

contrivance,

There was an approved list of names, put together by Aunt Lydia and the other senior Aunts. Becka said the names were made from the names of products women had liked once and would be reassured by, but she herself did not know what those products were. Nobody our age knew, she said.

She’d had a gang of other perfumed, flinty-souled Hungarian mothers with whom she’d played card games and exchanged war stories about their respective escapes, plus grumblings about the thankless children they’d saved from the Communist salt mines. Lavender on the outside, meticulous about their coiffures and manicures and eye shadow, but pure adam

Aunt Lise taught us the basics of interior decorating, though the final choices about the style of our homes would of course be made by our husbands.

She was clearly innocent. But she was hanged anyway. The Aunts had known the truth. Or at least one of them had known. There was the evidence, right in the folder in front of me. Yet nothing had happened to Paula. And a Handmaid had been hanged for the crime instead.