Free Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

one; when you’ve cleared up after the dead, you know how few green plastic garbage bags you yourself are likely to take up in your turn.
    The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, the lone mother-of pearl cuff link, the tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth. The broken silver lighter, the saucerless cup, the cruet stand minus the vinegar. The scattered bones ofhome, the rags, the relics. Shards washed ashore after shipwreck.
    Today Myra persuaded me to buy an electric fan—one on a tall stand, better than the creaky little thing I’ve been relying on. The sort she had in mind was on sale at the new mall across the Jogues River bridge. She would drive me there: she was going anyway, it would be no trouble. It’s dispiriting, the way she invents pretexts.
    Our route took us past Avilion, or what was once Avilion, now so sadly transformed. Valhalla, it is now. What bureaucratic moron decided this was a suitable name for an old-age home? As I recall, Valhalla was where you went after you were dead, not immediately before. But perhaps some point was intended.
    The location is prime—the east bank of the Louveteau River, at the confluence with the Jogues—thus combining a romantic view of the Gorge with a safe mooring for sailboats. The house is large but it looks crowded now, shouldered aside by the flimsy bungalows that went up on the grounds after the war. Three elderly women were sitting on the front porch, one in a wheelchair, furtively smoking, like naughty adolescents in the washroom. One of these days they’ll burn the place down for sure.
    I haven’t been back inside Avilion since they converted it; it reeks no doubt of baby powder and sour urine and day-old boiled potatoes. I’d rather remember it the way it was, even at the time I knew it, when shabbiness was already setting in—the cool, spacious halls, the polished expanse of the kitchen, the Sevres bowl filled with dried petals on the small round cherrywood table in the front hall. Upstairs, in Laura’s room, there’s a chip out of the mantelpiece, from where she dropped a firedog; so typical. I’m the only person who knows this, any more. Considering her appearance—her lucent skin, her look of pliability, her long ballerina’s neck—people expected her to be graceful.
    Avilion is not the standard-issue limestone. Its planners wanted something more unusual, and so it is constructed of rounded river cobblestones all cemented together. From a distance the effect is warty, like the skin of a dinosaur or the wishing wells in picture books. Ambition’s mausoleum, I think of it now.
    It isn’t a particularly elegant house, but it was once thought imposing in its way—a merchant’s palace, with a curved driveway leading to it, a stumpy Gothic turret, and a wide semi-circular spooled verandah overlooking the two rivers, where tea was served to ladies in flowered hats during the languid summer afternoons at the century’s turn. String quartets were once stationed there for garden parties; my grandmother and her friends used it as a stage, for amateur theatricals, at dusk, with torches set around; Laura and I used to hide under it. It’s begun to sag, that verandah; it needs a paint job.
    Once there was a gazebo, and a walled kitchen garden, and several plots of ornamentals, and a lily pond with goldfish in it, and a steam-heated glass conservatory, demolished now, that grew ferns and fuschias and the occasional spindly lemon and sour orange. There was a billiards room, and a drawing room and a morning room, and a library with a marble Medusa over the fireplace—the nineteenth-century type of Medusa, with a lovely impervious gaze, the snakes writhing up out of her head like anguished thoughts. The mantelpiece was French: a different one had been ordered, something with Dionysus and vines, but the Medusa came instead, and France was a long way to send it back, and so they used that one.
    There was a vast dim dining room with William Morris wallpaper, the