Free Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood

pray for? We pray for food as all do, and for health and for the increase of our kind; and for deliverance from evil, which cannot be explained by us, which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs.
    Goddess of caves and grottoes: bless your children.

HARDBALL
    Here comes the future, rolling towards us like a meteorite, a satellite, a giant iron snowball, a two-ton truck in the wrong lane, careering downhill with broken brakes, and whose fault is it? No time to think about that. Blink and it’s here.
    How round, how firm, how fully packed is this future! How man-made! What wonders it contains, especially for those who can afford it! They are the elect, and by their fruits ye shall know them. Their fruits are strawberries and dwarf plums and grapes, things that can be grown beside the hydroponic vegetables and the toxin-absorbent ornamentals, in relatively little space. Space is at a premium, living spacethat is. All space that is not living space is considered dead.
    Living space is under the stately pleasure dome, the work-and-leisure dome, the transparent bubble-dome that keeps out the deadly cosmic rays and the rain of sulfuric acid and the air which is no longer. No longer air, I mean. You can look out, of course: watch the sun, red at all times of day, rise across the raw rock and shifting sands, travel across the raw rock and shifting sands, set across the raw rock and shifting sands. The light effects are something.
    But breathing is out of the question. That’s a thing you have to do in here, and the richer you are, the better you do it. Penthouse costs a bundle; steerage is cramped, and believe me it stinks. Well, as they say, there’s only so much to go around, and it wouldn’t do if everyone got the same. No incentive then, to perform the necessary work, make the necessary sacrifices, inch your way up, to where the pale pink strawberries and the pale yellow carrots are believed, still, to grow.
    What else is eaten? Well, there are no more hamburgers. Cows take up too much room. Chickens and rabbits are still cultivated, here and there; they breed quickly and they’re small. Rats, of course, on the lower levels, if you can catch them. Think of the earth as an eighteenth-century ship, with stowaways but no destination.
    And no fish, needless to say. None left in all that dirty water sloshing around in the oceans and through the remains of what used to be New York. If you’re really loaded you can go diving there, for your vacation. Travel by airlock. Plunge into the romance of a bygone age. But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. No more street crime. Think of it as a plus.
    Back to the topic of food, which will always be of interest. What will we have for dinner? Is it wall-to-wall bean sprouts? Apart from the pallid garnishes and the chicken-hearted hors d’oeuvres, what’s the main protein?
    Think of the earth as a nineteenth-century lifeboat, adrift in the open sea, with castaways but no rescuers. After a while you run out of food, you run out of water. You run out of everything but your fellow passengers.
    Why be squeamish? Let’s just say we’ve learned the hard way about waste. Or let’s say we all make our little contribution to the general welfare, in the end.
    It’s done by computer. For every birth there must be a death. Everything’s ground up, naturally. Nothing you might recognize, such as fingers. Think of the earth as a hard stone ball, scraped clean of life. There are benefits: no more mosquitoes, no birdpoop on your car. The bright side is a survival tool. So look on it.
    I’m being unnecessarily brutal, you say. Too blunt, too graphic. You want things to go on the way they are, five square meals a day, new plastic toys, the wheels of the economy oiled and spinning, payday as usual, the smoke going up the chimney just the same. You don’t like this future.
    You don’t like this future? Switch