Free Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood Page B

or whether it’s just a hallucination I’ve somehow duped you into seeing. There’s no doubt that you can see the bread, you can even smell it, it smells like yeast, and it looks solid enough, solid as your own arm. But can you trust it? Can you eat it? You don’t want to know, imagine that.

POPPIES:
Three
Variations
    In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row
.
    
That mark our place; and in the sky

    
The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below
.
    —John McCrae
    
1.
    I had an uncle once who served
in Flanders
. Flanders, or was it France? I’m old enough to have had theuncle but not old enough to remember. Wherever, those
fields
are green again, and plowed and harvested, though they keep throwing up rusty shells, broken skulls.
The
uncle wore a beret and marched in parades, though slowly. We always bought those felt
poppies
, which aren’t even felt any more, but plastic: small red explosions pinned to your chest, like a
blow
to the heart.
Between the
other thoughts, that one
crosses
my mind. And the tiny lead soldiers in the shop windows,
row on row
of them, not lead any more, too poisonous, but every detail perfect, and from every part of the world: India, Africa, China, America.
That
goes to show, about war—in retrospect it becomes glamour, or else a game we think we could have played better. From time to time the stores
mark
them down, you can get bargains. There are some for us, too, with
our
new leafy flag, not the red rusted-blood one the men fought under. That uncle had
place
mats with the old flag, and cups
and
saucers. The planes
in the sky
were tiny then, almost comical, like kites with wind-up motors; I’ve seen them in movies. The uncle said he never saw
the larks
. Too much smoke, or fog. Too much roaring, though on some mornings it was very
still
. Those were the most dangerous. You hoped you would act
bravely
when the moment came, you kept up your courage by
singing
. There was a kind of
fly
that bred in the corpses, there were thousands of them he said; and during thebombardments you could
scarce
hear yourself think. Though sometimes you
heard
things anyway: the man beside him whispered, “Look,” and when he looked there was no more torso: just a red hole,
a
wet splotch in
mid
air. That uncle’s gone now too, the number of vets in the parade is smaller each year, they limp more. But in the windows
the
soldiers multiply, so clean and colorfully painted, with their little intricate
guns
, their shining boots, their faces, brown or pink or yellow, neither smiling nor frowning. It’s strange to think how many soldiers like that have been owned over the years, loved over the years, lost over the years, in back yards or through gaps in porch floors. They’re lying down there, under our feet in the garden and
below
the floorboards, armless or legless, faces worn half away, listening to everything we say, waiting to be dug up.
2.
    Cup of coffee, the usual morning drug. He’s off jogging, told her she shouldn’t be so sluggish, but she can’t get organized, it involves too many things: the right shoes, the right outfit, and then worrying about how your bum looks, wobbling along the street. She couldn’t do it alone anyway, she might get mugged.So instead she’s sitting remembering how much she can no longer remember, of who she used to be, who she thought she would turn into when she grew up. We are the dead: that’s about the only line left from
In Flanders Fields
, which she had to write out twenty times on
the
blackboard, for talking. When she was ten and thin, and now see. He says she should go vegetarian, like him, healthy as lettuce. She’d rather eat
poppies
, get the opiates straight from the source. Eat daffodils, the poisonous bulb like an onion. Or better, slice it into his soup. He’ll
blow
his nose on her once too often, and then.
Between the
rock and the hard cheese, that’s where she sits, inert as a