Margaret Atwood - The Tent

At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter’s tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they’ll come up, you have faith in that, and they’ll look like the picture in the catalogue. In the brown earth there were already hundreds of small green shoots. You didn’t know what they were—some sort of little bulb—but they were intending to grow, despite everything. What would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren’t in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.

Material in this collection has been previously published as follows:

“Our Cat Enters Heaven” in Brick; “Warlords” and “Voice” in The Walrus; “Take Charge,” “King Log in Exile,” “Salome Was a Dancer,” and “Post-Colonial” in Daedalus; “Life Stories” and “Resources of the Ikarians” in Short Story; and “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” and “The Tent” in Harper’s Magazine.

In addition, “Bottle,” “It’s Not Easy Being Half-Divine,” and an earlier version of “Nightingale” appeared in a limited-edition booklet published in aid of the Harbourfront Reading Series; these three and “Take Charge,” “King Log in Exile,” “Thylacine Ragout,” “Post-Colonial,” “Faster,” and “Bottle II” were published in a limited-edition booklet called Bottle, in aid of the Hay-On-Wye Festival in Wales; “Tree Baby,” “But It Could Still,” and “Something Has Happened” appeared in New Beginnings, an anthology published in support of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake charities; “Bottle” appeared in a German-language literary advent calendar called Das Geschenk; and “Chicken Little Goes Too Far” was auctioned in a holograph-illustrated edition of one, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund.