Sunday Short: 'Stone Mattress' by Margaret Atwood

But old habits die hard, and it’s not long before she’s casting an appraising eye over her fleece-clad fellow-travellers dithering with their wheely bags in the lobby of the first-night airport hotel. Passing over the women, she ear-tags the male members of the flock. Some have females attached to them, and she eliminates these on principle: why work harder than you need to? Prying a spouse loose can be arduous, as she discovered via her first husband: discarded wives stick like burrs.

I've been late to Margaret Atwood, having read The Handmaid's Tale earlier this year and then proceeding to inhale her other work. She has such a wonderful sense of character, and shines a light on rape culture, sexism and misogyny through brilliantly intense fiction. 'Stone Mattress' is one of her newer shorts, and captures a brutal moment in the life of Verna and how that brutal moment ultimately begets more brutality. It's unsentimental, it's violent, and it's pretty darn perfect.

You can read 'Stone Mattress' over at The New Yorker.