Surfacing by Margaret Atwood

quick.
    It took them years to make the garden, the real soil was too sandy and anaemic. This oblong was artificial, the product of skill and of compost spaded in, black muck dredged from swamps, horse dung ferried by boat from the winter logging camps when they still kept horses to drag the logs to the frozen lake. My father and mother would carry it in bushel baskets on the handbarrow, two poles with boards nailed across, each of them lifting an end.
    I could remember before that, when we lived in tents. It was about here we found the lard pail, ripped open like a paper bag, claw scratches and toothmarks scarring the paint. Our father had gone on a long trip as he often did to investigate trees for the paper company or the government, I was never certain which he worked for. Our mother was given a three-week supply of food. The bear walked through the back of the food tent, we heard it in the night. It stepped on the eggs and tomatoes and pried open all the storage tins and scattered the wax-paper bread and smashed the jam jars, we salvaged what we could in the morning. The only thing it didn’t bother with was the potatoes, and we were eating them for breakfast around the campfire when it materialized on the path, snuffling along bulky and flat-footed, an enormous fanged rug, returning for more. My mother stood up and walked towards it; it hesitated and grunted. She yelled a word at it that sounded like “Scat!” and waved her arms, and it turned around and thudded off into the forest.
    That was the picture I kept, my mother seen from the back, arms upraised as though she was flying, and the bear terrified. When she told the story later she said she’d been scared to death but I couldn’t believe that, she had been so positive, assured, as if she knew a foolproof magic formula: gesture and word. She was wearing her leather jacket.
    “You on the pill?” Anna asked suddenly.
    I looked at her, startled. It took me a minute, why did she want to know? That was what they used to call a personal question.
    “Not any more,” I said.
    “Me neither,” she said glumly. “I don’t know anyone who still is any more. I got a blood clot in my leg, what did you get?” She had a smear of mud across her cheek, her pink face layer was softening in the heat, like tar.
    “I couldn’t see,” I said. “Things were blurry. They said it would clear up after a couple of months but it didn’t.” It was like having vaseline on my eyes but I didn’t say that.
    Anna nodded; she was tugging at the weeds as though she was pulling hair. “Bastards,” she said, “they’re so smart, you think they’d be able to come up with something that’d work without killing you. David wants me to go back on, he says it’s no worse for you than aspirin, but next time it could be the heart or something. I mean, I’m not taking those kinds of chances.”
    Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things. Love is taking precautions. Did you take any precautions, they say, not before but after. Sex used to smell like rubber gloves and now it does again, no more handy green plastic packages, moon-shaped so that the woman can pretend she’s still natural, cyclical, instead of a chemical slot machine. But soon they’ll have the artificial womb, I wonder how I feel about that. After the first I didn’t ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into a hospital, they shave the hair off you and tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers,