9

• 9

  Offred searches her room and finds the engraving.
• There has to be some space, finally, that I claim as mine, even in this time.
• I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.
• I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
• it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered.
• So there have been more than one (Handmaid). Some haven’t stayed their full term of posting, their full two years.