My name is June Osbourne. I was a writer. I was an editor. I was a wife and mother. I was a Handmaid of Gilead.
Aside from the last, I hope to be all of those things again one day. There's something I need to do first, though. I need to record the story of my escape from the so-called Independent Republic of Gilead for all those who care. I may not know anything else about you, dear scholar, but if you're reading this, you care.
The first thread in my most important weave came as I lay on my bed in the attic room I had been confined to by Mrs. Waterford, more commonly known amongst Our Manifest Superiors as Serena Joy. That was not her real name, of course, any more than my real name was Offred. I never did learn what she went by before. But that was what we were called, on pain of- well, pain.
My first assignment as a two-legged womb was with Commander Fred Waterford and his wife Serena. I was repeatedly told, by many people, that I should appreciate being taken in by two of the most valiant heroes of the Righteous Revolution. The Waterfords were the archetypical Gileadan couple, the High King and High Queen of this brave new world. I doubt they believed me when I assured them that my gratitude knew no bounds.
That background should help you understand (especially if you're reading this in a normal country) how I came to be imprisoned in an unlocked room in a house of horrors, one of many lining the pleasant, shady streets of a city of horrors. The specifics of what I did to incur Mrs. Waterford's wrath aren't important. I did, and the word of the Wife of the House was sufficient to prevent me from daring to creep an inch past the threshold.
The shutters that had been installed over my windows to protect me from jumping to my death allowed in slivers of light, slivers I used to mark the passage of time. On the second day, I broke off a chunk smaller than my pinky nail from the front window. It became my keyhole to the world.
When I tired of peering through it on the third day, I took to wearing a groove into the floorboards. I paced until dizziness forced me to sit with my head between my knees.
The fifth day is when time starts disappearing. A few moments I can recall with HD clarity, but it's hard to connect them across the gulfs of static. I remember tracing lopsided shapes on dusty surfaces, clapping and giggling like a child. I remember being fascinated by individual hairs on my arm. I remember getting down on my hands and knees and putting my nose an inch from the floor as I rubbed at the seams between the boards.
Based on what I've managed to put together, it was most likely the tenth day that I decided to explore every centimeter of the inside of my closet. That was where I found the words carved next to the doorframe, just above the floor. "Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum."
I didn't even know what the words meant at the time, yet they are what saved me from poop-flinging idiocy. I could sense the defiance they had been invested with. It bled from each crude gash and soaked into the woodwork. The message must have been put there by the Waterfords' previous handmaid, the woman who had hung herself from the now-absent chandelier that had hung over our bed. The mere act of putting it here, where it would be seen only by another desperate handmaid, signaled its intent.
I reached out with a wobbly finger and picked at the sawdust still clinging to the edges of the letters, tangible evidence of how little time had passed before she was replaced. That's one of my HD moments. What could she have used to carve them? Handmaids are watched closely around weapons, more to prevent us from doing exactly what this one did than out of fear of escape.
I was thinking about that as I lay on the bed, working a splinter out of my fingertip. Maybe that's why the thought occurred to me. Maybe it was because my brain, starved for stimulation, had begun to do new and strange things with everything around me. All I can tell you is that as I gazed at the disused fireplace across the room, just as I had done a thousand times before, I saw something different. I saw the brittle antique mortar between the bricks. When I scratched at it, it came away as a fine powder.
Lovely old houses such as this one are prized by the elite of Gilead for their sense of Old World character, but they also contain tiny rotted gaps for worms like me to wriggle through. That fireplace was one such gap.
Once I had that piece of the puzzle, my mind kept drifting back to escape. I believe it was probably just an intellectual exercise at first, a way to hug my sanity a little tighter in the face of awful, unending nothingness. I spent days staring through unfocused eyes at the ceiling, the floor, the pillow or that carving, letting them become screens for the movies projected by my mind's eye. Sometimes I simply closed my eyes and saw shapes in the colors that formed against my eyelids.
By the time the final piece of that beautiful crystalline matrix fell into place, though, I knew it would hold me. I swear I can still see it glowing white in the late afternoon sun, shedding its comforting rays over me.
The first thing I needed was a weapon. There was no need to leave my room for that. I scraped away the mortar first with my fingernails, then with the closet rod. When the chandelier was removed, the closet rod was also loosened from its moorings, to ensure it couldn't hold my weight. After freeing a single brick, I slotted it neatly back into place.
The second thing I needed was relative freedom of movement. Rita, the Martha, found me "passed out" in a foul-smelling heap on the floor when she arrived to deliver breakfast. (For those of you fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the workings of Gilead, a Martha is a female house slave. It's officially denied, but that's what they are.) The doctor took care of the rest for me.
The third thing I needed was the urine of a pregnant handmaid. Given the mad rush to create as many as possible, as quickly as possible, I didn't expect to have to wait long, and so I didn't. The Wives were huddled in a complicit knot, openly discussing who was pregnant and who was not, while we handmaids formed a silent circle around them. It was all they ever seemed to talk about. So absorbed were they in the topic that they barely noticed when I excused myself to follow a recently blessed girl to the bathroom and beg her assistance. I can still remember the perverse satisfaction I felt as I collected the urine from the toilet bowl without gagging once. I'd already done far more repulsive things.
Oh, I was careful to a fault. I reserved some of the urine, in case the Waterfords insisted on a second pregnancy test. I concealed my menstrual blood with layers of toilet paper, folded origami-like into snug wings that kept undergarments white. I faked morning sickness. My mother would have been proud of her little Junebug, for once. Every act in my own personal "Escape from Alcatraz" had been rehearsed hundreds of times, obsessively, until nothing had been overlooked.
Maybe she already is proud. Wherever she is, I like to think she's still the woman who would risk everything to read this.
Can your imagination grasp how much easier it is to lower your eyes and murmur respectfully and obey when you know there's a light at the end of the tunnel? I was so inoffensive during those weeks that, every so often, I would catch a suspicious glance that would have to be allayed with a barbed remark. I never challenged anyone and yet I usually got what I wanted.
"Baby needs good food." "Baby needs fresh air." "Baby needs exercise." I could prefix almost any sentence with the word "baby" and no one was allowed to argue with it. My imaginary fetus, the very thing that got me into this predicament in the first place, now gave me permission to begin rebuilding the strength I had been robbed of.
"Look at God's bounty," said Aunt Lydia. "Breathe it in. He has truly blessed us today."
We were walking in a recently replanted public garden, an attempt by our rulers to demonstrate that they were returning the Earth to a flourishing Edenic state. For what was likely the first and only time, I was in complete agreement with the woman I had been forced to call "Aunt". It was gorgeous. It was almost real life.
I voiced my agreement and suggested that we sit. Like all Aunts, she was dressed in stifling layers of grey wool and was beginning to sweat even from this small exertion. She looked at me with concern.
"Are you feeling all right, dear?"
Now she fucking cared.
"I've never felt better. You were right, you know. I didn't believe you, but when I found out I was having a baby, I was so happy."
She beamed. It was bizarre. In spite of all the threats, electrocutions and beatings, she genuinely seemed to think she was my friend. I returned the smile and seated us on a bench.
"The Commander may be more excited than his Wife. Of course, he'll have to stop-" I abruptly cut the sentence off.
"Stop what?"
Careful. Don't seem eager. Let her force it out of you.
"Offred? Stop what?" Her voice had taken on a familiar sharp upturn.
"Nothing. It's just that the Commander sometimes allows me a few... indulgences. He means well, but some of them are bad for the baby."
"Oh?" She tilted her head to look me squarely in the face. "Which ones, dear?"
"The ones we drink." Then I steered the conversation toward vitamin smoothies.
The fourth and final thing I needed was a cigarette. That was by far the easiest step. Like most Commanders, I suspect, Commander Waterford kept supplies of contraband scotch and cigarillos in his office. He liked to share them over equally naughty games of Scrabble and, in the course of the next such game, I palmed one from his case.
I put it to use the day Aunt Lydia was scheduled for a second obstetrical check up. The contents of a single cigarillo, when ingested, can cause alarming symptoms: racing heart, shortness of breath, uncontrollable shaking, faintness. Rita's symptoms were alarming enough to get her leave to go to the hospital.
See, Mom? I told you all that "Law and Order" would pay off one day.
You may be starting to grow horrified with my part in this story. What kind of psychopath poisons an innocent woman just to get her out of the way? All I can say in my defense is that if you spend long enough in an asylum, you become one of the lunatics. You learn what you're really capable of and sometimes what you're capable of is what you never even dreamed of when the world still made some degree of sense.
Thus when Aunt Lydia arrived, she was greeted only by Mrs. Waterford and me. I had developed a rapport with Nick Blaine, Commander Waterford's chauffeur and personal assistant, over the long months in his employer's house, and he had agreed to make sure the Commander would be away today. I didn't tell him the real reason why, of course. Escaping a totalitarian country takes allies, but it's not smart to trust them any farther than you have to.
In the doorway to my room, I paused and let Aunt Lydia know there was something on my sheets I thought she should see. There was no need to tell her twice. As she strode across the room, I quietly closed the door and edged over to the fireplace. As she threw back the covers, I pulled that loosed brick from its cradle amongst the others.
She pawed over the linen as frantically as if it was her own fetus that was at risk. Just as she straightened, inhaling a lungful of air for an angry reprimand, I brought the brick crashing down on the back of her skull. An arm around her waist helped guide her discreetly forward onto the bed.
Aunt Lydia looked up at me with a mixture of terror and numb shock that I had seen her put on countless women's faces. Selfishly, I only saw my own as I muffled her cries with a pillow and bashed at her skull until well after she stopped moving. I couldn't have stopped sooner if I had tried.
Afterward, I vomited. I was forced to quickly rein myself in before washing the blood off and calling to Mrs. Waterford from the top of the stairs. The pounding clack of her heels got louder as she ascended. The queen evidently didn't appreciate being summoned by the servant. When I heard a gasp at the sight of what was on the bed, I stepped out from behind the door and shoved the dead matron's electric prod (standard equipment for Aunts) into the back of the queen's slender, elegant neck.
I can neither confirm nor deny that I may have used more jolts than were strictly necessary to convince her to move along to the sitting room. Mrs. Waterford crossed her ankles as I tied her to a chair, trying to maintain her regal posture.
"What do you intend to do now? You know you'll never even make it out of the city."
"Now-" I plopped the telephone down next to her "-you're going to find my daughter for me."
She stared, then laughed. She actually laughed in my face. "Even if I were inclined to help the likes of you, that's impossible."
"Are you sure about that? Because I always found Mr. Sparky to be very persuasive, Serena. The other kidnapped women did too." I let fly a crackling electrical arc for emphasis.
"Do you have any idea how much trouble you're in, Offred? If you beg for forgiveness now, I might stop them from hanging you on The Wall after my baby is born."
Mr. Sparky did prove persuasive enough and, in the end, I obtained the names and address of my daughter's new "parents". Neverlet it be said that Serena Joy Waterford was a weak-willed woman, though. In contrast to Aunt Lydia's thuggish overtures, Serena maintained an ice-blue eye contact as cold and serene as her name.
That was how she had always looked into my eyes while she was holding me down to be ritually raped by her husband. Not once did I see a flicker of pity cross her face and not once did she look away before I did.
She looked away then, though, as I knelt to whisper in her ear.
"I hope you believe me, Serena, when I say that this is me showing mercy."
I pressed a kitchen knife to the throat I had fantasized dozens of times about piercing. It turned out I didn't have to push hard at all. Is this story dark enough for you yet? At least you can stop reading. I lived it.
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As I watched Nick drop off Commander Waterford at the front gate, I allowed myself one last stab of regret that I couldn't kill the two Guardians posted on either side. Without Guardians willing to enforce the new laws, none of the rest of it would have been possible. Still, their absence might have been noticed, and escape, not revenge, was my primary goal.
I backed away from the window and tried to look pleased to see him.
He stopped in the open doorway. "Where did everyone go?" His tone was light and almost teasing, as if we were intimates.
I heard my teeth grind. "Mrs. Waterford is with a sick friend. She took Rita with her."
"Isn't that your job?"
"Most days, perhaps. Today, Mrs. Waterford thought it would be nice if you took me to dinner. To celebrate the good news."
His eyes narrowed as the door slowly creaked shut behind him. "Did she? That doesn't sound like her."
"She would have left a note, but..."
That got a small grin out of him.
Commander Waterford once gave me a women's magazine from the days when the United States comprised more than Alaska and Hawaii. Without his masculine protection, I could have lost a finger for reading six-year-old makeup tips. Writing them would have been even worse.
A woman getting ideas is bad in Gilead. A woman spreading them is intolerable.
I continued, "Ive been looking forward to it all day. I haven't seen the inside of a restaurant in five years."
"She should have checked with me first." He ran his hand through his hair and let it rest wearily on the back of his neck. "I've had a long day."
The weight of the electric prod at the back of my cloak suddenly became very heavy.
These days, it's easy to forget the original meaning of the word "handmaid": a lady's assistant. I had often served this original function for Mrs. Waterford. I suspect it helped the elites connect us to the biblical handmaid whose story was used to justify our sexual servitude.
After the announcement of my (and therefore her) impending motherhood, I had used my newfound favor with her to beg sewing lessons. I think she enjoyed having an excuse to make herself useful, though naturally it was couched in the rationalization that a handmaid should know how to sew.
Even so, my stitches were the hastily done work of an inexperienced seamstress, and the long pocket I had added to the lining of the cloak bulged alarmingly at the gaps.
I was prepared to force his cooperation, but I knew how much easier everything that came after this would be if he left with me willingly. And so I redoubled my attack.
"Fred... may I call you Fred? I think this dinner is your wife's way of accepting my place in this house. And hers."
I could actually see him waver. He liked being deferred to, especially by his wife, who rarely did.
"And I imagine a hot meal sounds a lot better than bread and cheese in the kitchen."
The man swept me out of that house arm-in-arm, as if I was his fucking date. Before stepping into the car, I aimed a smug grin and a goodbye wave at the Guardians. It was an insignificant and probably petty rebellion, but beggars can't be choosers. Can we?
This part of the journey was the movie I'd seen more than any other, I think, as the walls of my world had inexorably closed in on me like a garbage compacter. The few surviving restaurants in this city were located downtown, and as we approached the isolated stretch between the well-guarded upper class neighborhoods and the even more well-guarded downtown district, I turned to Commander Waterford and said everything I wanted to say to him. I said it with a submissive smile that grew more mocking as the words gushed out.
"Fred. There's something I've been meaning to ask you. Did you think about me?"
"What?"
"When Mrs. Waterford confined me to my room. Alone. For thirteen days. Did you think about me at all? I can't have been too high a priority back then. One word from you and she would have had to let me out of there, yet there I stayed."
"Just because I choose to indulge-"
"Have you ever spent even one day doing nothing? It gives you plenty of time to think about what's important."
I think it was my brazenness in interrupting him, as much as anything else, that unnerved him. He sat dumbfounded, the color quickly rising in his face. I reached behind my head and heard my clumsy stitches rip as I yanked the prod from its pocket.
Maybe I reacted the way I did because it had been less than two weeks since he had last raped me. Maybe it was because it had already happened so many times. Maybe it was his insistence on acting like he was doing me a favor. Whatever the reason, I shoved the business end of the punishment device into his zipper rather than his cravat.
The car swerved so sharply that I had to brace myself to avoid flying over Commander Waterford's lap. Although Nick couldn't see what was happening from the driver's seat, Waterford's screams convinced him to pull over. He flinched away from the searing arc of electricity I set off next to his face.
You might remember that I like Nick Blaine. To this day, I believe him to be a decent human being trapped in an indecent, impossible situation. And that's precisely why I forced him to toss his gun into the backseat and wait for my command to drive. I could never have asked him to take the risk of willingly aiding a "pregnant" handmaid's escape.
It took me less than a minute to strip, even with shaky hands. That's faster than my trial run, sitting on the edge of my bed. You see, one of the few advantages of the handmaid's uniform is that you can fit half the state underneath it.
First went the medieval starched linen wings. Underneath, my hair was already coiled into the sleek bun favored by Wives, so tight it hurt. Then the scarlet letter of the red cloak, and finally the loose red shift that flowed to my ankles, revealing one of the blue dresses that advertised Mrs. Waterford's elevated social privilege.
The sash bound a folded handbag to my body. Believe it or not, the handbag was blue too. It's robin's egg shade offset the cobalt of the dress in a stab at style that wasn't supposed to happen in our austerity-obsessed New Society.
Dozens of documents were held inside my knee-high stockings, wrapped around my legs in two large paper tubes that would have made my calves look fat if anyone could see them. The semi-conscious man in the seat beside me started to regain his senses as I stuffed fistfuls of paper into the handbag. Somehow, a car also chose that moment to approach.
The clink of the gun barrel against his zipper put a stop to the impending tantrum as I pressed my lips to his ear. The car passed by.
Back in the early days of the traitor nation, before they had solidified their power, a friend of mine showed me that bullies become cowards the moment they no longer have the upper hand. Commander Waterford predictably fit that personality type to the letter. The two of us rode through checkpoint after checkpoint with my head nestled into his shoulder (to conceal the ear tag they branded me with) and Nick's gun bruising the small of his back. One Guardian even remarked on how inspiring it was to see such closeness in a married couple.
As we neared the Canadian border, I had Nick turn on the radio so we could all hear real music again. Believe me, there's no shame in admitting that I cried when Bowie started playing.
I went down the last checklist as methodically as I used to tick off items on my publishing schedule. Don the commander's coat and Rita's grey knit cap. Slash tires. Collect map and flashlight. Tell men my real name. Plunge into the snowy, pine-scented unknown.
The human brain is a mercurial organ, prone to reacting to stress in strange ways. By any objective measure, this was the most dangerous leg of the journey. The Gilead/Canada border is heavily patrolled by soldiers who like to shoot first and ask questions never. So explain to me why I felt more at peace in those woods than I had in years. In the shielding dark, just me, ten thousand trees and a preternatural quiet, I could almost feel like I was back in a before time.
I wasn't eager to test the idea that if a woman who claimed to be pregnant shot at those border guards, they wouldn't shoot back. The fire I set to draw them away from their posts improved my odds, but there was still a close call or two before my feet landed safely on Canadian-controlled soil. Invisible people, it turns out, don't really hear everything while making no noise themselves.
So here I sit, in a small coffee shop in Toronto, reliving the worst five years of my life. News of Fred Waterford went dark some time ago, but I expected that. The written work I left scattered all over his office saw to that. I even left something with my signature on it, to make goddamn sure it would be identified as my handwriting. The seeds of doubt I had planted with Aunt Lydia, as well as his own proximity to my escape, had unfolded into fragrant paper blossoms.
Meanwhile, the high-level government documents I smuggled out in that chic robin's egg handbag have been published in forty-two countries. That, of course, is only the official count. Via the Internet, they may have reached hundreds.
My victory, hard-won as it may have been, is tempered by the realities of the outside world. Everywhere I go, people buzz about their business, blissfully insensible of what goes on just across their national border. If they could read my mind, it might shock them, but they would also find speculation about the people who may have already moved into my old prison. Is another two-legged womb discovering the notches scratched into the underside of a creaky old bed, unaware that they mark the passage of days? Will she find "Don't let the bastards grind you down" carved in her closet in Fake Latin, and if so, will she understand or follow that advice? Most importantly, will she recognize that the "bitches" carved after it is the juvenile contribution of a second person? I hope the answer to all of the above is "yes".
Similarly, I fear my husband and I will eventually be forced to relocate to Mexico. The anti-refugee backlash has already begun in Canada. But I also hope to find new, more helpful allies there. Mexico is enjoying its unaccustomed status as a coveted destination and globally respected defender of human rights.
If you find yourself unlucky enough to be in Gilead and you happen to meet a young curly-haired, mixed-race girl who is introduced to you as Agnes, please know that her real name is Hannah Osbourne. If you can, please let her know that her parents are trying to reach her every single day. If you can't, just show her kindness. Turn a blind eye to the rules that her kidnappers insist she must be punished for not following.
Above all else, debunk the myth. My husband did it. My best friend did it. I did it. People do get out of Gilead.