AN - this is a piece written for my A-Level coursework. It is a creative narrative expressing my beliefs as to what happens after the end of Margaret Atwood's classic prophetic novel, The Handmaid's Tale. I do not own any of the characters or ideas detailed in this piece, it is merely my interpretation of an epilogue, if there ever was to be one.

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Nolite te bastardes carborundum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. These words are burned into my mind. I wear them as a talisman, carry them with me, they keep me alive. They’re scratched into everything I own. My wardrobe. My shoes. My skin.

The men here are not like the Commander. They wear clothes reminiscent of another time: a plaid shirt stuffed into low-rise jeans, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Their hair is unkempt and their chins are unshaven. Their tongues are loose, they cuss and swear and laugh. One of them smiled at me once, and called me by my real name. I am not Offred anymore; she is dead to me now. To these men she was never born.

I do not know where I am. There is no window for me to sit by, and the sunlight does not reach the crack beneath my door. I think I’m underground, hidden in a bunker somewhere far, far away. Away from the Commander and Serena Joy. Away from Nick.

On the night that I arrived here they gave me paper, pages upon pages, endless amounts of space for me to fill. They gave me a pencil with a soft lead. I ran my fingertips along the tip and watched the grey dirty my fingertips. I felt myself falling in love again. They didn’t give me a pen. They said ink was too permanent. If they ever find your books, they said, we won’t be able to rub the pen out. They said that books can be burnt and pages torn, but ink stains.

I think I have ink for blood.

I didn’t understand what they wanted at first, these strange men with loose tongues. They told me to write about anything and so I wrote about everything. I was comforted by the soft lead in the pencil, fascinated by the way it wound spirals across my page as I told all about Moira, about Luke, about Nick. Every day when I had filled a page one of tem would come and they would read it out loud for me to hear. My life from someone else’s lips, projected around my room. It was wonderful. While they read I could pretend that I was back there again, in the time before. Luke would be sitting at the breakfast table, reading the headlines to me. He would put on the voice that he said sounded like a newsreader. It didn’t, but I would laugh anyway. In this room it isn’t Luke reading today’s big story, it’s someone else, someone I don’t know. But I still want to laugh.

I filled three books before I stopped writing with my pencil. They were thin books, paperbacks, and they smelt of glue and salt. She used to have one, when she went to school. She would hold it in her left hand and I would hold her right hand as we walked down the street. She is what I think of as I hold my books to me now, as if letting them go would kill me. In truth, it probably would.

When they were finished, my books were taken away and were replaced with plastic tapes, and an old machine that made me think of those futuristic programmes that used to be on the television, except they weren’t really futuristic because nothing is truthful or accurate on television. Not even the news.

I sat in my chair with these tapes and the old futuristic machine, and they told me to tell them anything. So I told them everything. I understood then what they wanted. They wanted to be sure that I was telling the truth, to be sure that I was who my soft pencil letters made me out to be. So I told them everything for a second time and then they left me alone.

I do not know what they want with me. I don’t even know if this is Mayday, or if this is just another way of the Eyes squeezing information out of me before I’m hung before the ladies of the land at my very own Salvaging. I’m the star of the show, they tell me, but I do not know if this is a good thing.

They say that I have done well, that my work will be rewarded. They give me things, trinkets, bottles of hand lotion. Anything I ask for. The trivial things make me forget that I still am not free.

There are rules here, and they come wrapped in memories of the life I lived before.

The room I’m in is white. It’s also big. There is a bed, a sink, a toilet and a wardrobe. There is a bulb in the light fixture hanging from the ceiling. There is also a mirror on the wall, one that I can see myself in. At first I didn’t believe that who I was seeing in it was me. Now I am more surprised that it is made of real glass.

They trust me not to kill myself. I trust me not to kill myself.

This room is mine. It’s nice to have something of my own again, apart from myself.