When Nell comes home just before dinnertime as “First Aid” opens, many readers will recognise her immediately, as I did.

I first met married couple Nell and Tig in the linked collection Moral Disorder (2006). I read that collection on the subway, mornings and early evenings; the rhythm of the train fills my memory as I suddenly reemerge in the life of this couple as though climbing the stairs from the underground into the city.

Here the couple are taking a class, learning safety techniques in a highrise building near the Bloor Viaduct.

It matters that this is a bridge which once held the record for the number of suicides committed from its heights, that people travelled great distances to jump there specifically. There’s a documentary about how the barrier to reduce the frequency of these deaths was constructed. There are telephones on both sides of the bridge, inviting people in distress to place a call, rather than jump.

This is a quiet reminder about the prevalence of mortality, a quiet reminder that quite another kind of short story could have been written in place of “First Aid”.

But here are Nell and Tig taking a first aid class for work; they need a certificate to satisfy their employers.

This requirement provokes remembrances of various close calls in their shared and individual pasts and it provokes imaginings of their own ineffectiveness or usefulness in emergencies-to-come.

(All of this comes up in the late-night video I recommended in Week One, too, the class like this Atwood herself took, the thoughts those plastic dummies inspired in her. The link is in the schedule widget nearby.)

At the front of the class is Mr. Foote, who is amusing and reassuring, in case you were thinking the story was going to be all about death. You were right: it is—but, it’s also amusing.

MARM 2023 PLANS

Each week I’ll share links to some online sources, so that anyone with a few minutes can join in the celebrations. Some poetry and flash fiction, some interviews and reviews, some fresh reads and rereads: mostly reading with a little viewing and, in particular, short stories.

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Rape Fantasies” (November 3)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Dancing Girls, “Hair Jewellery” (November 10)
Old Babes in the Wood, “First Aid” (November 12)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Dancing Girls, “A Travel Piece” (November 17)
Margaret Atwood’s 84th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Two Scorched Men” (November 19)
Dancing Girls, “The Resplendent Quetzel” (November 24)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Morte de Smudgie” (November 26)
Wrap-Up (November 29-30)

Mr. Foote himself is entertaining. Not to look at, necessarily: “Mr Foote would not be easy to upend. Nell expects that’s been tried, in bars—he looks as if he’d know his way around a bar fight, but also as if he wouldn’t get into any of those he couldn’t win.

His delivery is particularly entertaining: “‘You can fix a lot of things,’ Mr. Foote is saying. ‘But not if there’s no head. That’s one thing I can’t teach ya.’ It’s a joke, Neil guesses, but Mr. Foote does not signal jokes. He’s deadpan.”

But mostly the action in this story resides in inaction, or in the idea of preparedness rather than the reality of responsiveness: “How much waiting we used to do, she thinks. Waiting without knowing. So many blanks we couldn’t fill in, so many mysteries. So little information.”

That’s the nature of life, so the choice remaining is how to cope meanwhile. Nell and Tig joke about having an emergency contact card on them, at all times, instructing anyone who finds them in distress to call Mr. Foote. It seems like a good plan.

Meanwhile, Nell and Tig, and we readers, carry on, as instructed: “‘You keep going. You don’t give up,’ says Mr. Foote. ‘Because you never know.’”

Knowing that some of these stories were written before the death of Graeme Gibson, the author’s husband, and others were written afterwards, it’s easy to imagine the conflicting emotions and thoughts she might have, reading this first story aloud from Old Babes in the Wood. But there she is, taking Mr. Foote’s advice and offering it up to us as well.

In each of the next two weeks I’ll read the next two stories from this new collection; I admit I’ve peeked ahead and the next story begins with a gunshot, so what a relief the First Aid class is complete.