"I thought it might be the end, for me. Or back to the Center and the attentions of Aunt Lydia and her steel cable. She enjoyed that, you know. She pretended to do all that love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin stuff, but she enjoyed it. I did consider offing myself, and maybe I would have if there'd been any way. But they had two of them in the back of the van with me, watching me like a hawk; didn't say a hell of a lot, just sat and watched me in that walleyed way they have. So it was no go.
"We didn't end up at the Center though, we went somewhere else. I won't go into what happened after that. I'd rather not talk about it.
All I can say is they didn't leave any marks.
"When that was over they showed me a movie. Know what it was about? It was about life in the Colonies. In the Colonies, they spend their time cleaning up. They're very clean-minded these days.
Sometimes it's just bodies, after a battle. The ones in city ghettos are the worst, they're left around longer, they get rottener. This bunch doesn't like dead bodies lying around, they're afraid of a plague or something. So the women in the Colonies there do the burning. The other Colonies are worse, though, the toxic dumps and the radiation spills. They figure you've got three years maximum, at those, before your nose falls off and your skin pulls away like rubber gloves. They don't bother to feed you much, or give you protective clothing or anything, it's cheaper not to. Anyway they're mostly people they want to get rid of. They say there're other Colonies, not so bad, where they do agriculture: cotton and tomatoes and all that. But those weren't the ones they showed me the movie about.
"It's old women I bet you've been wondering why you haven't seen too many of those around anymore and Handmaids who've screwed up their three chances, and incorrigibles like me. Discards, all of us.
They're sterile, of course. If they aren't that way to begin with, they are after they've been there for a while. When they're unsure, they do a little operation on you, so there won't be any mistakes. I'd say it's about a quarter men in the Colonies, too. Not all of those Gender Traitors end up on the Wall.