Margaret Atwood's 'Weight.'

Just read this brilliant short story. I find Atwood is a marvel of short story tricks. Her technique is umpeccable.

'The tending of such men is a fading art, like scrimshaw or the making of woollen rose mantelpiece decorations.'

Through the story she interjects alternative definitions for words:

double espresso - a diabolical torture devised by the Spanish Inquisition, involving a sack of tacks, a silver bootjack and two three-hundred-pound priests.

dismemberment - the act of conscious forgetting

battered - covered in slime then dipped into hell

But it's the way she structures her writing that I love and admire. She seems often to open her stories by telling them backwards.

This one is from the collection called 'Wilderness Tips'.
But I'm probably preaching to the converted.