Stone mattress: a fossilized cushion, formed by layer upon layer of blue-green algae building up into a mound or dome.
Atwood also wrote short stories, collected in such volumes as Dancing Girls (1977), Bluebeard's Egg (1983), Wilderness Tips (1991), Moral Disorder (2006), and Stone Mattress (2014).
After reading the stories in "Stone Mattress," by Margaret Atwood, who is now seventy-five, I began to question my portrayal of old age as a time for the tying up of loose ends; as one reviewer wrote, Atwood's stories depict "the stored-up rancour that one can amass over the years".
Several weeks ago, the Jay Cashman Company of Boston moved in cranes and other materials, including 160 stone-filled polyetheline mattresses -- each 4 inches thick, 6 feet wide and 20 feet long -- to shore up the eroded rock.
What was billed in my "Let's Go Europe" book as a "historic" Irish hostel in a "castle," turned out to be a crumbling tower with no heat, stone floors and mildewed mattresses.
Barricades were built from paving stones, tables and chairs, mattresses; women emptied dustbins and chamber pots from windows on to the heads of policemen; children threw marbles under the hooves of police horses.
The décor consisted of log and stone tables and chairs, meager mattresses and mournful skulls and hourglasses for contemplating the passage of time.
"There are stones under the tents, no mattresses, and we cannot sleep".
A small group of rioters sang "Goodbye - See you tomorrow," to a cordon of security forces in central Dakar while clearing up a thick mattress of stones on the street.
The families here have clustered their few belongings – some clothes, mattresses, blankets, pots and pans – on the stone floors.
