Stolen

by Myra King


She has misplaced her virginity. Cannot remember where or how, or when... The memory of her before lost in the archives of time, flitting around like something unamendable. Surely nowhere here she thinks, glancing sidewise at the Classifications: Autobiography. Romance. Crime. Self Help. She's not in a library, it's just three bookshelves at the end of the painted white corridor in Ward 10. Some of the stories are older than centuries and some are up to date, but who would write anything about her? She comes here every day. Reads passages from all her favourites. Takes them all out and then puts them back. Never sits down.

     Maybe these voices know. Where it is. Her misplaced virginity. Though she tries not to listen to them lately, not since they said they'd lock her in the bathroom. When she peed on her bedroom floor, the nurses made reassuring noises at her. Told her that no one would ever lock her in. "See," they said in unison, like twittering birds, and gesturing with open hands at the bathroom door with its blind handle, "there isn't even a lock to lock you in."
     Her dreams are locked in. They spin nightly to a Miss Havisham, Dickensian time, a desiccated wedding cake and tattered white dress.
     She touches Great Expectations with gentle fingers. A passage overrides her thoughts. She picks up the book and finds her marks. Every day begins the same.
     There's another pure laced dress out there, 90's fashionable, hers she is sure of it, cloistered in its plastic protection. Untattered, uncluttered, like some forgotten fairytale. But no forever after. And there's a man, handsome as a cowboy, but not as strong, out there too, who could not face her face after it happened.

     She sees that today there is a new book, remembers the author from her school years. She loves Thomas Hardy. Then she reads the title and her breathing quickens and her stomach feels like a fist. She smacks her forehead as if swatting a fly.

     Was it lost? Her virginity. Had it been ‘lost’? Not if it was taken. Then it would be stolen. Stolen. It's the quiet voice that says this. The one not loud enough to mind. Most days.

     She cannot recall when the words started inside her head. She thinks there were voices outside her head at the time she misplaced her virginity. Three of them, but young. Past the high slipping squeak of adolescent vocals. Perhaps not so young after all. And oh, so loud.
     She takes down the new old book from the shelf of Classics: Tess of the D'Urbervilles, blinks through the pages trying to snare her train of thought. Pauses at one scene - Hardy was so ahead of his time - she remembers this, but wonders why the R word with its simple four letters blurs her mind and runs away.

     She ignores the quiet voice. She has misplaced her virginity. Lost. To somewhere untouchable. So long ago... Surely, she thinks, it should not matter.
     She shakes her hair, tries to straighten the books to line their edges with the shelves' edges, measures perfection with flat palms held upright and outright like stop signs. It didn't help then and it doesn't help now. Her own voice raises crescendo. The words in her mind are tumbling, sparking behind closed lids. She knows the nurses will be here soon.
     She pulls down every book, fan-scattering pages, burying the newly arrived one, and then as footsteps come scurrying, slows her breathing, chooses a book from the pile, and begins again.


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Myra King lives on Worlds End Highway in South Australia with her rescue greyhound, Sparky. Her poems and short stories, many of which have won awards, have been published in print and online, in literary magazines, anthologies and papers including Writing in a Woman's Voice, Puncher &Wattmann, October Hill NY, Islet, Boston Literary Magazine, Rochford Street Review, EDF, Heron's Nest and San Pedro River Review.