I Who Have Never Known Men

An old woman sits alone in a wood-paneled underground room, reading book prefaces.

An old woman sits alone in a wood-paneled underground room, reading book prefaces. When she encounters expressions of gratitude, she thinks of Anthea—a woman who sat on a mattress sewing with thread of plaited hair, who recognized her ignorance and patiently taught her everything she could. The narrator begins to sob, her first tears in a lifetime, calling Anthea's name into the silence. She grasps, decades too late, that she has loved, that she is capable of suffering, that she is human. Her story, she decides, matters as much as Hamlet's. The cancer in her belly grants her perhaps a month. She sits at the big table and begins to write.

A caged girl invents desire and discovers she has no masters

As far back as she can recall, she has lived in the bunker—an underground cage holding forty women, watched by silent male guards in threes. She is the youngest, the only child, her puberty arrested at its threshold: no periods, barely formed breasts, no name. The women refuse to explain love or sex. Isolated and furious, she notices one guard is different—younger, blue-eyed—and begins inventing elaborate stories about him that trigger a brief, overwhelming burst of pleasure she chases nightly. This secret inner world transforms her. When Dorothy, the eldest woman, demands to know the secret, the narrator refuses. In refusing, she grasps that Dorothy has no power—the cage's only real authority is the whip. The night she impulsively reaches for another woman in despair, the whip cracks at her for the first time, teaching her that even the impulse to be held is forbidden.

The narrator turns her pulse into the women's secret clock

She approaches Anthea, the brightest of the women—a former nurse-in-training—and demands honest conversation. Anthea shares what little they know: forty strangers from different places, drugged, imprisoned for unknown reasons. Their discussion sparks a question about time. The narrator notices the guards' shifts never align with the women's sleeping cycles. Anthea mentions that a healthy heart beats roughly seventy-two times per minute. The narrator begins counting—first consciously, then automatically, even in sleep. She discovers their artificial days last between fifteen and eighteen hours, with random variations. Something locks into place inside her: a mechanism alerting her every seventy beats. The women adopt her internal clock, establishing their own twenty-four-hour time. When food arrives at what her heart says is midnight, someone always jokes about the late dinner.

A siren screams, the guards vanish, and one girl acts It happens during a routine meal delivery. A guard slides his key into the hatch lock—and at that instant, a terrifying wail fills the…