Fall 2017

House of Virgins

Samantha Stiers

Silent

Dispatch needs to clarify. Several virgins held hostage by their own desire? Yes, we will send someone right away. But we need to know. Please, try to stay calm, ma’am. Is this a purely physical desire, or is it a desire for spiritual union as well?

The caller says that only a man could dream of separating the body and the soul.

The emergency response team is silent on its way up the canyon of tall gray stone and still green leaves that holds the house that traps the virgins. Even the flash of sirens is silent. It is the silence of a virgin touching herself in her narrow bed in her parents’ house late at night, her body rigid in efforts to suppress even the softest sigh, the creak of the bedsprings.

The men mute the sirens out of respect for the virgins. Passersby, rubberneckers, know such a long line of ambulances can mean only one thing: that more girls, for whatever reason, have been starved as surely as anyone deprived of food. And starvation is always a most private thing.

 



Venus Opposing Saturn

In the house there is one virgin who is fat and dirty, not like the others. She does not want to be beautiful. She wants to survive. While the other virgins lie on the swept-dirt floor and moan about being virgins, she pleasures herself with grunts and cries, sounding more grief-stricken than pleasured.

Another virgin, tall and thin and severe, who will later become a stockbroker, lies in her white gown and contemplates the actions she could take against the fat virgin—petitions, signs, rallies. The stockbroker virgin is not cut out to be a virgin. It is her parents’ dream for her. Her virginity is a life stage she has to get over with before moving to bigger and better things.

 



Home Remedies

Tinctures, bought once a week at the little store in town. Catnip, skullcap. These are general nervines, calming potions.

The long-term virgins inject lidocaine up themselves to numb their desire. There is a black market for desire treatments, most addictive—perpetuating their own use, they relieve nothing. The lidocaine is more useful, injections that sting, but the desire never fully goes away. It is because the girls cannot find the source—they would have to inject their brains, souls, hearts.

 



Sugar-Cube Desire

Most of the virgins do not admit any desire. Their desire is a sugar cube removed from their bodies and hidden in an unused portion of their brains, sectioned off with police tape.

The stockbroker thinks that is nonsense. She is matter-of-fact about it. She has desire, yes, but it is well managed. Who or what does the managing, or how well they do it, she cannot articulate, but that is what she repeats to herself all night—well managed, well managed. The noise of the fat virgin, though, reminds her of a time when she was not so well managed, that ill management, as a concept, might exist.

 



Memory

The collective soul of women remembers with horror the sexual famines that swept the land in their mothers’ time, how even the bees died, and how in newly made deserts their mothers sat in relief tents and submitted to desperate experimental treatments: blood transfusions from those who had just made love.

But it was no use. Joy and comfort were not carried in the blood. The virgins who died were autopsied. Their brains were enlarged, their hearts shrunken, their dopamine and oxytocin depleted. Supplements were given to the survivors: they made no difference.

 



True Starvation

The EMTs want to respect the privacy of the virgins, although it may be privacy is what they had too much of—still, they must be allowed their secrets, particularly their secret hungers, they must not be taken from the darkness straight into the light, or the pain of exposure will be too much, and they will die in their own way, not as blatantly, not as physically, as those suffering “true starvation,” the only kind of starvation allowed on men’s news—oh, if women ran the news, how many kinds of famines, of epidemics, would make the headlines—not only the deprivation of the stomach, but also the plagues of forced virginity that descend on many lands, and the many illnesses that result from them and are attributed by male doctors to female irrationality.

 



Uterine Fire

The men are businesslike in the back of ambulances, assembling IV drips, tubing, masks, and siphons. They see thwarted desire as a mechanical problem only. They have been trained to see it as mechanical, because they are professionals. A professional man does not feel desire for the slender virgin in tattered white cotton whom he lifts from her own uterine fire. There can be a certain detached tenderness, but once the virgin has been taken to the treatment center, intubated, her hormone levels balanced, the professional man must look away. The place between her legs is so small and smooth, and he tries to pretend that the many nights she has held her desire tight within herself have not given her a certain scent, and he pretends he does not smell it as he lifts her gown. This is being a professional. Her wound may tremble as he dilates it to prepare her for whoever will break the seal, but it is not like the trembling of his lover. The virgin’s trembling, the EMT knows, is from fever, serious illness. He must not be aroused by her suffering, although it looks like joy. Virgin bodies do not operate like ours. They need different nutrients, they are prone to different diseases. Their pain and their pleasure look the same.

One man is scared. He has never liberated a virgin from her own desire before.

 



Tourmaline Crystals

The virgins await one of two things, their rescue or their rape. There are men who trawl the mountains looking for caches of virgins to rape. Then the women would not be virgins, although there was a group of women who claimed otherwise. Their virginity had shattered during their rapes, been ground to dust and borne away on the night breeze. Now they found their virginity in the minerals of the sea, in tourmaline crystals, in the moon’s cool light. They gathered up its shining dust and put it in their beds to prevent nightmares.

That’s not real virginity, though, sniffed the unraped virgins. And that was the great schism of 1912, between virgins who believed virginity to be a purely physical phenomenon, determined by men, and virgins who believed virginity was a state of mind, a state of spirit.

 



Madness

Whatever the condition of the fat virgin’s hymen, surely she is satiated, the virgins think.

What no one knows, not even the fat girl, is that her hunger only grows each time she touches herself, because her body recognizes echoes of love empty of substance. This drives her wild—recognizing the reminder of what she wants, but seeing the actual thing nowhere to be found. The substance in her blood that desires love rises with each futile, desperate touch, driving her near madness, the thirst of a sailor drinking seawater.

And so she starts ordering in.

 



Aspirations

The other virgins had imagined their virginity from childhood. Before they knew what a virgin was, they poked and prodded at themselves, hoping to make themselves into virgins. They knew a virgin was a special and pitied member of society. They and their sisters dressed up in nightgowns, playing the virgin game, waving their dolls and yelling out the window, “We’re virgins, we’re virgins, save us!” until their embarrassed mothers made them shush and get dressed, it was almost noon.

In adolescence they dreamed of being on the news, in the papers, on made-for-TV movies and after-school specials that warned girls to lose their virginity, yes, not too soon, but also not too late. They wanted to be interviewed from hospital beds with tubes running up their noses, white, white, the hospital beds, their faces, their gowns, everything white.

 



Clinical Signs

What are Virginity Treatment Centers like?

Virginity, like starvation, leaches nutrients from the body. What are the body’s and mind’s reactions to such deprivations? The clinical signs?

These days there are telethons for virginity relief efforts.

 



Dessert

The first time the virgins hear a knock on the rickety gray wooden door at night, they tense. It is either the rescuers or the rapists.

But it is only a restaurant delivery boy. The virgins are confused, because no restaurant delivers this far up in the mountains. The house of virgins has no telephone, no Internet. But here is the fat virgin lumbering up to answer the door—naked, her long teats swaying.

The minute she accepts her order, the other virgins wish they had ordered some too. Not because they want her food—a glass platter bearing a three-tiered cake with pink icing and a maraschino cherry on top—but because the delivery boy sees her nakedness and her hunger, and treats her so kindly, treats her as though she were human, instead of the ball of need that she so obviously is, that all of them are.

The cake itself scares them. It looks like their insides laid bare. It looks like the parts of them where their virginity and their hunger dwell. And yet they can see a sort of innocence that the cake has, the way it displays its cherry so openly. The cake only wants union, it only wants to give pleasure, and in that way, it is much like all of them.

“This is exposure therapy,” the fat virgin tells the delivery boy when he comes by again, and she answers the door again, naked. “I’m exposing them all to the idea of food.”

 



Pregnant with Themselves

It is fullness the virgins crave. Nightgowns ripped off, the hard bite on the nipple, things rammed up them until their insides are annihilated into smoothness, the hot squirt of vital liquid in the vestibule of their innermost chamber, the deep itch finally scratched, and then, the hard, tight drum of their stomachs as a baby begins to grow, and in a reverse of the process, the birth, the destruction of the pelvic wall.

“Screw that,” says the fat virgin. “It’s called eating. Makes you full.”

“You’ve just given up,” says a virgin. “You’ve given up on our rescue.”

“Are you a Disney princess?” says the fat virgin. “What I do, girls, is called self-rescue.”

“I think it’s called self-abuse,” someone says primly. “In both senses of the term.”

But after this, the virgins realize they are running low on the fantasies they deny having. Each one is sick of her same old fantasies. So they write down their fantasies on scraps of paper, mix them up in a glass jar, and each virgin draws a new fantasy and shares it aloud.

The virgins discover they dream of heated dildos, nipple clamps, being fed with a baby bottle through their cunts. (That last one is weird, all the virgins agree, except for the fat virgin, who thinks it is the only halfway original one.)

 



Forecast

There is only one bed in the house of virgins, and the fat virgin commandeers it for herself.

She was raised by a mother who kept her in bed at the slightest sign of illness, and now she believes that beds, carved mahogany four-poster beds, beds with white muslin sheets and canopies of mosquito netting, are powerful tinctures, not only for the body but for the soul. And she knows that something in her is very, very ill, and so she gets into bed and stays there.

Soon the other virgins have to be in bed too.

They build beds for themselves out of whatever they see, sun-bleached rocks and twigs they gather from the woods. It is difficult to lift the heavy stones with their starved, parched white arms, and they often enlist the fat virgin to do it for them.

Under the stones a flat space has been made in the damp, rust-colored pine needles, crawling with ants and grubs.

It is true, the virgins are ill. Ill with a disease they nickname the purity nettles, a disease that makes them feel their insides pricking with messes of dry nettles. Because homeopathy is the rule of the mountains, the virgins gather nettles in their white skirts and soak them in well water along with flat stones to make an autumn tonic.

The tonic strengthens but does not soothe, and the fat virgin suggests something different—peppermint tea, and the last of the ripe, juicy strawberries out back. The virgins are afraid to eat the strawberries, afraid something so wet and red might compromise their virginity. If like cures like, the fat virgin reminds them, surely like will preserve like.

The virgins fall for this and eat.

The virgins need to know when. When their lovers will come.

The fat virgin will not help them divine this. So they gather in a clearing in the woods and hold hands around the flattest, most sun-drenched stone they can find to call a sundial. But they do not understand how to read it, how to mark time upon it, and at high noon all they see is the eternity of stone awash in sun.

So that is their answer, they think. Their virginity is eternal and hot and scalding as the noon sun. They go back home and weep.

 



Survivors

The famine survivors who became our mothers rejoiced that we would not be deprived. Imagine their horror when a generation of us, carrying memories picked up in the womb, played “virgin” with our dolls, tore our white nightgowns to look like the victims. Our mothers hit us and only bought us colored clothing.

What are the long-term effects of virginity, ask scientists, psychologists, gynecologists, suicidologists. We have discussed the starved ones who forget to eat. They live as invalids. The tragedy of virginity, all agree, is that it can last a lifetime, but does not kill its victim.

Old women confess to senile husbands that they were once virgins.

 



Strum of Joy

The fat virgin, unlike the other virgins, does not much care for nature. As a child she had been carried away by its beauties, but ever since her body had changed, a numb white haze covered all her feelings, including the strum of joy that used to shiver across her lower belly when she heard aspen leaves rustle. When she and the virgins go gathering nettles, she always finds herself far behind, sweating, needing to rest.

Sometimes a virgin will be polite and show her a broken bit of glass they found at the old hippie camp, or the first strawberry to turn red, insisting she taste it. But the fat virgin knows these are false, pitying kindnesses, brought on by the warmth of sun on the virgins’ thin arms, warmth that soothes their desire, desire that often makes them so cruel, snappish like creatures in pain.

 



A Wedding under an Aspen Grove

The virgins are not without comfort. There is the earth itself. They run outside in summer, in clean muslin nightgowns, barefoot, and sit under the aspens.

The virgins love the trembling aspens. To sit in a grove of them, peel off their bark, breathe the scent of their shivering leaves. Our men, they call them. The virgins are tall and thin and white too, with heads that tremble. They will make a good couple, the girls and the aspen grove.

 



Inside

The virgins’ eggs are freshwater pearls. They harden into gnarly, glossy iridescent knobs, and the pearls are not sad, not sad at all, that no seawater moistens them.

 



Scar Tissue

And there are those who claim no desire, who remove it with coat hangers and quinine, who give their money to a man who claims he can make them never yearn again, but later, deep in pelvic scar tissue, find it again, buried and therefore unable to ask and therefore unable to be sated; the starving person who does not feel hunger is in the worst shape of all. The therapy then is to cut back the scar tissue, uncover and nourish the desire. This is terrifying to the victim because she knows she may feel it in full again, and, as before, be unable to satiate herself.

 



For the Sake of Science

In order to learn, scientists perform autopsies on virgins. They find the muscle of the women’s hearts stiff and gray, having never been made to beat hard at the promise of love.

 



Courage

The virgins bear up bravely, in the way that women do. They do not lie abed after waking: to do so would be to invite disaster. Instead they march down to the spring. They wash in the cold water under the pearlescent sky. They try not to look at each other’s naked bodies, as suppressed desire has a way of diverting itself onto new objects.

The cold water helps a great deal. They make sure their muslin dresses are stiff and clean and starched, having hung over the clothesline, scratchy and smelling of mountain air. They take very little for breakfast, some roots, and sarsaparilla. They brush their teeth with goldenseal. They make all the beds in the house tight, changing the linens daily. They send the virgin who seems to be struggling most down to the stream to wring the washing by hand.

After all this, they are satisfied their bodies have been taken care of, in all ways except the one that is needed most.

The long, hot mountain summer days are dangerous. They are languid. Hummingbirds zip past, linger over a flower. It is unsafe for the virgins to have nothing to do.

Really, their whole house is perfect except for the fat virgin, who sometimes interrupts their mooning by stomping past for something to eat. She is desire itself, and not a beautiful feminine desire, but a raw, messy hunger. She reminds them of their own festering needs. They pretend she is not there.

This whole virgin ideal would be so elegant and tragic if not for her.

 



News

The headline in the typo-prone Mountain Times read: “‘It Was Wounderful,’ Says Human Touched by Another.”

The article told about how a human had been irritable and depressed, and resigned to living this way, thinking he was happy. And then another human had offered regularly to touch him in places that it had not occurred to him needed to be touched, and when she did so, he became much happier. And he did the same for her.

The virgins thought it was a fascinating article and tacked it up on their wooden wall. But they didn’t understand why they liked it so much.

 



Witch Burning

Afternoons, the virgins sit on the porch and whittle. The things they whittle come out firm, smooth, long, comfortable looking. They fit the hand so nicely. Help sticks, the virgins name them. They carry their help sticks everywhere. To dinner, where they sit beside their tin plates, dressed in quilt scraps. Even to bed the help sticks go, the way girls in olden times carried hot irons to bed with them at night.

There is peace in the house of virgins.

Here Stockbroker Virgin draws the line. Voodoo, she calls the help sticks. Are you virgins or witches, she demands. “Virgins!” sob the ever-hormonal young girls. “Oh virgins! Always and forever virgins!”

“Then bring your little dolls and follow me!” cries SV.

Numbly, hysterically, the girls walk out to the dirt out back where Stockbroker Virgin has built a bonfire. They tremble, recoil, clutch their help sticks tighter as they see what Stockbroker Virgin wants them to do. And then the first virgin steps forward and casts her help stick into the fire. They all do it, and their tears blur with the blurred heat of the fire, their bare feet kick up plumes of black dirt.

 



Glowing Igloo

It was pain. None other than pain, hard pain, against the bone.

The fat virgin was not as young as the others. One night, above the tin sink and scratched mirror, she found streaks of white in her black hair, and knew that hard want had aged her body prematurely. Where had her youth gone? She had spent it here, eating, building circles of fat around her core, a body igloo, impenetrable. In the center of the igloo may glow firelight, but who can penetrate the bricks of white ice?

The other virgins were glowing igloos too, although their bodies were thin.

That night she joined the girls for their meal of sorghum and bone broth. They eyed her wearily. Without bags of white flour and brown sugar, the fat virgin’s desire grated, bone on bone when the ligaments are worn away.

 



Liberation

If want cannot be satisfied, one solution is not to want. If one cannot stop wanting, a solution is to remove desire at the root.

Virgins sharpen shards of tin down by the stream. They sleep with them under their pillows, running their fingers along the jagged edges, pain that distracts from the impacted desire and helps them sleep. They think about the day when, with blood and pain, they will be free. When the ones who are not strong enough to free themselves will be held down by the others, legs spread.

They will clean each other’s wounds with cold spring water, hold rags to stop each other’s bleeding, stitch each other with spiderwebs, and finally the virgins will look upon each other with tenderness, and, in injury, each will be touched.

 



Sterilized in Flame

Because it is more acceptable for women to hurt than to desire.

Some of the shards are sharp enough now, ready to be rinsed in the

stream and sterilized in flame.

The fat virgin, in secret, calls the authorities.

 



At the Rescue

The EMTs are tender with the virgins.

“Does—does it—hurt?” an EMT asks.

“Does it hurt?” repeats a virgin, confused.

“Does it hurt to be a virgin?”

 



Crone

He means, they suppose, is it lonely.

It is taboo to ask a virgin about loneliness. It is offensive, invasive, and in poor taste. Like asking a circumcised woman the exact perimeters, the exact secret physical effects, of her wound. We are supposed only to empathize, to hide our morbid curiosity. But of course, how can we truly empathize with virgins, we cannot begin to imagine, we who have not had our tender inner places scorched by purity’s white fire. When we see virgins walk down the street, we can’t help but speculate about their loneliness, for this itself is the horror and the thrill of virginity. When a woman has made love, she forever carries a part of her lover inside her; nomatter what happens later she is not alone in her body.

Virginity is a “purification chamber” where women’s inner parts are held over solitude’s white flame, and their hearts too, and the resulting nerve damage is called “loneliness.” When a virgin has been tortured by the flame (which is her own desire) long enough, her flesh withers, until she is only smooth bone, and does not feel “loneliness” anymore. The other virgins envy and fear these crones. The younger virgins have taken on whiteness as a sort of spiritual fashion statement, but the crones have become white. The girl-virgins, despite their pale skin and white gowns, retain some juicy redness in their hearts and other parts. The crones do not.

How do the virgins survive it? Some of them take the pulpy redness of themselves, tenderized by salt, dip brushes into it, and make art. Some of them do not survive.

If touched, can a crone regrow her flesh? Can bone feel again?

 



Protocol

The EMT who was nervous becomes even more so as he kneels beside the first virgin. Provisions are limited. The team did not anticipate this severity. What would he want, he asks himself, were he a virgin in this condition?

He would want the rescuer to say he was trying his best to get her what she needed. That he was going to stay with her until more help came. That he was so sorry he could not give her that help. He would want his rescuer to cry with him.

He does all these things. But they do not work. So, near evening, out of sheer desperation, he designs his own experimental treatment for Stage III virginity: he holds her. He does not get the idea from any treatment manual. It comes to him when he is too scared and exhausted to think of anything else. And somehow, although he has none of the requisite siphons, tubes, and supplements, the holding seems to stabilize her.

All that night, he moves from virgin to virgin, holding each for three minutes, then starting at the beginning. Contact rations. During a break, in a moment of grandiosity, he imagines naming his new treatment after himself—designing studies, writing up his holding protocol in journals.

 



The Wedding

Virgins are not the only ones with dreams. EMTs have dreams too, especially the anxious ones.

They dream of virgins, of taking one virgin, and making her a bed. Of building it with their own hands, smoothing the cherrywood posts in the lathe until they are curved and smooth, of hammering it together, the warm, fresh scent of hurt wood, and even washing the muslin sheets in cold water, for their virgins, their very own. They will have their own houses, shining cherrywood, white goats out back, carved hope chest in the corner, cool stream.

The virgins will lie in the beds first, and it will not even occur to them to invite the EMTs in. But night comes, and there is nowhere else for them to sleep.

 



Spring Again

“Get up,” the stockbroker tells the fat virgin. “It’s the rescue.”

“I don’t care,” Fat Virgin sobs.

“Fat Virgin,” says one girl. “Don’t you want—don’t you want—”

“No.”

“You don’t want it at all?”

“No.”

It is spring in the mountains now, because during virginity plagues the seasons follow the minds, bodies, of young girls, change quickly, and are what certain men call abnormal.

Green leafy breezes blow in through the open windows.

 



Union

The stockbroker virgin also refuses to go outside. She does not need to be carried on a gurney. She will not lose her dignity to EMTs barely old enough to shave. What do those men know of her desires?

The fat virgin weeps in the big bed. The house empties as the virgins are carried out on gurneys one by one.

Never again will the fat virgin know the scent of muslin and sarsaparilla.

A breeze shudders through the house, the breeze of still chilly spring. It is sunset. Time for the fat virgin to become who she has been all along, the goddess of the sunset, the goddess of the blood light that illuminates worlds through dark transformation.

Stockbroker Virgin barely notices. She is preoccupied with her own trouble. I’ve forgotten my name, she whispers, and she paces, her long, narrow feet bare for once, over the smooth gray floorboards. She paces in circles. I’ve forgotten my name.

In the early hours of the morning they lie beside each other, the women who have shed their false names and now have nothing, their phalanx of virgins no longer shielding them from each other, their hatred and hunger burning out until only love remains.

Samantha Stiers has contributed to Conjunctions’ online and print editions as well as to journals such as DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, and Puerto del Sol. She is the recipient of the Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award.

(view contributions by Samantha Stiers)