A short story.

MARILYN got through her childhood as quickly as she possibly could.

She mastered puberty by filling out her plain school uniform before she was a teenager, and inhabited the body of a middle-aged, overweight woman by the time she reached her twenty-first birthday.

Swapping school plaids for sterile nurses’ uniforms only meant Marilyn had more room to fill.

“The unveiling of her flesh was a physical pleasure she didn’t know how to enjoy.”

She maintained her weighty hourglass beneath a cotton waist belt, her figure diminished by the enormous regulation veils she starched religiously and spent more time on than the other girls and their hours of make-up.

Marilyn sterilised equipment twice as long as the other trainees, and never scowled when rostered on for back-to-back ‘Dirty Nurse’.

It was during one such marathon that Matron noted the size of Marilyn’s stout red hands as she carved paths of cleanliness throughout the wards.

Both women had been trained to polarise cleanliness and dirtiness. Matron simply recognised a sterile girl when she saw one, and knew she had little to teach Marilyn when it came to the simple rules of cleaning up after life’s messes, and doing it without fuss. Not with a minimum of fuss, but with absolutely none…

214 of 7621 words. Unlock the rest of this story by purchasing Michael’s Closet His, Closet Hers: Collected Stories.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved.