The Pygmy Giant

by Kevlin Henney

“Evie, virginity is precious. It’s not something to be given away freely — you can’t get it back.”

Evie’s mother offered today’s breakfast homily with burnt toast. There seemed no end to the advice sandwiched into the summer between school and university — morality, money, contraception, cooking, computers.

Her mother struggled as much with their bills as she did with their rattling PC. But sometimes she was right. Evie did need a good laptop. The preloved netbook was powerful enough to run the web-design software she planned to use. Her spreadsheet held promising quarterly forecasts for each coming year. She had no wish to be a pauper to her education, a slave to her loans.

Her virginity? Why hold onto something she didn’t want? And if she was going to get rid of it, why not profit from it? As her mother said, it was not something to be given away freely.

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Kevlin Henney writes shorts and flashes and drabbles of fiction that have appeared in various places online and on tree.