I Who Have Never Known Men

The narrator states that it will be difficult to relay the next events “because of the shock and amazement” they evoke (66). A guard slips a key into the hatch where food is passed to the women. Just then, a frighteningly loud siren sounds, and the guards rush out of the bunker, leaving the keys in the lock and enabling the women to escape. After racing up a staircase, the narrator is outside for the first time in her life. The landscape is a vast plain that none of the women recognize. They are not even sure if they are on Earth.

The women are frightened, unsure if the guards will return, and they huddle together. The narrator, however, stands apart from them, and she volunteers to go back downstairs and retrieve food. Anthea joins her, and they search the prison’s other rooms, finding tools, supplies, canned goods, and a freezer full of meat.

As the narrator and Anthea bring up supplies, the women arrange bushes and blankets around a hole in the ground, creating a private toilet. Although the narrator never understood the women’s discomfort with public defecation, she knows her invitation to the new bathroom means inclusion in the women’s world.