Lost Girls by Graham Wilson

ancestry, of
gods and warriors, indomitable spirits who could survive in this
land and, when the winter ice was gone from the fiords, these brave
souls would sail out in their ships to raid and gather resources
for their families, sometimes they would discover new and unknown
places, even whole new worlds. These legends lived on in her mind
far beyond her childhood. They gave her a soul filled with
wanderlust and, as she grew from a child to a woman, that restless
soul ate at her.
    In the rest of
Elin’s life things changed too as she grew, though these memories
had blurred edges. Around when she was ten her mother got really
sick. They tried treating her and all her hair fell out. She got
better for a while but got sick again. This time she never got
better.
    Elin remembered
that awful cold day, coming into winter, when they stood around the
hole in icy ground, throwing in gifts and bouquets of flowers. Her
mother’s body was wrapped and placed in a small boat, the boat her
mother and father had sailed in together around the lakes and
fiords of Sweden and Norway, from when they had first met as two
children in the local village school. Then the boat and her mother
were covered in icy dirt. Her father spoke of how her mother could
sail the boat over wide oceans, a new warrior queen.
    Her mother,
Elle, was the love of her father’s life. Their family was her, a
brother and a little sister, along with her parents. They had all
been very happy until her mother got sick.
    Both her father
and mother loved the early Norse customs. So, on that sad day,
following the way of their warrior ancestors from time immemorial,
they had done their own boat burial. Her father had dug a huge
hole, it had taken him days. Then he had placed his Elle and the
much loved boat together into the ground, so the boat could carry
her into an afterlife where her father had a dream of meeting her
again when he made his own journey. It was what he had promised her
as she lay dying and he had faithfully fulfilled his promise.
    The years that
followed had been hard and lonely years for them all; their
mother’s bright smiles and golden hair had lit up all their lives
and her absence was a great hole.
    But life had
continued on. They had moved a year later to Stockholm, where her
father had got work in a factory. Elin had moved from the village
school to a big school in the city and got good grades. But all her
friends, family and teachers said that Elin had a restless soul, a
sort of wanderlust, endlessly dreaming of the Viking legends and
how she could in some part recreate them in her life to come. She
had taken her mother’s looks, not in totality, but the golden hair
and the blue eyes were the legacy. Her sister had the rest of her
mother’s face, the chin and nose; Elin’s were stronger, like her
father’s. But Elin was striking in her own way if not a full
classic beauty. And she could sense the power it gave her to make
her way in the world.
    She had her
first man when she was fourteen, a teacher in her school. She had
stayed behind after lessons; working away at her desk, she could
feel something inside her drawing her to him. He was married but
young and handsome, and she wanted to know what this boy girl thing
was about. He had come up behind her as she sat at her desk and,
after initially putting his hands on her shoulders, he had fondled
her breasts. She was a willing participant and had encouraged his
advances. They had ended on the carpet in the classroom, with
blinds drawn and doors locked to keep any curious passers-by out.
It happened a few more times before she moved on to other pursuits.
She learned that moving on from people was easy to do, even though
they shared her body none got deep into her soul to the place of
her dreams.
    After that she
had experimented with other men and a couple of women, learning how
to pleasure her body and theirs. One of her girlfriends got her a
prescription for the pill which she had then taken