The Woman of Three Holes

Rain had just stopped over Soho, leaving the pavements shining like long mirrors that refused to forget what had passed upon them. Emma Grace stood beneath a lamppost outside the café where no one called her by name anymore. Her coat, an old beige thing that once held the scent of men’s colognes, was buttoned all the way upas if to keep her silences from escaping.

She was forty-two now, with the kind of beauty that had learned how to hide. Once she had been a woman of velvet beds and dim red bulbs; now she was a cleaner in a second-hand bookstore. But even in that quiet shop, among torn pages and dead words, she felt them the three holes inside her being. Not wounds. Not absences. Just quiet openings that time had left behind.

The first hole was in her voice.

It had appeared the night a man laughed while she cried. Since then, her words came out like cracked glass reflecting light but never containing it. People said she spoke softly, but the truth was she feared that sound itself might betray her. So she spoke less, letting others fill the air with their safe noises. In the hole of her voice, silence had made a home soft, watchful, and infinitely deep.

The second hole lived in her heart.

It wasn’t broken; it was simply too wide. Love, whenever it came, slipped through like water through cupped hands. Men had entered and exited, leaving echoes of perfume, cigarette ash, or laughter that didn’t belong to her. Each encounter added a layer of polish to her sadness. She had learned to kiss without leaning, to smile without warmth, to listen without expecting. “You’re perfect,” one man had told her once and that was precisely when she knew she wasn’t human to him anymore. She was an echo chamber. A hole that returned the sound but not the feeling.

And the third hole the deepest was the one she couldn’t name.

It wasn’t in her body. It was behind her eyes, where memories were supposed to live. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw someone half-erased, as if her reflection had been smudged by another hand. That hole was her forgetting. Her private eclipse. Through it, all her years as a worker in the red-light streets had drained into something wordless. Sometimes, when she looked into the London fog, she thought she saw it staring back a hollow face made of vapor and time.

Emma often sat by her small window in Brixton, watching buses slide past like tired whales. She had a habit of talking to herself in whispers, not to hear answers but to test if her voice still existed. “This city eats sound,” she’d murmur, “and keeps nothing but echoes.”

Outside, a boy played a tin whistle near the station. His notes rose, trembling, into the grey afternoon. She closed her eyes. The music slipped into her a brief, piercing warmth that filled the holes for a heartbeat. Then it faded, as all things did.

One afternoon, a customer in the bookshop found an old volume of Sylvia Plath’s poems and asked her opinion. Emma had read it many times, but she merely said, “She knew about holes too.” The man smiled, not understanding, and left. When she returned the book to its shelf, her fingers lingered on the paper, as though it pulsed. Maybe the poets are the only ones who survive their emptiness, she thought.

That night, rain came again the kind that doesn’t fall but whispers. Emma walked back through narrow alleys, her shoes clicking softly on the wet cobblestones. Outside a closed bakery, she saw a homeless girl huddled beneath cardboard. The girl looked up. Their eyes met for a second, and Emma felt something move inside like a forgotten window being opened after years. She placed her scarf on the girl’s knees and kept walking. But as she turned the corner, she realized the holes inside her were no longer silent. They were humming.

The hole of her voice began to breathe. Words she had not spoken in years started forming not for anyone, but for herself.

The hole of her heart stirred like soil before rain.

And the hole behind her eyes that space of forgetting filled with a faint light, as if memory had forgiven her.

For the first time, she did not feel ashamed of what she had been.

The city had touched her in every cruel way it could, and still she remained breathing, seeing, holding small mercies in her palms. That was enough.

Weeks later, the bookstore owner asked if she would read aloud at the poetry night they were hosting. Emma hesitated but agreed. When the night arrived, the shop was dim, candles flickering among books. She stood behind the wooden podium, palms damp, heart slow. The audience was small, kind-faced. She opened the worn Plath volume and read a few lines. Her voice, though fragile, filled the room like rising smoke.

When she finished, silence hung not empty, but whole.

Someone clapped, then another, until the small room became warm with sound. Emma smiled, not shyly, but as one who has met herself again after years apart.

Later, walking home, she passed the same lamppost where she used to wait for strangers. The rain had stopped, but the pavement still gleamed. She looked down and saw her reflection ripple in a shallow puddle. For the first time, she didn’t look away.

She whispered, “The holes are not empty. They are just spaces where the light comes in.”

And as she stepped into the night,

London vast, bruised, and endlessly alive seemed to breathe with her.

The holes within her no longer hurt; they sang.

And in that soft, hidden music,

Emma Grace finally became whole.