The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

There seemed to be a lot of them around nowadays, women who thought themselves superior, who’d forsaken nice, feminine qualities like meekness and humility.

Some of them were God-fearing, but their main god, the one at whose temple they worshipped most frequently, was violence.

If violence was their god, then the alehouse was their church;

She thought about what they all went through each day: the great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men. How painful it was, and how humiliating.

It struck Robin, listening to Richard reel off these questions, that the villagers were more afraid of the girls themselves than they were of the dogs.

“And if you call yourselves good Christian people, you’d be kind to them instead of spreading vicious stories.”

“We went out when we weren’t supposed to, we were too free, and this—all of this—is our punishment. It has nothing to do with the idea of us becoming dogs, and everything to do with the fact of us being girls.”