The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

He had not done anything wrong, and yet here he was, ashamed. That was the cunning power of girls, he thought. They turned a strong man weak. They made a good man penitent.

He saw before him a plain girl, unexceptional in almost every way, but when his eyes met hers his insides leapt like a salmon and his body stopped working. He was amazed by her, and ashamed of his amazement. He dropped his cap. His ears burned.

They were funny and loud. Their laughter came in shouts. He was enchanted by them, even over the space of a single meal.

“You’ll fall in love,” she said at last, “but the love will be brief.”

They wanted to live—loudly, freely.

The badger had made a mockery of them.

but this sound unsettled him. This was no dog. It was a person barking, a person deranged into believing themself a dog.

He was beguiled by her abandon. He wanted to watch her eat forever.

They knew nothing of frustration, of suffering. He was the only one who knew.

She thought about what they all went through each day: the great, gruelling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men.

“Don’t be so ridiculous, sir. We live in an enlightened age. Stories of this sort belong in the past.”

He put his face in his hands. His wife would think him so weak.

That was what had frightened him the most: they were not mere doltish dogs, they were girls with teeth and claws.

But girls who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.

For a moment, he saw how he could become like everyone else. He could make things up, feeding the villagers’ appetites for stories about the sisters and their odd, demonic ways. Perhaps he would even start believing his own tales. Lies could be told with such liberating ease—they tasted better on the tongue than hard facts.

Yes, they’d tell each other, the devil’s at work again—the new farmhand, so guileless and sweet, has been seduced by the eldest dog-sister.

He picked up Mary first, who gave him a disgusted look, as though she was being torn too early from a game.

“I love Anne Mansfield,” he said. “And I knew Pete Darling wouldn’t rest until he’d ruined her. I couldn’t let that happen.”