The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

Last summer a great rumour spread to us that some young girls … in the Oxfordshire countryside had been seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs. —Dr. John Friend, “Letter to the Editor, concerning a Tale of Rare Convulsions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1701)

All he wanted was some sign from them that they acknowledged him. That they saw him for what he knew himself to be: a man, a strong man, in the prime of health. A good man, God-fearing, who had been visited by an angel. Not someone to be ignored. He didn’t like the way they looked at each other. It was as though they spoke a silent language he couldn’t understand; it unsettled him. It made him feel less strong, less good. All he wanted was to be seen.

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.

The feeling was of triumph, and brilliance, and total, blissful possession. It felt like ruling and serving simultaneously.

Happiness was frail and flimsy: a petal, a whisper. Hardship was constant. It was muscular and loud.

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

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. To be forced to hold your dead friend aloft because it was thought that you, in your smallness and stupidity, might not realise that this could be your fate. It made her tense and pale with rage.

little tasks were the foot soldiers in the ongoing battle against despair.

That was what had frightened him the most: they were not mere doltish dogs, they were girls with teeth and claws. Girls had crazy whims and grudges—these ones especially. He didn’t trust them. They made him afraid.

Girls—normal human girls—people could contend with; they were weak and small. And dogs too could be trained. But girls who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.

“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.”