The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

“It’s not our business to know what the inside of the vicar looks like,”

and that he, Pete Darling, was the greatest hater of all.

Others believed they had the God-given right for their demands to be met, their greed satisfied, but Robin didn’t share this view. He made no claims on the world; it owed him nothing.

Anne was loved by all in the burning but inattentive way that children love their mothers.

“Yes, she says she’d rather be a boy. Or at least a woman who’s allowed to live like a man, like Joan of Arc. Or failing that, a pebble.” “A pebble?” “Yes. She says pebbles look very peaceful and are unencumbered by ugly things like blood and breasts.”

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.

“The truth is like a water creature,” he continued. “Too large for any single man to catch. He can take hold of one tentacle, or a silver tail, or a fin, but he’ll never catch the whole creature, not on his own.”

Perhaps the dream was not a message from God, as he had supposed, but was in fact merely a dream,

What if they set up a terrible dog dominion, where people lived in servitude?

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.

he’d rather they were dogs than damaged girls. Dogs lived ignorantly and happily; they didn’t know the extent of human pain. He wanted to preserve them from all the fears and the threats with which life might present them.

the girls frightened him to death. They had done so even before they were dogs.

“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.”