The Hounding

by Xenobe Purvis

If violence was their god, then the alehouse was their church; they congregated there most evenings.

Now it was brilliant morning, and he saw her more clearly than ever. He understood that she was beautiful.

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.

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.”