=16=

We find ourselves now in a place of bare rock, Neena standing dead center of a circle of gathered townsfolk, separated from everyone. For this scene she wears the usual penitent’s garment of rough homespun. She’s barefoot, cold, terrified, hugging herself pointlessly against a relentless and bitter north wind laced with ice pellets.

A man in ministerial black is reading from a list of what are supposedly her grievous sins against the “community of the righteous,” her eternal transgressions against the supernal luminosity (whatever that is), although his voice is all but inaudible over the word-dicing wind, “…a gnostic turpitude” being one of the surviving but crippled phrases still identifiable in the shredded word salad.

No one is really listening anyway, engaged instead in private conversations with whoever stands closest. They are stamping their feet, blowing on their frozen-stiff hands, smoking, sipping steaming mulled ciders, surreptitiously rubbing their privates through their pockets. Their small-talk dominated by local gossip and speculations about the weather, which looks, nearly everyone seems to agree, like the long-expected blizzard is about to hit them with a vengeance.

The sky is grey, flat as a dull knife-blade, and cloudless; there’s a moist chill in the air that seems to presage a merry fall of the wintry white stuff—and just in time for the holidays! The few who disagree, always on the sunny side of any forecast, argue on behalf of an early spring, calling forth the recent evidence of lichens, thinning tree barks, bird sightings, leaf-shadows, groundhogs, and suchlike to support their dubious claims.

Neena, meanwhile, feels the bitter cold like a pair long-nosed pliers squeezing her nipples. She hasn’t bathed in nearly two weeks, kept by her captors as she stands now, all but naked, and living in what amounted to a cramped makeshift cell; in reality, it was a cattle stall, with a dirt floor and some lice-ridden straw. She was raped, repeatedly, at length and in a variety of ways, by all the men (and a number of the women) of the village, anyone who’d a mind to rape her, actually, including children, livestock and house pets. They took their pleasure, if you will, with the captive in accordance with their social standing, top to bottom, from mayor to rag-picker to stray dog. Then, again, maybe she wasn’t raped at all, it depends on the local religious customs in whatever far-flung part of the world she happens to find herself a captive.

Either way, raped or un-raped, it’s obligatory, no two ways about it, that she be the most sexually desirable female of age in the entire village, and, as such, it follows (by routes too complex to trace in their entirety) that her selection in this place of dubious honor (i.e. as a sacrifice) to suffer as chosen victim the indignities at hand mark her as an object, variously, of envy, lust, veneration, sadism, class and racial violence—to name just a few—and not infrequently a combination of all of these and more lurks in the heart (and sexual organs) of any single onlooker.

Neena, for all the communal opprobrium justly or unjustly heaped upon her, is nonetheless without regret for the life she has lived heretofore; even if said life has led her to being appointed, acquired, chosen, or merely (bad)lucked into the role in which she finds herself so unfortunately cast at present. She is still proudly—if fearfully—unrepentant for whatever mistakes she might have made along the way that have resulted in her becoming a so-called “marked woman.”

“I am innocent!” The scapegoat’s perpetual refrain, as if the preposterous nature of that claim in itself weren’t enough to call the blade down on your neck each and every time.

Let’s go further. The perverse truth is that, within certain narrow autoerotic parameters, Neena is, in fact, quite proud, a.k.a. turned-on, at having been chosen to occupy this paradoxically exalted/martyred state. Her general outward bearing, if appropriately humble, as the role proscribes, nonetheless advertises this secret pride, the irresistible tickle of God’s finger surreptitiously diddling around in her own nether parts. 

One can’t help but notice, even envy, even in squalid extremis, her extraordinary beauty, her mild demeanor, her attractive bearing. For instance, the softness of her palms and heels, her pale complexion, the total lack of anything “sinewy” about her, the smooth creaminess of her limbs whose very mention prompts us to the wildest flights of eroto-poetic fancy; in short, the overall impression she radiates of “indoor femininity”—is tangible, in the final analysis, and all the more impressively lubricious for the fact of it being so obvious that even stripped of all cultural markers that would normally be required to hint at it—such as clothes, jewelry, even hairstyle, stripped, as previously noted, naked, in fact, except for the lice-ridden sackcloth such as beggars might wear—that Neena is clearly recognizable to anyone who might be looking on (such as you, dear reader) as being “not someone from ‘round these parts.’”

Perhaps it’s this last observation, more than any of the others, that explains what’s left of the unexplained, or what has previously seemed inexplicable: the attitude of unreasoned, unrelenting hostility in the crowd now gathered around Neena on this chilly morning; for it is obvious that on some level it is perceived by each and every one of them that Neena naturally considers herself superior to them, and, to their shame and rage, they consider her to be so, too.

As might be imagined, these socio-economic considerations have consequences of their own, over and above the strictly religious and erotic. For example, there’s been a great deal of contention (not yet entirely decided incidentally), even among those who you’d think would consider themselves eliminated straight-off from interest due to size, age, and even sex (!), over the division of Neena’s “city finery,” her clothing, accessories, and whatnot, all of it in the latest styles, so coveted and so far outside the reach of these plain and simple country-farming folk. The ultimate dispensation of these effects has led already (and will yet lead) to several incidents of outright violence and initiate bitter feuds that will continue on for generations. In the hopes of effecting some order, the community elders were compelled to convene and debate the matter. Their solution: a series of negotiations, lotteries, and charity auctions have been devised, not, of course, without their supposed fairness already being challenged by claims of bribery and inside double-dealings, but, in the main, fair enough, at least in appearance, that all were satisfied, or nearly all.

As she awaits her imminent immolation, Neena sees her favorite red Bongo  pumps (size six) crammed onto the chafed feet of a large rawboned farm girl, at least six feet tall, the kind of girl usually (and charitably) called “handsome,” to whom they’d gone in exchange for a large hand-sewn quilt, seven bags of barley, four bottles of pickled yams, two jars of sour mash, and an un-weaned calf, although a two hour bumpy ride by mule-cart over unpaved roads to the highway that leads to the nearest mall would have enabled her to purchase the very same shoes on sale for under thirty dollars…and in her size to boot, no pun intended.

At this point, it is probably entirely unnecessary to speculate on the series of circumstantial mishaps that led to Neena’s eventual stranding in this rural hinterland of religious atavism, but the usual can probably be safely deduced: an automotive breakdown, being the most cliché’, but also such things as business meetings gone awry, boyfriend troubles, light plane crashes, general world-weariness, bad vacation choices, simple kidnapping, and the over-utilized (in our humble opinion) journalistic trek to interview a reclusive and eccentric celebrity: an aged or disfigured film star, for instance, or a disgraced politician. Neena may have come to investigate a community of UFO-abductees, conspiracy theorists who are really onto something, or maybe an author of bizarre tales on the run from his own terrifying creations come to life. Or she may have been sent on assignment by a devious editor to report on an anachronistic community made up of exactly the sort of religious kooks before whom she finds herself stripped naked now. The whole “Heart of Darkness/Mister Kurtz" thing, but in this case the editor being part of the dastardly plan all along, even a member of this very community, enlisted to supply a sacrificial victim from among his comely female employees, bwa-haha.

Well, the list just goes on and on.           

In the final analysis, as initially noted at the start of the previous paragraph, it is unnecessary, in all likelihood, to speculate on just what exactly brings Neena to this particular place of bare and forlorn rock, raked by icy winter winds. Suffice to say, here she is, and here she waits, shivering with fear and cold, as a lengthy list of her largely imaginary transgressions are read, and this scene can be used as a starting point for much of what subsequently follows. Here we are supplied with a suitably empty, generic, elemental stage-set, barren and neutral, upon which might be acted out the expiation of so many basically undeserved, and, therefore, all the more inspired, and lubricious of punishments, sacrifices, and sexual murders--any one of which can begin, as it does, right this very moment, with the throwing of the very first sharp-edged stone.

Who will throw it? 

Why you, dear reader.

All you have to do is turn the page.

Amen.