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Show 360 But how could I tell him, knowing what he thought of me. He would only tell me that I had asked for it - which I had and remind me what I was - a hussy. The people in the group called him prophet. His prophecy about Aunt Kathy's baby had been fulfilled, along with many others. And he had predicted what I would be as surely, as accurately as any prophet. Perhaps, then, I had been made for some mysterious, dark purpose that only my father and God Himself understood. Or perhaps I had willed it to happen. I had been so attracted to him. Maybe some black corner of myself had begged for this. Maybe I had given up too easily, willed my arms and legs to heaviness, wanting to taste evil, to challenge all I had been taught. How long had the darkness been a resource, a place of comfort where suffering could be held off? Perhaps, then, my fate had begun long before tonight, long before I began working for my own money and strutted about the cafe, long before I had been drawn to him, this stranger. "Beware of the stranger," my father had said more times than I could count. In my heart I had not believed in strangers. I had believed in human beings, colored or white, God-fearing or not - that we formed the family of man. And now I pondered this, but my idealism held. There had to be something human about this two-legged animal. But his carnal parts were engraved on the raw places of my body, in the deep wounds of my soul. He was a wolf and he had cQiaght me. Perhaps I had stopped running home, had given up because I knew the door was locked, closed to me, the hussy. I stood in the dim hallway, studying my parents' bedroom door. I touched my bruised lips, my matted hair, remembering the dankness between my legs. |