Elf (Part 10): The boys

*

The day before her covenant class Elf stayed late at the gym and has to walk home in full dusk. There weren't very many bad parts in the town, the maybe weren't even enough bad neighborhoods really -- there were only a few blocks here and there that the residentialists and purists had forgotten to take a good look at. Some of these were demoralizing to something of an extreme. And one of them was in her path.

The boys stood doing so little. The boys stared at her. She suddenly had the most appalling sense of herself, something that she knew she had to hide from the boys: a sense that she was prey.

I am not prey.

But her sense of being only half a Christian hit her very hard.

She believed -- she was safe -- but one foot still lay wedged in unbelief -- it tried to pull her into peril that she couldn't even imagine properly. Nor did she want to. And then the ugliest boy in the gang took a metallo-plastic object, a tiberius, out of a paper bag and began to threaten her with it. To describe the apparatus would be to cede the story to a hoodlum. For such is the sucking force of empathy and imagination that, in a work of art, merely to describe something is to add a sort of hallowing to its meaning, even when you reject that meaning and everything it implies. And I won't do that.

So he wielded it and insulted her with it, saying: Happy Valentine's Day, sweet girl. And Duessa, flipping idly through the stations on her Cosmical TV of Evil, abruptly sucked in her breath and watched with great interest.

Elf looked at the other boys, at their liquid, rather nonexistent faces. She suffered a sudden horrible memory of wielding a knife, of cutting through a monster's substance in a visionary nightclub. Shaking off her memory, she took the thug's wrist and pushed it away from her. There was a small snapping sound inside his wrist, the crying out of a tiny bone. Then the punk began crying like a baby and the others, the ones with no faces -- they simply disappeared, gone almost without a breath of air, it was hard to believe that they had been there, that anything had happened. Ultimately nothing had.

The woman walked home, miserable now, feeling as if she had been raped, although she hadn't, not quite. What had been raped somehow was the innocent piece of ground that lay where she walked. One sensed a demon's shadow over the block she traversed. She prayed, hyperventilated, and closed her eyes.

Mother is near. Protect me, Lord.

*