The Ravish (a short story)

               

For whole weeks now Leo had skulked her, weeks whose near utter barrenness at length yielded reluctant fruits of his prey’s name Agnes, the name of her church group, Jaunters for Joshua, and the real lone windfall of her routine tour from fellowships to night prep, a petty journey that saw her ultimately without company through a lushly grass-flanked pathway to her favourite study.

    ‘Agnes,’ he accosted her at last.

    ‘Good afternoon,’ she said fellowship courteous, visibly surprised at the stranger’s knowledge of her name.

    ‘You too,’ he replied. ‘Don’t be so surprised, I had to find out your name.’

    Accentuated confusion. ‘You had to find out my name?’

    ‘Because I wish to poke with you, only I have yet to decide when and how,’ with a curious facial placidity.

    She hadn’t felt ever so sorely sqeamish. ‘You’re crazy, excuse me?’

   ‘Oh thanks! That’s my stock charge really only you put it a bit more indulgently, that is, civilly, so I take it a compliment. You see, the rest just say You must be crazy!’

    Only the overwhelming proximity of this gibberish-talking spectre assured Agnes her senses were not impaired. And she was certain when he spoke again that he was irreparably unhinged.

    ‘And since you prove quite civil, you can’t miss the courtesy upon which my vouchsafing my wish, beforehand, is founded.’

  

     One of Leo’s more oracular tutors at Gaga Highschool had called him a muddled mosaic, a result, whatever that meant, not quite unhinged upon the cumulative effect on his exuberantly melancholy temperament of the coarse negligence and fierce squalour of his early breeding. A man-shout away from his boyhood home a brothel, whose purely hedonist if mercantile inhabitants for want of  occupation during the less busy hours of their day had not enough scruple to stop them making actionable passes even at mere boys. And once or twice before he was to be a full decade old, one or other itchy-groined neighbourhood female had smuggled Leo to a clandestine corner, tossed him off, and taken his juvenile virginity afresh, till much later when he learned that only the pioneer of these possessed that non-refundable heirloom.

    And though it can’t have occurred to his oracular tutor, the muddled mosaic got his finishing bits right under, that is, despite, his care at Gaga where Leo mingled with boys who somehow  came to desperately desire life were more as the fowls’s, so a boy roused laxly libidinous, as often on many a morning, may flagrantly flap and flutter his cock-wings in pursuit of whatever hen-tail that caught his salacious sight: a desire  doubtless bred from countless similar cock-and-hen displays, a staple sight at Gaga Highschool tucked away in the remote recesses of a hilly village; where he mingled with boys who while yet fresh highschool men stared dreamily at the luscious laps of their English mistress whose mindless mini-skirt, when turned to illustrate a point on the chalkboard, can’t have divined the fresh fierceness of the puberty swiftly overtaking the tiny little scoundrels.

    Himself, Leo had often caught a dream-Leo always a mere thrust away from consummate rapture between the laps of the mistress, only always again to be thwarted by ‘this cruel rising-bell!’

   

    But he was in higherschool now, had spent a half and one sessions there, and set himself a mean if queer task, having concluded the category of girls, his prospective victims since three weeks called the Agnes- species after the name of his clearly inaugural victim, shared a similar ghoulish motive with the brothel inmates of his tender days to torture men. Only to theirs the Agnes-species gave a touch of courteous blatancy: what with the daily nude shows they staged before their dormitories, the really born-again ones taking the show right round the Campus, Christ Jesus having saved them from the shame of sin and death, pitched his tent right in their very hearts, their very spirits, so that they now worshipped him in spirit and in truth, unencumbered by old demands of bodily, physical modesty, things that have passed  away with the coming of the new.

    Christ Jesus’s tent was quite deeply pitched in Agnes’s soul; so that she had become a prime inviter to Jaunters for Joshua’s fellowships of her friends belonging especially to the still more ‘puritan’ church groups. And she had known some ‘blasphemous’ encounters with some ‘incurably orthodox’ ones, in her idiom.

    Such was Mary who dragged her back towards the entrance nearly choked with ‘This delayed orgy…your fellowship…however do your male-members manage it. God!,’ ‘This delayed orgy’ being a congregation of full girls, in wears whose transparent opaqueness flaunted the sheer vigour of youthful femaleness, interspersed with impossibly, Mary had sworn, congenital eunuchs.

    And as Agnes had insisted long on a notion of life as one big elaborate game whose delicacy must be jealously guarded, like a gallant really after a girl’s body simulating sincere care, such naked indelicacy of language often unhinged her, however momentarily. And she had never known such another since three weeks that gibberish-talking spectre accosted her. Now she felt an ominous link between the two discrete events, so overwhelming she did not herself stay through the fellowship, Mary having baulked soon as the blasphemy leapt from her. Agnes’s strict schedule should see her from fellowship to night prep, but she must, she decided, get some nap now before prep was due lest her present discomposure rendered that, too, futile. Any mediocre score in her looming quiz just won’t do!

    Rare as the sight was on Campus she spied on her way to her dormitory a ferocious cockerel make swift courtship arcs with his left wing round a feebly coy hen, then a brief dogged pursuit propped him atop his conquered mate.

    Nearly the flagrancy, a weird thought crossed Agnes’s mind, of that spectre the other day.

  

     When she roused from her overstretched nap, found her discomposure had defied the alarm she set to wake her in time for night prep, the clouds were roaring fresh signs of the diabetes they had suffered lately. But she’d rather the inclemency of the clouds than a flunked quiz. At any event Christ Jesus had ensured she may dare snakes and scorpions with impunity. Hastily she readied, books in schoolbag hanging from her left scapula, rushed out onto the lushly grass-flanked footway towards her regular study.

    Barely had she done half the solitary snaky path when two masked bipeds sprang out, each from either of its flanks. A desperate  reflex convulsed her around to scream-run her way back, a convulsion as reflexively rendered impotent by the vision of three similar bipeds right on that lone escape front. And her stuck trunk was collapsing from terror-coma when the bipeds closed in opportunely on her, gagged her, now only to be sure, bundled her into the left arm of the grass-flanks to a clearing farther in where they spread-eagled her, four of the five ensuring each the steadiness of her limbs. Then the fifth stripped her frocks.

    ‘God, no pants!’ The biped securing her left forelimb was thrilled, a disbelieving whistle leaping from his lips.

    The stripper was hardly as tickled. ‘Don’t be such an ass man!’ his voice recognizable as Leo’s had Agnes only enough sobriety at the moment. ‘Didn’t I tell you I intimated her on this three weeks ago? She can’t have been entirely unaware “she’s got a whole lot of loving she’s gonna give tonight,”’ and they picked up the quoted portion of Leo’s speech in a most mischievous chorus.