The Dole 3 of 7

The Visitation

Jul 17, 2025

She was not pleased.

When the results had conscripted her, her parents, in stoic bravery, had admonished her that it was merely their way. The way.

“What else can be done?” asked her mother rhetorically.

“You just cannot not go!” said her father, loyal to the process and to the faith.

Such were her loving parents who had birthed her, raised her, and loved her.

But only to a point, Deirdre felt.

Many speak of destiny as certainly as they speak of the past, but destiny is the future, expectations notwithstanding. Destiny is forever-yet-to-come until it sits historically in the past by touching down fleetingly onto the liquidity of the present. One cannot see the future, so destiny is cloaked, blindsiding the present, only to become a wound of the past—healed, scarred, or forever festering.

The man lying-in-state knew only too well.

Deirdre had been selected by her predecessor into the Valley, the lovely lass, Brid. The Ones had, as was their tradition, blessed and finalized the choice.

It was the custom that the subsequent season's selection be nominated by the current season's sacrificial honored selectee. Young girls learned to get along early, lest they be nominated based on a grievance, some jealousy, or another emotional debt. Yet, another dysfunction arose from this custom.

So announced, the selectee for the next season had a year to lose her virginity and thus make her unworthy.

This was a charade, for it never worked, though many tried. The reality was that the Ones had to verify any such self-report as true; and no young man stepped forward to corroborate a girl’s confession of her spoilage, since any man who ruined the sacrifice was to be sent into the valley in her stead. And since men were upright and women were hysterical and historically unreliable, this never happened.

Only chaste girls—or, otherwise—visited the valley.

Deirdre had survived this expectation since the last harvest, which had been so bountifully inspired by the fair Brid who by now must have been atomized along the smelted Valley of the courageously burnt. She had accepted her blindfold and followed the hot sand-glass path, barefoot, into the Valley. Her announcement of Deirdre’s name meant she was next, a decision as adjudicated as any etched in the cornerstone of the Hall of Devotion. (The Ones had never reversed a nomination, for then such a death sentence would be on them; and they were cowards, for they would have to look families, parents, and siblings in the eye for an intolerable year.

Brid and Deirdre had been friends, but not their families. An ancient dispute over the few fertile fruit trees outside of the Valley had mutually felled many menfolk on both sides. When Brid had been named by her begrudged predecessor the year before, she had gone into family seclusion until she had emerged decrying a name on her tongue, articulated as invective: Deidre.

From thence, Deirdre, was the selected; the selectee; the doomed; the pariah. The vehicle of revenge for some silly little girl's imagined slight or a statement of disposition of one family against another.

Over fruit trees, no less!

Deirdre was a rebellious child. She was angry. She knew she was forthright and virtuous far beyond any spurious "spoilt" maidenhood. Her spirit was defiled, but she was something new and unexpected which the Holy Ones would condemn if they hadn’t trusted so blindly the coercion of tradition. Of course the tradition would prevail.

So they thought.

No, asserted Deirdre, they would have to force her into her “duty” even if it meant they would have to follow her into the Valley to enforce her presentation as a main course. Even if they were to suspect her planned disobedience, they wouldn't dare follow her, because cowardice was the essence of holiness and the self-serving strategy of incumbency.

As the equinox approached, she was no longer a pariah; her repute compounded with each day into a positive cause célèbre. Forsooth, her name began to be chanted each dawn when she appeared at her family threshold to assure the village that she was still chaste and proper and succulent and delectable. She was still perishable.

And palatable.

There would be a reverent hush from the mob outside, and her parents would flank her proudly, albeit with forced tears which fit so well into the narrative.

By night, a lone villager remained to stand watch, to guarantee there was no escape toward some tryst. During supper and until the time she and her parents retired, no words were spoken. Sleep came like a potion onto her, and the wiring of her thoughts re-aligned to welcome her hypnotic visitor.

"Deidre," she called to her. "Heed the words of Nyx, mother of Atrox. My child has been trapped long enough. You are to refuse the dragons and so vex them as to allow its release."

"How?"

She was dream-talking, so she used diction, syntactically confused, which would seem as nothing more than nonsense to anyone awake to witness. "With up-so-many floating flames down, a how-to escape brings me anywhere drowned."

"Fear not," Nyx answered. "You have the dervish in you to suspend the animation of the dragons. They will fall mute in admiration."

"I spin the t'world," I replied, "but I under stand the trans-dance transcendence warily."

"That is your remedy to being consumed by dragon flame and hunger."

"And then what-wherever-of-why the future?

"Of your villagers?

"I dress yes, I confess."

"They have selected you, and so you have selected them in return. And the dragons will be seduced by your dance. And the Atrox released.

"Dance-entranced and sated with fasting?"

"Yes."

"And what of the Horror? The Atrox? Must it just-must plus to us, thus?"

"I am its mother; you are its savior. It's Messianic, dear Deirdre. The old ways’ days are numbered. Destroy this temple, and in three days you will raise it up. Except this time no one will die for our sins. Though someone rightly should."

TO BE CONTINUED