Forgotten Ground Regained

The City is Recruited from the Country

Downstairs, my neighbor was stabbed today.The cherry-bright Pepto-Bismol glugged out of the mere gallon and a halfhis forty-sixth year’s frame had held within to be eaten by the snowbankor pool in the pavement of the Synagogue’s path.
There is no news outside needful:Three assailants; searching for two;slashed on the hands; slit his face.
But was it a hate crime?Or was it a lone wolf slasher?Is there a difference these days?
I will not write this woe elsewhere. If I blog about it, my buddies and motherswill write concerned. I’ll have to unsealold demographic studies to prove to the doltsthat this kind of thing happens quiteoften — tenfold as often or more —as it happens in my hood. But they don’t hear.
Perhaps it’s because I merely have to call out “YO!” from where I’m looking, leaning out my tower,while they are shielded from local stabbingsby fences, walls, front yards,and football games. I guarantee you:it is not the city that is depraved anymore.
It wasn’t for the early church, even, but the country, the desert, the dark cloudsrolling over the forbidden forest’s ringof eldritch trees demanding a trystwith sanguine knife sacrifice. Neo-Pagan nihilisminfects my city now, it seems,
but only ’cause of our murderous country.
Editor's Note
'Country' in Latin was pagan, hence the English word 'pagan', referring to the period in the late Roman empire when the city population had been Christianized, but pagan practices persisted in the coutnryside.
Copyright © Lancelot Schaubert, 2025
No part of this site may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems