For all that is Holy

Chastity gazed into the flames… the cold night air sending electric shivers across her skin. She felt goosepimples rising across her tightly crossed arms. Her nervous, embarrassed compulsion to cover herself as much as possible. Yet, the fire from the barrel bathed her in waves of blistering heat. Its forked spew of flickering yellow and orange light casting away the shadows of all the figures surrounding her and it. Casting away the sparks and ashes of all she had left to own in this world. There, into that rusted old oil drum, had she deposited the very clothes from her back… right down to her last pair of clean, cotton panties. Mother had ordered it so… just as she had ordered the donation of all the rest of their worldly belongings and organised the sale of the house Chastity had spent so much of her life in.

The teenager could see her parent now, across the burning chasm, in just as much a state of undress. She didn’t seem to be feeling the same thumping heart palpitations though. The humiliation and anxiety of being surrounded by masked strangers and watching everything you had left of your previous life burn away to nothing. She looked down upon the fire with pride and disdain, leaving her full breasts and the patch of curling hair between her legs unguarded for all to see. In all her memory… Chastity could not imagine having seen so much of her own mother on display. Skirts or dresses which reached to the floor and gave no hint of the sinful shapes beneath had always been the example set. But that had been before she had met him. The man who demanded to be known only as ‘Father’. The man who mother now clung to like a leaf to a tree, terrified that winter might come tomorrow. Even completely unclothed, the older woman pressed herself to him. Breaking every rule of propriety she had pounded into Chastity’s mind over 18 years of painstakingly enclosed upbringing. ‘The world out there was amok with temptation and sin!’ She had proclaimed. ‘Girls these days wearing as little as they could, to lure righteous men from the path and into their lurid wants.’

Yet, here they both now stood. Naked under the emerging stars. Encircled by men they could not know the faces of and walls they could never hope to climb. The ‘Church of the Faceless Father and Kneeling Mother’, as they liked to be called. A ‘prayer group’ Chastity had watched her mother become blindly devoted to. Tried her best to ignore, in thanks for the time it gave her to herself as her sole parent attended more and more ‘evening classes’ and ‘all-night masses’. Until it had been simply declared, not two days previous… that on the evening of Chastity’s eighteenth birthday they would move in to this high-walled commune. Leaving all their past lives behind. Homeschooling completed, the girl would learn to be a woman by a new set of teachings. Those that had opened her mother’s eyes to the ‘Truth’.

Chastity did not know what lay ahead. She did not know what her only family member even believed in anymore. Yet, even as she shivered with the cold and anxiety. The intrinsic horror of being unclothed before some unknown number of glinting eyes… There was an excitement awakening in her chest as well. A sense that all this was new and changing. After so many years of being locked away in a house with only Mother’s ever-chiding company, she was finally seeing another shape of the world. Another color of experience than the drab, endless boredom her life had been so far.