Reading Sunday, June 13, 2010

It is a function of shunning that it must eliminate the shunned completely. It feels like a murder, and is baffling because there is no grave; no hymns were sung to ease my going or to beg for God's blessing on my soul. Shunning is as precise as a scalpel, an absolute excision, leaving, miraculously, not a trace of a scar on the community body. The scarring is left for the girl, an intense, debilitating wound that weeps for the rest of her life. It's quite a price to pay for having scared sex on a beach on a foggy Labor Day night.