Hot Property
“Pythia, were you ever baptized?”
She looked at me critically, then shrugged and answered the question at face value.
“Sure, when I was younger. Mom went through a real religious phase.”
“She did? I-” I paused, trying to remember everything I could about Jaah and Pythia’s mother. “I don’t know much, other than the fact she’s a nurse. Your brother doesn’t really say anything about her.”
“Yeah, they don’t talk much these days. That religious phase had a lot to do with that, actually.”
“How did it feel?”
“To be baptized? Oh, I dunno. I was just a kid, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just did what I was told.” She looked off, contemplatively, and then said, “The cheering did feel real good, though.”
I told her about the church service, and the baptisms, and especially about the girl in the wet dress. Why were all these women choosing to join such a controlling, oppressive organization?
Pythia nodded sagely. “I bet she was real pretty, too, huh?” “She was!” I exclaimed, glad that Pythia seemed to have some insight that I lacked. “She was stunning. Could have been a model. A lot of the girls there were. Unusually good-looking, I mean.”
“I see it down south all the time,” she said, shaking her head, “Hot property.”
“What do you mean?”
“The religious, conservative trap these pretty women like to fall into. All this ‘saved’ stuff, it puts them above everybody. Morally, you know. Spiritually, or so they think. They buy into the idea that some people are just inherently superior to other people. And all the attention they get for their looks will back that up.”
“Part of that whole white supremacy nonsense, right?” I asked.
She shrugged, looking grim. “Sure there’s some of that, but I’ve seen plenty of black folks get caught up in the same kind of thought trap. You start thinking that certain people are inherently superior to other people, and there’s a short leap from there to believing that the inferior people deserve to be exploited.”
A wizened old fae knocked his flagon of beer on the counter, getting Pythia’s attention.
“Now, I don’t come here for all this politicking, young lady,” he said testily.
“Then don’t come here, Melvin. It’s my bar tonight, don’t test me. Anyway-” She turned to me and poured me a tall seltzer water as she continued. I didn’t want to interrupt her flow to ask her to put a splash of something harder in it. “Now, in their ideology, women are inferior. We’re property.” I glowered, and also quickly checked left and right to be sure that Zinnia and Azalea were not in earshot.
“But,” Pythia held up a finger, “They’re hot property. Valuable property. The game is rigged, sure, but they’re guaranteed to win, so why not play!”
A fae I hadn’t noticed at the end of the bar reached out a long-nailed finger and a scene of barbie doll blondes in high-heeled baseball uniforms hit a home run in the direction of the liquor bottles. Apparently he was enjoying the discussion enough to illustrate it.
“And of course, winning means getting a powerful, superior man to choose her to be his wife and whisk her off to a superior life, because she is what he’s been told he’s supposed to want.”
“Supposed to want?” I repeated, making it a question.
“You know,” she said, opening her eyes wide and pulling a face, “Thin, blonde. They’re not supposed to want me,” she gestured down at her lythe, dark, dancer’s body, “and they’re not supposed to want you,” this time she indicated my round, curvy frame, and winked, “but they do though.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “it’s not about what he actually wants, or what she actually wants, it’s about possessing her, which will make other men impressed. And she’s been trained to submit to obediently catering to his sexual and domestic needs, for the rest of her lonely, limited life, or, God forbid-” Pythia drew a dramatic sign of the cross on her chest before continuing, and the blonde barbies traded their baseball bats for oven mitts and baby bottles.
“She gets sick or disabled, or otherwise unhappy and therefore unpleasant enough for him to stray into the arms of the beautiful new young secretary or lonely neighbor, and she won't think twice about stealing our girl’s husband, because that’s her ticket to that same superior life.”
“Why don’t they warn the young ones?” I asked, “It seems like women could break women out of this cycle, couldn’t they?”
“Realize that they’ve been flattered into spending their entire life in service to a man who only ever saw them as a commodity? That being hot property wasn’t protection from being used up and discarded? Of course not. They’re in too deep. That would mean admitting to themselves that they’d been had.”
The blonde barbies had morphed into middle aged women with sharp a-lines and botox, throwing shovel-fulls of dirt over pants-suit clad shoulders, as they dug themselves deeper underground.
“So that’s why they do it, huh? They buy into a rigged game without realizing it’s rigged against them, too?”
Pythia nodded. “Or it’s the only game in town. For a lot of women, there aren't a whole lot of choices other than to play.”
*** Excerpt from Festival Season, Book 2 of the New World Fae trilogy. Book 1, Intermagical by TS Davis, is out now