MONSTRUM

A HIDDEN WICKEDNESS

On a cold spring evening some months after the installment of the Mad King, the elderly coach of a small mountain school team seized the hair of a young player and yanked her head back viciously after the loss of an important contest, a look of abject rage in his eyes. The victim betrayed, perhaps tellingly, no look of particular shock at this assault, but only commenced to weep more wretchedly than she had before. A teammate stepped in to defend her as the assailant homed in for another go, remonstrating bravely with him despite falling several inches and half a century short of his stature, until he retreated. The incident may well have ended there, but for the ubiquitous eye of the panopticon, which was broadcasting the game to an audience of untold thousands beyond those spectators in attendance courtside, many of whom were too distracted by the celebration of the victors to take note of this by-play on the sideline right in front of their eyes. The footage, however, spread like wildfire, and promptly blew up into a national scandal. The coach was fired, the girl filed charges, and litigation over the matter is still ongoing. Both player and mentor eventually moved on, leaving behind them a bitterly divided community. Some blamed the girl for her own attack and went so far as to express appreciation for her assailant on printed signs that sprang up like noxious weeds on lawns around the village. The rest laid responsibility for the incident squarely at the feet of her attacker, muttering darkly about previous aggressions at his hands that had gone without comment or consequence.

The sun had hardly risen and set once more on this sleepy rural community before an assault of a much more serious nature unfolded mere blocks away from the school at the center of the first. The following evening, a cadre of constabularies raced to a house where a young man had held his wife hostage with a shotgun after striking her, strangling her and threatening to shoot her. She escaped to call for help, and a standoff ensued between state, county and local police and her attacker, who eventually surrendered without further violence. Per their custom, the officials released an account of these events and the subsequent charges - three felonies and two misdemeanors - which was picked up by local media, but went no further. More than a few in the village remarked wryly that the assault that put their tiny Adirondack village on the map, while disturbing, did not even amount to a criminal offense under the law, while the one that could have ended in murder went largely unnoticed.

Each of these victims endured an ordeal undergone by the women of our dark and troubled world every day: male violence. But only one of them - the one whose life may well have been ended by it - was attacked in that private space where such acts pass largely unnoted as part and parcel of the mundane machinations of cohabitation: the home.