Scapegoat

Outside the facility, the peace laws must be observed.For a hundred and fifty points, you can spend an hour with a designated scapegoat. No one outside will ever know what you do there. You are encouraged to shout, to complain, to cry, if it will help to calm you.For two hundred points, you may strike them. They will never strike back.Abrasions, heavy bruising, first degree burns, are five hundred. The scapegoats will endure it and they will never name you or your...needs.A few thousand if your rage requires you to break a bone. Scapegoats are not law-abiding like you. They deserve it. They succumb to their passions too easily without our control. It has led to their downfall. The pain you inflict is their redemption. You teach them the patience and resolution that they have lacked their entire lives.For seven thousand points, you can give them absolution. Final forgiveness. In whatever manner most relieves you. Because outside the facility, the peace laws must be observed.Remember the creed of the Designated Scapegoats: Through our suffering, may you find peace.They will not complain. They will not resist. They will not fight back.Until now. A severe addiction to Post-apocalyptic literature combined with a lifetime of a very rural existence, first in central Maine and now in northern Idaho naturally led to both of Deirdre's novels: The Jade Seed and After the Cure.Deirdre's education in anthropology and peace and conflict studies prompted the central idea for After the Cure: How do people live with each other after doing horrendous things to each other? How do societies put themselves together or continue to exist after terrible wars? What is day to day existence like when such violence exists within living memory? Though fiction can never come close to the reality of living with atrocity, it can help us ask important questions about our world and our treatment of each other.Since living in the woods makes it all too easy to imagine being one of the last people left in the world, After the Cure is only the first novel of several that will take place in a post-apocalyptic, "post-zombie" world.