The first thing that Suzy realized when she awoke was that she was naked. That alone was not surprising because she usually slept naked. But she wasn't in her bed. She wasn't even in her bedroom. She was in a large, clear, sealed cube in the middle of the village square. She could see the lights of the festival all around her and feel the vibrations of the loud music from the band over by the park. A large crowd was gathered around the cube watching her. She screamed a long, loud "Noooooo!" as she pounded her fists against the glass-like walls of her enclosure. She had been chosen!
She yelled at the people who were just inches away from her naked body. "This is a mistake!" she screamed. "I didn't volunteer to be in here!" she cried out to the watching faces. "No, no, no, I don't want to be in here! Let me out!" she pleaded with the crowd, but she knew that no one could hear her.
Suzy knew that no one could hear her because for many years she had stood in that crowd and watched the chosen one pound on these transparent walls and beg and plead to be released from their captivity. You could see the terror on their faces. You could see the tears flow down from their eyes. You could see the hopelessness begin to overwhelm them. Sometimes you could even see them piss themselves in fear. But you could never hear them. For the entire three or four or five days of the festival, you could not hear them.
The length of the festival depended upon the actions of the offering. The festival continued until the offering finally mounted the saddle. No one knew for sure how an offering was chosen. Nor did anyone know how the offering came to be placed in the cube. There did not appear to be an opening in the cube. The cube itself would just suddenly appear in the town square every 4 to 6 months. When it appeared, that meant it was time for the festival.
All work would cease. Everyone in the village would come to the town square and party continuously for the entire time of the festival. It has always amazed Suzy that for festival time she could go without sleep for so many days and nights.
Sometime during the second day of the festival, the offering would suddenly appear in the cube, usually lying unconscious on the thickly carpeted floor of the enclosure. It wasn't always a naked woman. Sometimes it was one of the young men of the village who would be naked and screaming and pounding against the glass when they awoke.
Suzy stopped her pounding and stood staring at the crowd outside her window. For the first time since she had moved to the village more than a dozen years ago, she noticed something odd about the population of the village. Everyone in the entire village was now in the village square, but there were no children present. And there were no old people. Everyone was between twenty and forty years of age. Why hadn't she noticed that before?
Suzy, herself, was twenty-six. She worked as a...???? She couldn't remember! Whatever it was that happened to the chosen ones was starting to happen to her. She couldn't remember what she did in the village. She couldn't remember where she lived in the village. She could remember the festivals. Dozens and dozens of festivals were very clear in her mind, but she could remember nothing else. She recognized people in the crowd, but could place them nowhere else but here, at the festivals.
Something within the cube must be draining her of her memories. But if that were so, why then could she remember her years of schooling. She could clearly remember growing up on Colony Twelve. She could remember classrooms in the complex as she grew up. Even her college and post-graduate work in astro-physics and planetary systems was very clear in her mind. But her life in the village was fading from her mind. She could remember attending the festival many, many times, but where she lived and what she did in the village had been erased from her mind.
She sank to the carpeted floor. It seemed strangely warm against her naked body. The entire cube seemed warm. It was not uncomfortably warm, she was not sweating, but it was definitely warm. And her body was beginning to warm also, only this was a different kind of warm. This was not a thermal warm, this was a sexual warm.
"No!" she screamed aloud. "I will not do it! I will not make a spectacle of myself in public. I will not do it!"
Even as she screamed, however, her eyes were drawn to the only piece of "furniture" in the cube. There, in the very middle of the enclosure, sat a large saddle . She had never seen a real saddle. For that matter, she had never seen a horse, but she had read of them. They were creatures from the home planet and people once rode on their backs using seats of leather and wood that had been strapped to the beast.
What sat in the middle of the cube on a stand, concealed by the same carpet which covered the floor, looked exactly like the saddles she had seen in the recreational videos she had watched as a youth. Well, not exactly. Those saddles didn't have two rather large metal dildos sticking straight up from the center of the seat.
She tried to remember if she had looked into the empty cube when festival had first begun. You could tell if the offering was going to be male or female by the shape of the saddle. For a woman, there were always two dildos, but for a man, there was only one, and a strange leather-looking humped opening in the saddle that almost exactly replicated the female vagina. For male or female, there were stirrups on the saddle and a saddle horn like on what she thought was called a western saddle, except it was not covered in leather. The saddle horn was the very same shiny material as the dildos.
Silently, Suzy circled the walls of her cell like she had seen countless offerings do so many times before. She could hear the village clock strike the hours in the distance as she yelled at the crowd that they might as well go home because she was not going to do it.
Did the offerings who had come before her also say that? Did they also say that they would never mount the saddle? She had never been able to hear what they actually said. As they screamed and yelled, did they also feel that warm sexual feeling slowly building within their bodies that they knew would eventually drive them to impale themselves on those shiny pieces of polished metal?
She turned and looked out once again at the crowd. It was now dark, but the square was brightly lit. She could see the flushed faces of the young women in the front row. She knew what they were thinking. They were thinking-and some were even saying, "Do it. Do it. Do it!" She knew what they were saying because she could read their lips as they mouthed their simple chant. She knew what they were thinking because she herself had stood exactly where they were standing in festivals past and chanted the same words at the hapless offering year after year.
Just last festival, Suzy had stood in the cool fall air, flushed and sweaty, chanting with the people gathered around her as the offering slowly gave in to whatever it was that compelled her to mount the saddle. She remembered her chant changing to "Yes, yes, yes," as the chosen one began to writhe in the saddle with her hands held tightly to the shiny saddle horn and her legs thrashing in the stirrups. She herself had felt a powerful sexual rush flow through her body as she watched the offering's lewd ride toward orgasm.
