Somewhere in the last year, a group you belong to went looking for a villain. Maybe it was a workplace after a project collapsed. Perhaps it was a family after a holiday turned sour, or a whole country after a hard season of news. The group did not sit inside its own failure and ask what everyone in the room had done to cause it. It scanned the faces, found the one person who fit the mood, and set the entire weight of the trouble onto that single back. You felt the air in the room change when it happened. You may have felt the change move through your own chest. The problem had a face now, and a face can be sent away. That move is old. It runs deeper than the workplace and the country, older than writing itself in most of the places where it still survives. And when human beings reach for a body to carry their fear out of the room, they keep reaching for the same shape. A horned animal, dark, a ram or a goat, walked to the edge of the settlement and driven off into the waste with the sickness riding on its skull.
