Flash Fiction by Lasara Firefox Allen
CW: assault
Things to do when you are grateful it wasn’t a worse transgression:
- try to send a stun gun to NYC via amazon
- find that you can’t, so instead send it to yourself and smuggle it in to NYC in a care package (not illegal but it feels like it is)
- vacillate between gratitude that your daughter is armed and anger that she has to be.
Things I sent to my daughter who had been transgressed upon:
- a statue of Diana (the goddess of the hunt) she has had since she was a child, which has been resting, semi-forgotten, in box
- a bust of Nefertiti that she loves
- some classic wool pants from a garage sale
- Halloween socks
- lichen from the trees here at home in Mendocino county which she had gathered as a younger person
- some goat milk face cream that she likes
- the taser
- pepper spray
- kubaton
When I hear that the ex-boyfriend has broken into my daughter’s room in the wee hours of the morning I want to get on a plane and fly to New York. I want to stand in the doorway and protect the inner sanctum of my daughter’s sovereignty. Instead, I send this box of treasures and weapons, hoping to bolster her spirits and to make sure she’s protected. I tuck the stun gun and pepper spray into festive, skeleton embellished socks, and ship the box of above listed treasures via priority mail to Brooklyn.
It takes more days to arrive than I want it to but it finally gets there and I feel marginally better knowing she is armed with a taser and pepper spray, along with the kubaton I have sent for her and all her roommates. They are bright, candy colored stakes about seven-inches long, with finger grooves to increase impact. Cute accessories, designed to maim.
When the ex showed up in her room, a different boyfriend had just murdered a girlfriend in a high profile case. I am darkly affected by the fact that so many men, all at once, and all the time, all over the world, feel that their girlfriends bodies and time and bedrooms are theirs to enter - without consent.
So I send weapons. Grape kool-aid colored, petite, and engineered to stun or otherwise disenfranchise. I send weapons, and pray my kid will train herself to fight back.
Lasara Firefox Allen (they/them/theirs) is a writer, Witch, and gritty academic. Having grown up in the wilds of Mendocino County, Lasara resides in Ukiah with/in the ancestral and contemporary lands of the Pomo people. Lasara is a Harm Reductionist, social justice activist, and co-conspirator for our collective liberation. @FirefoxAllen