NOVEL WEB Communities At The Cusp of War- A Chronicle Of Near Non-State Civil Conflict In America
If Darla had been kinda aroused by Lavender invoking the castle doctrine, watching her distribute .45s and AKs like she was fucking Carlos The Jackal was on another level. The actual threat of violence they represented kinda still freaked her out, but the fact that it was being deployed in defense of her? Absolutely intoxicating.
There was actually some pushback, which was surprising, considering how Lavender had presented herself to Darla when they met. Apparently only about 4 or so people, Lavender and Joan included, physically owned guns, while the rest of the community squeamishly tolerated it due to how dangerous it was to set up an openly LGBT space in one of the more extreme evangelical parts of the nation. Now that they were on high alert, there was a fight over whether the more pacifistic villagers had the option to sit out open carrying, even with the understanding that they would not have to actually ever pull a trigger or even point it at anyone.
Laney and a person who seemed like she may or may not be her girlfriend were the only two that were unwavering in their unwillingness to carry. Eileen (because that was, in fact, the name of the mediating gen-X lesbian) and her wife decided to carry an AK-74 between the two of them. Many more people didn’t have firearms training, and so settled on leaving their weapons unloaded, since the likelihood of a shot fired in anger was very low. Darla had felt she could not be carrying if she wanted to get through to her father, but having most people there at least pretending to be armed reassured her that whatever bullshit Darrow was planning could be scared off with a show of force.
Since the Village was run partially on consensus (for the really big things, little to midsize things were all done on individual initiative) everyone got a chance to speak, and the meeting couldn’t end until everyone's opinion was known. This meant plenty of droning on about various things that were only tangentially related to Pop’s impending arrival. Thankfully, the sheet pizzas were a big hit, so at least she got to hear those wonderful appreciative mumbles, as some member of the community (who seemed to maybe be Paul’s boyfriend?) was giving a self important lecture on how Foucauldian Biopolitics related to the current situation.
At one point Clair nudged Darla. “You know, your cooking is pretty good, and you know how to cook for a bunch of people...”
Darla blushed “W-well, it’s nothing really… it was only me and Pops growing up, so I had to learn if I didn’t want freezer meals every night, and we had to bring Something to church potlucks. Especially the ones Pops organized.”
Clair nodded looking over at the guy who’d been going for nearly 20 minutes without interruption. “All I’m saying is we don’t have a cook yet, so if you wanna stay here...”
“For real?”
“Fer real!” Lavender sat down next to Darla and began to pig out on pizza dripping with sriracha. “Everyone pays a little bit of rent to cover property taxes, and groceries- that sorta thing.” She spoke between bites, crumbs spewing everywhere as she disregarded all taste and decorum. “We based it on how much you make and how much we need to pay, but if you provide an essential service that doesn’t make money, or are queer in need of shelter- No rent at all!”
Clair cut in “Point is, you fit both right now, but long term even if your dad accepts you, you still have a place here.” Clair’s eyes locked with hers, and she could feel the red tide washing up on her cheeks once more.
“Woah!” Was all Darla could manage. Set between both women she was crushing on, who while exes, didn’t seem to mind the other’s attention, she could feel herself melting with joy. On a completely different non-sexual level she was exited, not only because she had essentially had a place where she could totally be herself dropped directly in her lap, but also because cooking was one of her favorite hobbies. Cooking as rent seemed like a dream come true.
From then on Darla couldn’t stop smiling, even with the continued barrage of questions from everyone about what the town was really like, and what the most likely for retaliation her father would take. Eventually she excused herself, letting Lavender and Joan explain the power map as they sniped at each other over the pettiest shit.
The truth was, Darla needed some time alone. She was a ‘she’, but she honestly had no clue what that actually meant. She now knew vaguely she was ‘(a?) transgender’ too, and that could mean all sorts of things. She decided to do what she did best- analyze the political economy of being trans. The girl found a corner and settled down with her phone and a list of trans resource sites that Lavender had given her and got to work.
-
It was mid-afternoon when the shouting started.
By that time Darla had fallen into a state. Down backwards into an event horizon of forbidden fruit. There was just… so much! The flavors and colors extended across a life she could only look into from the outside (for now). Terminology whipped past her as she dove deeper, to the heart of things, to the past and what people had to say about the past. As she approached she could nearly taste the word on her lips: History, and Hoo boy there was history.
That picture of Nazi book burning? An Image you can smell if ever there was one- It was papers written by The Institute Of Sexology- the people who pioneered hormonal and surgical transition! The prickles on her skin when she realized only reason there was a ready to go treatment for Narragansett's was the existence of people like her, and they were murdered for it. The visceral rage so deep she could taste iron while her skin lit on fire. There were people like her, who were fed into the maw of Treblinka and Auschwitz, never to be released, as both Germanys kept Hitler’s “sex laws” on the books.
She flew down a vortice about Osh-Tisch the Crow Two-Spirit warrior woman who fought the Lakota and Americans a few states over, one of the few Two-Spirit people in written history. The joy of knowing we’ve always been here led her to yellow fireworks and the smell of peaches and cream. Then fell again watching how her own government had forced most Two-Spirit Indigenous people, often at gunpoint, to assimilate with their gender of birth.
Then she landed with the Narragansett crisis, and the deregulation of HRT in the 80’s. It caused an explosion of Trans people, both taking HRT and doing “tick tourism” to the Northeast, the fact that Providence wasn’t considered a “Gay City” until the 90’s blew her mind. The friction over what to do with Narragansett's was quickly eclipsed by anti-gimme hysteria. Regions schismed and all the time those who were suffering from crippling dysphoria by being “turned trans” were ignored. There were even trans people who got weird about all the “fake trans” created by the bacterial infection. Nor was any attempt made to isolate the cause of sexual inversion, to better treat those born in the wrong body (Darla was going with that language for now since while she had seen some folks quibbling about it, it felt right to her. Much later Lavender will give her an earful for this, but it wont be shown on screen).
She had then come across a strange website named Narragansett Truth Now! NTN had an impressive cache of FOIA documents which made her want to trust them. However they were propitiating the conspiracy theory that Naragansett’s was made by the US Cold War Bioweapons Program along with Lyme disease, and the outbreaks in Narragansett and Lyme were a result of containment failure. She had heard such things from John Beecher society folks, and that had always seemed a little ridiculous. She didn’t have time to read their documents though, because it was then that she heard Lavender yell “Get back!”
Pocketing her phone and rushing to the door, she popped her head out just in time to see Darrow and a couple of his farmhands stopped halfway up the driveway in a convoy of 2 Dodge Chargers. The guys sitting in the beds were all carrying ARs. Enveloping them were nine or so rifles trained on them by the Ecovillagers. Lavender had dragged a couple logs across the drive and was now standing on the makeshift barricade with a bead on Darrow himself, sitting as he was in the air-conditioned oversized cab of his luxury truck.
The war party had come, and they weren't expecting a fight. Darla recognized the farmhand in the back of Darrow’s vehicle, George. He was sweating and looking very nervous. Darrow had a rictus grin of a man fighting back blind rage. She could barely see the three guys in the back truck, but she assumed they were equally chagrined. The engines hummed loud enough that she could hear them from where she stood at the door of the farmhouse.
Darla realized that this was, in fact, her time to shine. She made her way over to the barricade just as Lavender shouted “I SAID TURN THE FUCK AROUND AND GET THE FUCK OFF OUR PROPERTY!”
Darla sighed. She should have known better than to hope Lavender would deescalate things. As she approached the barricade she could see the romance oozing off the scene like a sweating can of Bud in a commercial. The pose while demoralized still had the sheen of macho guys trying to practice frontier justice for the first time in their lives. The elan of it all dripped from their clothing (even more cowboy than normal), they had washed the trucks and cleaned their guns before they left, because those motherfuckers gleamed. It wasn’t just them though, Lavender had the look of a revolutionary decked out in a battle jacket (blue denim with ‘kill your local cop’ back patch), a red hankie over her face, black skinny jeans. She held her gun against her shoulder like she was ready to unload into the convoy with a twitch. The sun caught Darla’s eyes and the pure zeal of the moment was caught in silhouette. High noon (at 1526 hours). Suicidal idiots the lot of them.
Darrow broke the spell for Darla when he rolled down his window and shouted “Can we talk first!?” Darla let the breath she had been holding out, he could see sense. She climbed up the barricade next to Lavender, who only briefly nodded her way, keeping her gun trained on the man sitting in his fuck off truck.
“If you wanted to talk why’d you rock up with a squada thumbheaded dudes armed to the fuckin’ teeth?” Lavender retorted. “I ain’t gonna let off the pressure till you get your goons off our fuckin’ land.” Darla noticed Lavender was really thickening her accent.
“Look, I just heard a family friend maybe bein’ held here against his will, and I think we responded with just concern.” Darrow drawled in the most aristocratic southerner voice Darla had heard from him yet. Are… are they trying to out folksy each other? Okay... Okay! She had to step in now or else this accent based dick measuring contest would devolve into gunfight quickly.
“You looking for Danny?” She said in her most authoritative way. Darrow’s eyes snapped across his dashboard to lock on Darla’s. George twitched his gun, but one of the Ecovillagers flanking them shouted and he stopped. The guys in the other truck watched her warily.
“Why yes, yes we are.” Vincent Darrow purred full of tension. Dragging out the aristocratic aurrrr, a lion ready to strike. He looked over the faces of the assembled prospective combatants, as if searching in vain for the lost boy, who had ceased to exist. “Where are you holding him?” His eye twitched, zeroing back on Darla.
She realized she needed to get this back under control fast, they didn’t have Pop’s, Rockwell, or Mike which meant that, while the entire town hadn’t gone crazy yet, there was also no one particularly reasonable to negotiate with here. She decided that getting Darrow to realize his mistake still had high enough odds, because c’mon, who else could she be? Her name was literally an embarrassing portmenteu of her mom’s name and her own, not to mention that she looked like a shorter, more feminine version of herself. “Nowhere, look, this is all a big misunderstanding.” Lavender raised an eyebrow as if intimating ‘you really gonna come out to this fucker?’ Eileen gave Darla a reassuring smile. Paul was checking out George’s ass.
Darrow narrowed his eyes. “What!” He revved his engine. “What the hell do you mean!!?” George and the other farm hands were starting to shout as well, George glaring at Paul especially. Nice going dude, way to sexually harass the christen weirdos. Ecovillagers began to shout taunts and get off our land back at them. Darla centered herself trying to rise above the shouts and half arguments that constituted a whiling chaos of noise.
She locked onto Darrow staring her down, frowning. Things were escalating too fast. There was going to be a shoot out. She realized she had a weapon at her disposal that she just didn’t before, it was now or never. She screamed. A woman’s scream can be a very powerful thing, especially in a small Church going town like Twin Crossings. It can stop a whole room of men, and make them run to the noise. It can get a person in trouble, if they’re brown at least. It can alter the course of whole days when executed correctly (a very handy tool when living in the boonies gets boring).
It stopped the show this time too. Darla felt the drunken flow of euphoria mixed with power as she reveled in successfully deploying toxic femininity for the first time.
It was time to just spell things out. “I. Was. Danny.” She scanned the faces of the convey only to find confusion. “I got ‘Setts.” Darrow’s brow furrowed to the point of friction. “I’ve been here recovering, these people have been nothing but nice to me.” George held up his phone like he was taking a picture. She gave him the stink eye. “My name is Darla now.” She turned back to Darrow. “Are we clear?”
Darrow bit his tongue. There was complete silence as he looked to the side to whatever was on his passenger seat, looked up and mouthed a silent prayer, and let his eyes meet Darla’s. “You Faggot Gimme, I was right about you. I should string you up and gut you like a pig right here right...”
It was then that Lavender shot his Rear-veiw mirror off in a burst of three rounds. KACK. CRACK. KACK. “Get off our land.” She chambered another round. “Trespassers will be shot.”
The expression of blind rage on Darrow’s face was priceless, but he didn’t explode. It was like when a thunderstorm was about to hit, pressure building up begging for sweet release. Guns were held steady. The members of the convoy twitched in uncomfortable silence. Suddenly Darrow snapped over to Darla and grinned, in a pleasant, almost chivalrous manner. The storm blew apart before it hit.
“Well, we know where Danny is now.” Darrow may have been smiling but his voice betrayed a tremor of dreams deferred. “I guess we better report back to your dad then, but as a gentlmen I must have you know- this,” he gestured at his broken rear-view mirror, “means war.” It’s probable that only the Atlantan accent of English (and perhaps related aristocratic southern dialects) can manage to be both barely concealing boiling hatred while also thick with condescension. The Charger jerked as he threw the beast into reverse. “Let’s go kids! Back to the farm!” The overpowering hum of two truly giant trucks leaving the driveway washed over the assembled Ecovillagers like an earthquake.
They watched as the convoy got further and further away. A quiet disbelief setting over the crowd as they realized they had survived their first, and hopefully last, armed standoff. After about 5 minutes of hushed conversation, trying to figure out what exactly had happened, and worrying that they might come back, a whooping started from the rear.
The sheer joy of being alive after you’ve got your adrenaline going is intoxicating. Experiencing it together as one in a group is the greatest drug of them all. Drunk on their ability to send foes running, the whoop turned into a collective howl and scream.
Joan and her polycule got back from their perimeter patrol. Beers were broken out and a party started. Lavender shied away from being the lady of the hour. “I just have the best firearms training here!” She shouted in a drunken speech. “You should be celebrating Darla for standing up to that Evangelical fuck, I was just backup!” Darla hadn’t got this much positive attention since she had last taken the pulpit 2 years ago.
Once she was able to get alone at the impromptu afternoon party she realized she loved how everyone supported her. She felt like she had found a community again, this time they wouldn’t force her out for thinking women were more than baby machines, and that warmed her to the core.
She slipped into the bathroom to check out her reflection. Her breasts had filled in a little since that morning and her face had well and truly shrunk. The punk look that Lavender had given her just worked so well on her body. She began posing in the mirror and giggling about how the pretty girl opposite her was her. Then someone else slipped in the bathroom since she hadn’t locked the door.
Joan descended on her like an eagle going in for the kill. “You OK Darla?”
Darla smiled back. “I’m doing amazing!” She began to bounce up and down a bit “I did it Joan! I’m a cute girl now!!”
Joan frowned, putting a hand on Darla’s shoulder. “I’m glad, but are you really happy with the whole town knowing you’re trans?”
Darla’s face fell a bit. “No…” Rallying around the positive emotions coursing through her veins she tried to find a bright side “But it’s better than them thinking I kidnapped myself!”
Joan gave a halfhearted smile “Fair enough.” She ruffled Darla’s still greasy mop. “We gotta get this properly styled at some point, you look like a mousy girl who just got into hardcore through hijinks and gaffs.”
“I don’t know if I’ll even like hardcore, but that basically is a description of how I got here.” Darla joked back. They shared a smirk which in turn became a laugh, holding on to each other for old times sake.
When Lavender busted into the bathroom holding a beer and hollering something about how “Darla needs a drink for being such a good girl”. The old BFFies had been sitting on the tub catching up on small things. Joan raised an eyebrow at her friend sharing a conspiratorial smile and nod, who blushed and nodded back. Darla rose to meet Lavender. Using the fact that the room was too cramped to hold 3 people well, she darted into the tall girl’s space and tiptoe smooched her cheek. Whereupon Lavender belted out a laugh and picked up her shorter prospective lover carrying her out of the room.
Back on terrafirma Darla leaned against the wall out of breath from the bearhug carry. But Lavender had put down the beer and bent forward laying her arm on the wall, trapping Darla on three sides. Darla bit her lip, as she heard Joan scurrying off in the other direction. “So…” Lavender purred with enough vocal fry to feed the nation. “Now it’s all over, howabout that bar date?”
Before Darla could answer, Lavender’s lips brushed hers. She shuddered into a passionate kiss. It wasn’t as gentle this time, Lavender deployed her canines in a technique that mixed the soft sweat taste of lips angst lips, and the hard spicy sour pain of teeth dug in. Darla lapped it up and was taken for what seemed like hours. After that, what could she do but say yes?