Content Warning: Domestic Violence

There’s a lot of chatter about content warnings in my writerly social media lately. What needs them, who needs them, if they help or harm. 

This post isn’t about that.

Here, I want to have a frank discussion about stories of abuse and domestic violence. I want to lay out what I usually see in those stories, and why I decided to write and publish something different.

Personally, I’ve never read a story of a domestic violence survivor that gives the survivor what we so often feel that we want: What if our abuser just stopped doing that? What if they went back to who they were “before” anything bad happened, when we were happy together and they treated me right?

Stories on this subject often mirror reality: There was no person “before.” There was only a mask, purposefully created to deceive and trap. You can’t fix them. They don’t want to be fixed. Only they could choose to do better, and it’s safe to assume they never will.

This idea of simply convincing them to go back to “when it was good”—it’s a fantasy. It’s not real.

But I do write fiction.

In “Anaesomia,” in less than a thousand words, I give that untold story of “fixing him” to the female main character, Jen. And I tell that story from her abuser’s point of view, not from inside her head. Writing from the perspective of such an unsympathetic protagonist is quite a choice, and I lost some sleep about publishing this story because of it. But I wanted to let Jen keep her own thoughts and judgments private, in order to leave it to the reader to decide if this decision was good for her, good for her abuser, good for society as a whole.

It’s a dark story, but personally, I had a question to explore:

If I could fix him, would I want to?

Read “Anaesomia” for free at Sci-Fi Shorts and tell me what you think.