A toned-down excerpt from “Our Putative Couple,” a work in progress.
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One drizzly Friday afternoon several weeks before the 2024 United States presidential election, twenty minutes and seventeen seconds into our putative couple’s first visit, either together or separately, to the airport development district’s newest cultural venue, the Kinnick Museum of American Folk Art, the abovementioned couple starts staring at an anonymous painting, Peaceable Kingdom (circa 1860s, oil on canvas, 36.5 inches by 48 inches [92.7 centimeters by 121.9 centimeters], collection of BXR Funds International), that shows a dog, a cat, a hen, a rooster, an eagle, a bluebird, a turkey, a lion, a lamb, a cow, a bull, a bear, and a giraffe all standing in a field and grinning queasily at the viewer. “I don’t know about you, but I love the color scheme,” Brody Waters, our putative couple’s cisgender white male component, age forty-two, a poet/creative writing instructor at Swensen College, says about the work’s dingy, gritty pastels. “It reminds me of depressed cotton candy. No, actually, it reminds me of depressed cotton-polyester blend candy. Artists back in the olden days loved tints and hues and whatever that didn’t require ironing.”
“I like the colors too,” says Cassie Flanagan, our putative couple’s cisgender white female component, age thirty-nine, a trend forecasting analyst at Mattercomp, “but do you know what I like a little more? How the creatures all have dilated eyes. A super new dispensary must have opened in the neighborhood.”
“Yeah. Bambi needs some wacky tobacky, stat. Who wouldn’t, if you lived in a Disney cartoon?”
She chuckles.
Our putative couple continues staring at the painting.
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An hour, twenty-seven minutes, and forty-three seconds later, they stand outside the museum.
“What a rewarding cultural experience,” Cassie says.
“Yes indeed. I never thought scrimshaw could cause such a frisson of excitement in me,” Brody says, loudly pronouncing that French word as “freeee-sooohn.”
“Ooh la la.”
Pause.
“So you want to attend that concert tomorrow?” he asks.
“No thanks,” she answers.
“How about a movie?”
“Nope.”
“What would you like to do?”
“Uhhh—actually, I’d like to spend the day by myself tomorrow. To recalibrate?”
“To recalibrate?”
“Yup.”
“Recalibrate from what?”
“From everything.”
“All right.” He pauses. “How about Sunday?”
No response.
“Monday? Tuesday? Any day?”
No response.
“Exactly how much time do you need to recalibrate?”
“I don’t know. I’ll call you, okay?”
Longer pause.
“If you recalibrate too much, you’ll go blind,” he says.
She chuckles.
Brief pause.
“So, uh, I guess I should go now,” she says.
“You want a ride?” he asks.
“Thanks, but I’ll walk. I need a good walk.”
“So do I. Maybe I’ll have one someday.”
She chuckles.
Another brief pause.
“Well, uh, bye,” she says.
“Bye,” he says.
They walk off in opposite directions.
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Two years later, Brody has his first novel published, Livin’ la Vida Locher (304 pages, paperback, Quarto House Press, US $21.99 [Canada $30.00]), whose title paraphrases “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” the 1999 hit by Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin. The novel deals with a white, cisgender, forty-six-year-old man named Larry Locher, a cultural studies instructor at Gunderson University, who has a brief affair with one of his graduate assistants, Jazmín Torres, a transgender legal immigrant half his age from somewhere unspecified in Central America. As a result of what the novel’s free indirect narrator calls the “hashtaggers (more like trash-haggers—those pests don’t serve a wittier label)” and the “cancel crowd who’ve cancelled growing the hell up,” Locher loses his job; and his white, cisgender, thirty-nine-year-old wife, Connie Dean-Locher, a trend forecasting analyst at Mastercorp Technology “who pretty much PMSes twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week,” divorces him, taking fifty percent of everything; and Jazmín, who more than once told him “Steeck jour beeg white deeck eenside me, pronto!”, writes Honor Roll, a best-selling, thinly-fictionalized novel about the affair, whereas he cannot get started on his thinly-fictionalized, affair-related novel, What REALLY Happened, because “his ex-wife and his ex-mistress must have sucked the life out of him but not through that certain beeg appendage of his, unfortunately”; and “one of the world’s most popular streaming services, Mango Deluxe,” adapts Jazmín’s novel into a limited series, that service’s most popular offering ever, inspiring “a million memes on the young people’s favorite social media platform, DingDing (and judging from those memes, the young people’s brains must have shrunk in the wash, as that renowned social critic, Gage Cutter [from Cutter’s Law, a 1994 American action movie], would put it)”; and Jazmín and Connie start a romantic relationship, announcing their status via the latter’s account on “that platform for formerly young people, Sunnyday,” via a close-up, sepia-filtered photo of them kissing, with the caption RELATIONSHIP STATUS: TAKEN ✓; and worst of all in Locher’s opinion (or maybe best of all, considering the readers’ proclivities), he can get aroused only when “self-abusing” to fantasies of those two women “humping up a storm.”
Livin’ la Vida Locher receives laudatory reviews both online and in that retro medium, print.
- “Waters proves adept at sculpting prose.”—Thomas Woo, pitchingwoo.com
- “At last, a one-stop source for political incorrectness.”—dripnose2008, litfreek.com
- “This ripped-from-the-headlines novel not only rips up the headlines, it might also rip you a new one.”—Addison Andrews, The Neater Reader
However, Olivia Purcell, in her weekly wordgasm.com column, Purcellular, calls Livin’ la Vida Locher “the worst release yet from that legend in his own mind, the poetaster Brody Waters[,]” who “has really, truly outdone himself this time in the cringe department while adding heaping helpings of MAGA-capped bigotry”; he “obnoxiously” wants readers to sympathize with the white male protagonist, “an aging Gen-Xer who quotes pop culture from the 1990s while going up against deranged, all-powerful enemies: feminists, brown people, immigrants, gays, lesbians, the transgender, Democrats, and—most heinous of all—anyone who quotes pop culture from past the year 2000.” She concedes this novel “has one redeeming quality: the almost-clever names Waters gives his off-brand equivalents of Apple Plus, TikTok, Bluesky, Pornhub, Grindr, et cetera.” But “that still can’t salvage a book even Chad Chaddington would find malodorous. (Though Waters refers to ninety trillion ’90s TV characters, he doesn’t mention his probable role model, Chad, once. To quote a popular hit song from that decade, how bizarre [a reference to “How Bizarre,” a 1995 single from the New Zealand group OMC].)”
Brody can usually shrug off negative reviews. At least they provide a change from the nonstop adoration he receives, not that he hates nonstop adoration, heh heh heh heh heh. But this hatchet job—
He knows Olivia Purcell, white, cisgender, thirty-eight, a presence in airport development district literary circles. He’s run into her over the years at readings, art openings, chamber-music concerts, and other cultural events. “Hey,” she says with a vacuous smile. “Hey,” he replies similarly. They exchange small talk for no more than half a minute, say “Bye” (sometimes he says “Ta-ta”), and part company; otherwise, they have zero contact, though he does hate-read her column every week, to find out what she’s praised or (far more often) what she’s premenstrually eviscerated. She has horrible taste, preferring virtue-signaling pabulum over more intelligent, more challenging fare. Typical book critic—she wouldn’t recognize good writing even if it did the Achy Breaky dance on her face. (He’ll have to remember that line for a future project.)
But perhaps that airhead he’d dated for maybe five seconds a few years ago, Cassie, uh, Cassie Flanagan, had something to do with that review. Both women had attended the same vaguely prestigious school, Garnetville University, together two decades earlier and (at least when he knew Cassie) still kept in touch, having friended each other on Facebook and even occasionally hanging out in person. Cassie might have told her that an insensitive, un-woke poet she’d dated for maybe five milliseconds a few millennia ago had released his first novel; perhaps Cassie had given her a copy. Thanks, Cass.
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 