An excerpt from “The Weekly Farm Report,” a story in progress.
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It wasn’t until college, March Twenty Twenty-six, that I had what I considered my first serious girlfriend. I met her, Taylor, one afternoon in line at the Brew Crew coffeehouse at the student union. The moment I looked at her, my jaw actually dropped in amazement. (Well, it dropped maybe half an inch, but that still counts.)
During my almost two years at that school, I’d seen quite a few hotties, but they’d looked, well, they’d looked a little too hot for me. I don’t mean they were out of my league, though they probably were. I mean they looked unreal in an A.I. kind of way, if anyone remembers A.I.
Taylor was also a hottie, but one with an everyday quality to her, a handmade quality—an artisanal hottie, you could say. Her curly black hair flowed down to her shoulders, in a style that, to me, didn’t look as if its creation had required blueprints or a construction permit or heavy equipment or a hundred-member work crew. Her complexion didn’t have that smooth glossy look adopted by so many women and men, so the adopters can, I don’t know, position themselves above mere mortals? Her huge dark round eyes all but escaped their sockets and embraced you—okay, more like engulfed you, since eyes don’t have arms. Her face featured, from what I can tell, very little makeup—maybe a minuscule amout of red blush and a thin layer of lip gloss.
And she worked out, judging from her tight—well, name an exterior body part of hers, and it was probably tight, but not bulked up, with a little bit of curviness thrown in.
Anyway. We’d each ordered our favorite, a large, double-caramel cappuccino; heh heh, we laughed, what a coincidence. We sat together at a table and started talking.
We found out quite a bit about each other.
For starters, we were sophomores majoring in political science. We’d always cared about current events and such, and with so much stuff happening during the current presidential administration, Trump part two, well, yeah, we both agreed, someone had to care.
Second, we hailed from Robinson Township, a fancy suburban area in Western Pee Ay, with her family living maybe two miles away from mine. We had never run into each other until now, though, due to our having attended different schools and different churches and shopping at different stores and the like. And speaking of churches—
We had grown up Catholic, but since arriving at college, we’d stopped going to church. We’d put our faith on hold, so we could explore other options for helping us develop mentally, emotionally, culturally, and any other adverb we could think of.
Also, we had parents who worked as mid-level executives at various firms at various Robinson industrial parks. My mom worked in investment finance, my dad in mortgages. Vice-versa for Taylor’s parents. We wondered, though, if our respective parents would ever have the chance to advance further career-wise, what with the idiots who always seemed to get promoted over them.
And we used to own female dogs that had two-syllable, six-letter names starting with M—Muffin (a Pomeranian) in my case, and Maisie (a Lhasa Apso) in her case. Our families had adopted the dogs as puppies. The dogs had even passed away a few years earlier from natural causes at the same age, fourteen and a half, Muffin first, then Maisie a week later. Describing what had happened to our pets still choked us up a little, even now.
Taylor and I talked about all this and much more for about an hour. By the end of that hour, we’d finished our beverages, and we’d fallen in love, not necessarily in that order.
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 