Another excerpt from “The Weekly Farm Report,” a story in progress. For the first two excerpts, please click (in this order) here and here.
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Easter morning, bright and sunny. I met Taylor outside her dorm.
“Have you seen Trump’s post today on Truth Social?” she asked.
“No,” I replied.
“You should. You might think the post is fake. I certainly did. But it’s real.”
“Okay, hold on.”
I took out my phone and went to the above social-media site, a site Trump owned. He had been publicly threatening for a while to destroy Iran’s infrastructure if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F—-n’ Strait, you crazy b—–ds, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
(I’ve cleaned up the language a little.)
“So what do you think?” Taylor asked.
“I think Trump didn’t have his coffee first thing this morning, heh heh,” I replied.
“Actually, he’s addicted to diet soda, not to coffee. But right now, it doesn’t matter what he drinks, since it’s far, far, far more important that he threatened to commit war crimes in two days.”
“That’s just his way of negotiating.”
“ ‘Do as we say, or we’ll destroy your country’—a great negotiating tactic.”
“Well, we’re dealing with Iran here. We have to show them we mean business.”
“Yes, we always have to show predominantly non-white countries we mean business. Non-white countries with lots of resources we need, for our businesses.”
“Should we start heading out?”
Taylor paused. “Sure.”
We started walking toward downtown, where we’d planned to have Easter brunch at Taylor’s favorite vegetarian restaurant, Happy Harvest. She’d quit eating meat seven years earlier, when she was thirteen, due to how killing animals for food made her uncomfortable, though she didn’t actually kill them herself or even watch them get killed. She still didn’t like the killing part, but now she also believed that carnivorous diets made you fat and ruined your health. Humans had evolved to the point where they no longer had a biological need to consume animals, she thought. As someone who regularly worked out, she needed extra protein but got it from sources such as tofu, tempeh, and nuts, and sometimes from higher-carb sources such as lentils, requiring her to—
“You don’t deny that even threatening to destroy a country’s bridges and power plants is a war crime under international law?” she asked.
I didn’t respond.
“Well? Do you deny it?”
“I guess not. But—”
“But what?”
Pause.
“Sometimes you have to think outside the box,” I said. “Sorry if this sounds like corporate-speak.”
Copyright © 2026 by David V. Matthews
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 