flash fiction – DAVID V. MATTHEWS

Flash Fiction #130 (Exactly 130 Words): Ghostposter

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE saga, please click (in this order) here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 130-word limit.

■

In 2025, I was Senior Advisor on Gender Policy for the Trump administration. I worked in a fancy-schmancy office in DC, writing papers on how our country could promote the biological reality of two and only two sexes. I’ve always opposed gender extremism, before “gender extremism” was even a thing.

Anywho, Stewart Pringle, the White House Social-Media Director, he visited me at work one day. He told me the President had lots to do, what with fighting the migrant invasion and wokeness and DEI, so—would I like to help out by writing the President’s posts on Truth Social? “It’s like you two share a brain,” Stewart said. “I can’t imagine anyone else who’d make a better ghostposter, so to speak. Plus you’d have personal access to him.”

Personal access.

Flash Fiction #129 (Exactly 129 Words): No Other Teeth

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE saga, please click (in this order) here, here, here, here, here, and here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 129-word limit.

■

Reading Mom’s text today in which she related the news that Trump had turned my sister Bethany into “a Washington bigshot” by naming her “senior advisor for combatting radical gender ideology” didn’t enrage me as much as seeing the emoji Mom had attached: an ecstatic smiley-face, three-fourths mouth, a gargantuan buck-toothed overbite, a somewhat smaller buck-toothed underbite, and no other teeth. Usually, as a survivor of childhood orthodontic treatment, I would find such an image amusing. But not now. I almost texted Mom back that her news had deserved “a poop emoji,” and that she should “TRY not to revel in deranged anti-trans cruelty.” Instead, I blocked her number; I’ve blocked scores of people (including longtime friends) since Trump’s victory last year, regardless of the blockees’ dental status.

Flash Fiction #128 (Exactly 128 Words): Imperfect Vessels

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE saga, please click here, here, here, here, and here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 128-word limit.

I’d heard rumors for years about Pastor Blake Summers, the ex-rock star. I’d heard he hadn’t quite renounced his sinful ways, that he cheated on his wife, that he liked getting handsy with his female parishioners. Even if those rumors were true, I didn’t care, ’cause we need imperfect vessels to spread God’s word. Donald Trump, the most imperfect vessel of all, he gave us three Supreme Court justices that helped overturn Roe, preventing millions of future preborn babies from getting murdered. And Pastor Summers, he wants to stop transgenderism, same as me. So of course I appeared on his podcast, though I did bring my husband Brandon along. Anyone who bothers me, Brandon gets hansdy with them, in his own way.

The pastor was a perfect gentleman.

July 15, 2023

Flash Fiction #127 (Exactly 127 Words): Offerings

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE saga, please click here, here, here, and here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 127-word limit.

Soon after Child Services had visited her house, my sister appeared on that podcast hosted by Blake Summers, the Eighties rock star turned right-wing pastor, to say her “groomer brother” had ratted her out to “the woke police” for having “the nerve to uphold traditional family values.”

“Shameful,” Blake said. He urged listeners to support her via Offerings, that Christian crowdfunding site, so she could “hire the best legal team if and when the courts go after her.” The next day, she’d received forty-seven grand, the same day somebody—perhaps one of those listeners—doxxed me, bringing me tons of vehemently anti-trans texts and voicemails and social-media posts, making me feel like resuming my former habit of gobbling drugs while writing self-pitying poetry. Who needs self-pitying poetry?

May 25-26, 2023

Flash Fiction #126 (Exactly 126 Words): Fine

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE saga, please click here, here, and here. The author doesn’t share the narrator’s views or the meme’s views. These three sentences don’t count toward the 126-word limit.

If my brother wants to take castration drugs and dress like a whore, wearing skirts that barely cover his equipment, then fine. But when he tries to break up my family—well, that’s really not fine.

Two days ago, Child Services dropped by my house. First they interrogated me for a million hours about how I disciplined my children, then they, Child Services, they said they’d drop by again at some point.

Afterwards, I called Mom. She told me my brother had texted her a minute earlier that he’d reported me ’cause he didn’t like how I encouraged my son to develop a normal sexual orientation. My brother must’ve known she would tell me. She tells everyone everything. She’s like the news media, only not fake.

May 11, 2023

Flash Fiction #125 (Exactly 125 Words): The Righteous Path

For previous installments of the ALWAYS WITH LOVE Saga, please click here and here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 125-word total.

I haven’t spoken to my sister Bethany in years. According to my parents, who still speak with her, she’s bragged more than once about, in her words, “beating the devil” more than once out of her “perverted” five-year-old son Isaac—“perverted” as in gay in Fundie-speak. As for her other kids, she’s paddled them more often than usual “to remind them to stay on the righteous path,” she’s said.

Of course I called Child Services, despite my aversion to anything government-related, such as law enforcement. Both my sister and the cops have repeatedly deadnamed and misgendered me. At least my parents have evolved, referring to me as Callie and she/her, though they have no problem with what Mom calls “a little corporal punishment, judiciously applied.”

April 29-30, 2023

Flash Fiction #124 (Exactly 124 Words): Masculine Side

For part one, click here. These two sentences don’t count toward the 124-word total.–DVM

_____

I didn’t really care about transgenderism until four years ago. That’s when my brother Caleb sent everyone, including me, a text announcing, first, that he had started “transitioning” so his outside could match what he felt like inside. And second, that we should start referring to him by a female name he’d given.

If “OK groomer” had been a thing back then, I would have texted that to him, I was so angry. Instead, I didn’t text him anything. Though I did wonder if, during his childhood, the family should have encouraged him to embrace his masculine side more? Like, watch the Steelers with us? Or watch superhero movies? Watching the right stuff can prevent you from ruining your life. And everyone else’s life.

_____

I don’t share the narrator’s bigoted beliefs. These two sentences don’t count toward the 124-word total, either.–DVM

March 26, 2023

Flash Fiction #123 (Exactly 123 Words): ALWAYS WITH LOVE

My sister Bethany, the rabid right-winger, has started referring to herself on her TikTok channel as “O.T.: the Original Tradwife.” She got married straight out of high school a decade ago to her troglodytic boyfriend. She has five children with a sixth on the way. She homeschools her kids, because she doesn’t want what she calls “the woke virus” to infect them. She also beats them with a thick wooden paddle that says ALWAYS WITH LOVE. She never goes out except to church. She used to go to the supermarket every week, but now she has everything home-delivered, the best way to avoid libs and criminals.

Maybe none of her kids will grow up to die from a heroin overdose—foolish optimism, right?

March 23, 2023

(In other words, #123 on 3/23/23. I hadn’t consciously planned it that way.)

Flash Fiction #122 (Exactly 122 Words): That’s My Brand

“Y’know, the GOP could kill everyone who votes Democrat. And the Dems in charge, they’d do nothin’ but yawn and continue playing Candy Crush on their phones.”

“What have you got against Candy Crush?”

“Nothin’.”

“Then why—”

“Any game. The Oregon Trail, whatever. Y’wanna know why the Dems in charge wouldn’t care if their base got wiped out?”

“Sure.”

“Because they don’t care about nothin’ except keeping the rich happy.”

“Just like the Republicans, yeah yeah, I get it.”

“No you don’t. The Republicans don’t even pretend to like you. The Democrats, they gotta pretend, ’cause that’s their brand.”

“Then that makes you a super-Republican, ’cause you hate everyone.”

“No. I hate everyone ’cause I have a brain. That’s my brand.”

March 9, 2023 (revised a little March 10, 2023)

Flash Fiction #120 (Exactly 120 Words): Don’t Ever Change, Dude

“You heard Victoria’s Secret’s hired a model with Down Syndrome?”

“Yup. That’s great. Now we can jerk off to the handicapped outside of porn.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Women need something, now that they don’t have abortion rights no more.”

“Since when have you cared about abortion rights?”

“Since a little something called child support, that’s when.”

“You need to have sex with a woman first before worrying about that.”

“I do have sex with women. Just ask your mom.”

“I did. She projectile-vomited. Which means you must have banged her.”

“I also banged your grandma.”

“Oh really? When?”

“Last week.”

“She died five years ago.”

“Well, no wonder she was such a great lay.”

“Don’t ever change, dude.”

February 17, 2022