flash fiction – DAVID V. MATTHEWS

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

Flash Fiction #119 (Exactly 119 Words): As Soon as Possible by My Standards (Part One)

My mother the Baptist fanatic, who hadn’t spoken to me since I’d come out as a gay man eighteen years earlier, left me a voicemail telling me that with “the passage of time,” she now accepted my “lifestyle” and hoped we could “patch things up as soon as possible.”

“All right, Mom, what do you want?” I asked when I called her a week later (as soon as possible by my standards).

“Nothing,” she replied. “I’ve changed.”

“Congratulations.”

I agreed to meet her for lunch sometime.

“She must have eaten her first pussy,” my husband speculated later.

If so, hooray for new experiences, though rebooting a relationship can make you pine for the previous script and its well-rehearsed predictability.

January 17, 2022

Flash Fiction #118 (Exactly 118 Words): Blocheads

Stopping at Target and seeing the empty shelves due to the COVID-related supply chain disruptions, I joked to my girlfriend that we lived in the Eastern Bloc now, causing her to respond in a non-joking manner that good thing we had, in her words, “turned into Blocheads,” because, first, the American desire for cheap, bountiful consumer products had driven down wages and destroyed the environment; and, second, those Communist countries at least had generous social programs and no, again in her words, “religious crap,” though of course other crap had existed. Every ideology has its crap, she added matter-of-factly. (She’d taken Cold War History in college, taught by a professor so radical, he wore ragged jeans to class.)

January 17, 2022

Flash Fiction #117 (Exactly 117 Words): Two VIP Tickets

12/31/2021: Tyler, having heard Betty White, the last surviving Golden Girl, had died that day, posted on his Reddit account those nude photos she’d posed for sometime in her twenties, photos where she shows her non-geriatric boobs and butt. His girlfriend Skyler, a Golden Girls fan, saw him post the photos.

“You think she’s hot?” she asked.

“Sure,” he replied. “I’d bang her.”

“I’d rather bang the young Bea Arthur.”

Whereupon Ty and Sky ushered in the new year by staying home and banging each other. Afterwards, screw COVID, they spent $105 on-line for two VIP tickets for the Golden Girls puppet show in January at that fancy theater. You can do anything when you’re in love.

December 31, 2021-January 1, 2022