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.”
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.
An excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Photorealistic Raccoons.
■
Sitting on an old white bedspread under a tree, Gerry looked through his stack of comic books, wondering what he should read next. Perhaps Mekka Lords? Nah, he’d grown bored with the current plotline; Dr. Harmer has taken control of Mekka City’s protektors again? Shouldn’t the chief protektors have gotten fired after the second time at least? Or how about the new Silverquake? Maybe, but leafing through the issue, Gerry could see the story took place in the ghetto. He saw enough blacks in real life, thank you. Or The Mighty Victors? Pretty good art by Dick Dobbins, especially during that quantum matter battle in the Zordonian space station, but Gerry had already read that issue twice. He should have taken the time to choose better comics instead of waiting till the last second then grabbing whatever he could find at home. But even the worst comics were better than this sorry place, Presque Isle, that peninsula jutting out into Lake Erie, near the city of Erie.
His parents sat behind him in folding chairs, his mother reading Newsweek (THE NIXON TAPES), his father reading U.S. News & World Report (BUGGING INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE). Gerry had always had an interest in current events, not as much as his parents, but enough to make him feel more sophisticated than his classmates, whose favorite pastime involved placing ketchup packets on the street, watching vehicles drive over the packets, and—
“Excuse me?”
Two people had walked up: a man carrying a folded folding chair, and a girl carrying an oversized tote bag.
“Excuse me?” the man repeated, addressing Gerry’s parents. “Do you mind if my daughter and I plop down next to you, here in the shade? If I spend more than five minutes out in the sun, I turn into beef jerky.”
“I know what you mean,” Gerry’s mother replied. “I burn pretty easily myself.”
“So you don’t mind if we plop down here?”
“I don’t mind. Do you mind, Roy?”
“Nope,” Roy answered.
“Thanks,” the man said. He unfolded his chair: green mesh fabric on a gray aluminum frame. “What a coincidence we have the same chairs, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” Gerry’s mother said.
“Great minds think alike.”
“They certainly do.”
The man sat down in his chair. The girl sat down next to Gerry on the bedspread and placed the bag between them.
“So, I guess we should introduce ourselves,” her father said. “We’re the Seahorse family. And yes, really, that’s our last name, Seahorse. It’s been in our family for generations. Along with”—he pointed at his face—“my cute little button nose.”
Gerry’s parents laughed. In reality, that guy had a nose like a bloated cantaloupe, like the Screaming Ghost’s nose in Hatchetman, not one of Gerry’s favorite comics, one he’d stopped reading months ago after that boring Battle Renewed plot where the characters spent far more time whining about their lives instead of, you know, battling.
“Anyway, you can call me Jake,” he continued. “And this here’s my perfect peach, my daughter Margot. Margot with a silent T at the end—a T for ‘terrific.’ ” He turned to face her. “Say ‘hi,’ Margot.”
“Hi,” she muttered.
“Tell them how old you are, Margot.”
She didn’t respond.
“Margot?”
No response.
“She’s thirteen. You know how moody teenagers can get.”
“No I didn’t. Thank you for sharing that with me,” she said, staring at something in the distance.
The adults laughed.
Jake and Margot looked alike. They each had light red hair, pasty skin, and a lanky physique. And—ahem—that cute little button nose.
“I’m Roy Blanchard, my wife Helen, our son Gerry-with-a-G,” Gerry’s father said.
“G for ‘Gee, our son’s great,’ right?’ Jake asked.
“Right.”
“How old are you, Gerry?”
“Twelve,” he said.
“He’s growing up fast,” Helen said. “He starts junior high in a couple weeks.”
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.
“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.”
Following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Hannah tweeted that she had never told anyone other than a few close friends this, but three years earlier, during her freshman year of college, she’d had an abortion during her tenth week of pregnancy, her first pregnancy, and that she considered choosing to undergo that health-care procedure the best decision of her life, because that decision prevented her from having an unwanted child and more likely than not making that child’s life miserable because the child would have symbolized Hannah’s thwarted ambitions, resulting in, despite Hannah’s best intentions, sheer loathing of said child, not to mention sheer self-loathing; now Hannah could finish college and pursue a career and care for any wanted children she might someday bring into the world.
After that tweet, however, her brother Logan somehow found out which clinic she had used. He then sued the clinic under Texas law—she lived in Austin, he in Abilene—for performing an abortion after six weeks. He won his case, receiving a ten-thousand dollar reward, as the law allowed, and helping drive the clinic, one of the few that still performed abortions in that state, out of business, though by the time the clinic closed permanently, she had stopped speaking to him, had even blocked him on social media, though after their father’s funeral in Abilene, standing alone by the grave, the first time they’d seen each other in eight years, she did mutter “Hey” to him. Without exchanging a greeting, Logan told her nothing personal about that abortion stuff, he had never really cared one way or the other that she’d terminated her pregnancy, and he still didn’t care, but he’d needed to pay off the rest of his pickup truck loan, totaling ten grand coincidentally enough, a pretty good pickup, no mechanical issues unlike his previous trucks, plus the finance company had kept harassing him, even threatening to sue him. Sorry.
She found him more reprehensible than ever but, Goddess help her, for the first time since the lawsuit, also sort of sympathetic. He never could budget his money. And as she knew from personal experience, sticking to a budget in this capitalist economy posed myriad difficulties.
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 