religion – DAVID V. MATTHEWS

A Biological Need

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.”

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

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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.)

DVM v. the Bible

Zap! Pow! Bang!

Four Drawings (with One ? and Two !’s)

Rabbi Bern’s XB-70 Valkyrie Fantasy

Yes, in Only Minutes, the World Series of Nuclear Brinksmanship Begins!

But Who Can Understand Monks Anyway?

Robert Crumb Is Stinkin’ Rich, Man!

Flash Fiction (a Hundred Words or Fewer) #19: Caesura

Ms. Greenberg called it her caesura: her daily break in her eight-hour workplace melody—more like a dirge, she sometimes joked. Fancy vocabulary words added syllabic class to any day, she felt, although a steaming cappuccino from the break room’s coffeemaker—a sleek gray machine that looked futuristic in her blocky beige office building—also helped improve her life, in a joltin’ kinda way.

Some coffeemakers (but not that one) now have Bluetooth built in, she thought during her last caesura. Her electric toothbrush had Bluetooth—a Bluetoothbrush, heh. She sipped her cappuccino and thanked Jebus for wordplay, heh heh.