Author: ireneallison12

All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 577: Can’t Teach a Shark to Kill Tofu

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(Elliott the Header Pigeon is on vacation this week. PDQ Peety is filling in and is also  filling  himself with PDQ Pilsner.)

Introduction

I again found myself undertaking the idea of the End of Humankind. Which is not to be confused with the End of the World because that will happen a few billion years from now when the sun dies, at which time it will greatly expand and obliterate everything on out to Jupiter. Like the rabid cur shot dead by Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird a dead sun is still a dangerous sun.

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Literally Reruns, Short Fiction

Literally Reruns: Artificial Love by L’Erin Ogle

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Of all the writers who have appeared on the site, L’Erin Ogle is the one whose name I most expect to turn up on the list of famous writers. She is not a commercial type of writer, but she is just plain so damn good that you’d think that even the doofs who control the money would notice her. But maybe it is for the best that she continues to make her way under her own control and at her own speed.

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Short Fiction

Writers Read – Travels With Charley – an essay by Leila

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Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

By John Steinbeck

In late September 1960 John Steinbeck and a French Poodle named Charley loaded a vehicle called “Rocinante” with a sizable amount of liquor and went on a road trip to discover America. Two years later the account was published to wild success. I happened to find a copy (which I later gave to a friend) of a first edition of the book at the local St. Vincent de Paul Thrift Store about twenty-five years ago.

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Fantasy, Humour, Short Fiction

A Castle For the Roller Derby Queen

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(The image is of the actual Andy, who graciously posed)

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Charity and Baby Hope had been searching for the perfect place to build a castle. Magick Minion Andy had done some in person searches and returned with the best prospect, which he explained to Charity in his surprisingly good Wiccan. “Surprisingly good” because your basic Cat, although all are born understanding the Wiccan tongue, has a bit of difficulty speaking it due to some of the trickier elongated vowels. Whenever your basic Cat meets a difficulty that really is not his problem he ignores it, but Andy is not your basic Cat, even though he does somewhat closely resemble a heavily used mop head more than he does an immortal Magick Gray Tabby.

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All Stories, Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 573: An Elegy For a Friend and the A to Z of Adjectival Slight

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A friend from my youth died recently. His name was Kim. We were close through our twenties until he moved to Japan (due to marriage). The only contact we had for decades was the occasional Facebook “happy birthday like” (I fell out of using Facebook fairly quickly; too many ads and idiots, but the premise is a good one). I considered writing letters, which I (without modesty) am pretty good at writing. Maybe I should have–but to paraphrase James Taylor “I didn’t know where to send them to.”

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Short Fiction

Literally Rerun – Trailer Parks and Sagebrush by Rachel Sievers

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Rachel Sievers has been a steady winner with us for the past four years or so. Trailer Parks and Sagebrush is one of her very best. Many writers, who know nothing about trailer parks, attempt to go at the people who live in them as though the residents were alien beings from another solar system.

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Editor Picks, General Fiction, Short Fiction

Week 571: Andy Fought the Law, and, Well, Andy Won

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Andy

Since late 2017 I have been feeding a Feral Cat named Andy Hisster (his image above, circa 2019). Simple math tells me that Andy, full-sized upon my meeting him, must be close to ten years old, which is a good age for a housecat and flat out Methuselah for a wild boy. And make no mistake, Andy is a wild wild wild one.

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Editor Picks, Latest News, Short Fiction

569: More Grammar Gripes

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Every year or so I feel obliged to make a statement on behalf of proper grammar in the English language. Before the tongue is finally killed and left to rot in the Pop Culture Wood, I feel that it is the duty of writers long acquainted with the written word to get in a few shots at the would-be murderers. The killers of language are the Usual Suspects, namely the Selfish and Lazy (from here, “Sal”).

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All Stories, Latest News, Short Fiction

Week 567- Superfluous Quotation Marks

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The Introduction

This is my first wrap of 2026. A few weeks away have made me flabby because I am unnaturally lazy. Therefore, like an athlete gone to seed, I will pull on the sweats and attempt to get in shape by writing about small pointless items and work my way into good enough form to intelligently write about this week’s group of stories. All within a few paragraphs. I aim to put a point on pointless, to sharpen its, well, pointy, or at least pointier end, then use it to etch profound wisdom on the corbomite* walls of public inanity. (*Extremely hard and potentially explosive fictional mass invented by Captain James T. Kirk, known associate of Hardcourt Fenton Mudd, a suspected interstellar Jeffrey Epstein of the 23rd Century.)

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