I saw a SPIDER THROW A TWIG yesterday….I watched Brunhilde the garden spider repair her web after a windy night. I don’t generally like watching spiders as I have primeval-fear issues with them (I suspect, and I am not joking, that some of us have DNA memory from proto-anthropoid ancestors…

— flash fiction by John Shirley Emilio knew it was the googuys the second he saw them through the peephole in his apartment door. Despite their being warped around the fish-eye, he could see they were in their “casual but not casual” clothes; designer jeans, top drawer button-up shirts. The…

Dwayne Dwidget, Chairman of Flibbertigibbet Incorporated, leaned back in his plush boardroom chair, started to speak — then noticed the damn gulls flying up to the window again. They’d become most bothersome lately. Happily, he’d had the laser anti-bird device installed and he smiled seeing its green beams lancing out…

“Consumer Reports found dangerous heavy metals in chocolate from Hershey’s, Theo, Trader Joe’s, and other popular brands.” Lead poisoning from chocolates? It’s quite real. The lead and cadmium in chocolate scandal led me–a sad, dissolute chocoholic–to ask what’s the safest chocolate, and how they can get the lead out. “Safest”…

“You canines sure are a mixed bag,” I told my dog. “Here it is in the news today: Ten month old baby killed by the family dogs. That was in North Carolina. Their Rottweilers mauled the poor kid to death! Some of you canines are grossly savage, bro. Domesticated dogs…

The act of revealing, or disclosure — that’s what the word apocalypse used to mean. It meant revelation. It meant a rent in the veil; an opening up that revealed divine purpose. For most people now, apocalypse has come to mean widespread destruction, even an end of the world as…

“It’s just so amazing, so…well, miraculous, really!” the Republican politician said, in the congressional caucus room. He glanced at the door to make sure it was closed. The ten other congresspersons in the room looked too, as he went on, “It’s so miraculous I think that God must have ordained…

Sadly, what happened on January 6th, 2020–gibbering louts, gullible Qanon stooges and white supremacists invading the Capitol Bldg–is probably only a prelude. White nationalists and their conspiracy-theorizing allies will not go away; probably not for a generation. These people are deeply entrenched in their fantasy world. They have guns (who…

When we were kids, we played a game in the yard: “That part of the yard is lava! Stay out of it or you burn up and die!” So we had to walk across ornamental rocks to keep from falling into ‘lava’. This is a really widespread thing, and you…