The Calico Café Cat
“The Calico Café Cat,” by Craig Loomis
“The Guacamole Incident,” by William Torphy
Horace reaches for the party-sized plastic tub, hits it with his thumb and pushes it off the coffee table. The tub falls face-down, sending gobs of guacamole exploding across the new cream-colored Berber carpeting, instantly transforming its surface into an abstract painting of green clods and speckling red. He slides off his lounge chair and kneels next to the goopy mess. Silvia will be home soon from her therapy appointment. There’s going to be hell to pay and he needs to think quickly. Grab something to sop up the carnage— a rag, a towel, a sponge. Maybe something like a trowel to first scoop up the worst of it. Armed with a spatula, he attempts to spoon up the chunky clumps but he only manages to spread the catastrophe further. He tosses the guac-covered spatula…
“I’ll Have Water Overnice,” by Kaeli Dinh
I’ll have water overnice Freedom was getting to sleep over at our uncle’s. Fridays consisted of squirting ketchup into our waters and Saturdays with blankets over our eyes from the late-night horror films. We were three spoiled children that slept with sugar running through our veins and nightmares we didn’t tell our mother. Then the pencil marks on the wall got higher and our hands started to grab more. But uncle was still squirting ketchup into his water. Freedom was forgetting to answer his calls and taking cash out of the birthday cards he made. Keeping us healthy costs more than his insulin shots. But his hand kept feeding until he lost his sight. He was fooled humbling himself a Giving Tree. We took his only good apples and now his eyes. When he wanted…
“Algorithms and Lies,” A Short Story by Dave Swan
Mick Sanford stared at the screen, blinked, and shook his head, thinking his editor had lost her millennial mind. She’d just sent an email telling him to submit his new manuscript, “Murder By Desire,” for review—not by her, but by some artificial intelligence bot. Unbelievable. Muttering about the young punks wrecking the business, he started his video meeting app. “Good afternoon, Mick,” Lindsey Parrish said pleasantly a minute later. “I thought I might hear from you today.” She was going to hear plenty. “You’ve got to be kidding me. What the hell is this?” “The principle is really no different from spellcheck,” Lindsey said, unruffled. “It gives us metrics that affect the quality of the story. I’m not saying I’ll accept all of Max’s advice—” “Who?” “That’s what the bot is called. A lot of…
“Spare Parts,” Poetry PLAGIARIZED by John Kucera
Editor’s Note, January 26, 2024: We published this post in July of 2022. It has recently come to our attention that at least one of the poems was plagiarized. Thank you to Tara Campbell for alerting us to this literary swindler. We are leaving this post up, minus the poetry, so Google searches will still lead here and people can learn the truth. Our apologies to John Compton, who is the original author of the plagiarized work. Check out his poems here. John Kucera (a pen name for John Siepkes) has made a name for himself by stealing others’ poems and it is well documented. Below are just a few links for anyone who wants to hear more about his shameful acts of passing off stolen work as his own. We hope that you will…