Miss Helena Orobos of Upingly was considered the finest badminton player in the county. She had her shuttlecocks made specifically by Feerer’s and Sons of Lower Palliton Falls.

If you come over you'll find we're fierce friends. Like bottles and knives we're eminently useful but have sharp edges.

First there was the building of the sets, but he enjoyed that part of the labor, transforming the many rooms of his Victorian home into living narratives with lumber, paint, and scrap metal.

Professor Tinderbrooks’ Hauntingly Horrific Extravaganza (featuring Mordecai the Ghost) begins each night when the stage lights dim bit-by-bit. On this particular evening, the heightened murmurings of the audience dims alongside the lights.

It was not until Augustus sat down to play the piano that he finally realized he could no longer feel anything. And that did not surprise him. 

The first time they set up the Ouija board it takes the girls about an hour to realize they have to actually ask me a question. “Here goes nothing,” they say, and nothing is right. They sit with the board between them for awhile until one of them gets my hint.  

The mouth of the bass kept opening and closing against the paper, even with the sides cut out and the organs smeared. It didn’t bother her, of course, it never did, but the maiden frowned at it anyway. 

Ramuli lay spread out on the floor of an oak planked living room. The room was bare around him, empty of all things, as was the rest of his home. He felt long, thin pinches down his bare back where the floorboards, old and warped, spread apart and left gaps, some as wide as a human finger.

A man got on a city bus and said, “Regis Toomey.” The bus was not crowded and was a nice bus, not one of those articulated freight haulers.

Freddie went and hugged the flood.

Freddie floundered in the mud.

Freddie went crazy in the head.

And now Freddie Flounder is dead, dead, dead.

I come from a village of basket weavers. Wicker to wool, bamboo to bark—if it was meant to hold something, we could craft it.

When his father moved out, Tyler went mute, sitting in his room surrounded by Tinkertoys, building cars and houses that would not break. He would ignore the voice of his mother that penetrated the carpeted floor, punctuated with words that made him sweat.

One of the bright guests died suddenly that evening.  It was Miss Helena, who wore a long strand of pearls and an ostrich feather in her hair.  Some said she’d drowned in the mansion’s gray fountain. Others claimed she’d fallen down the garden’s stony stair.

It was the summer that we, of our own guts, decided to become anesthesiologists. It was the summer that my twin sister and I went about capturing the smallest animals we could find and placing them in dirty green-glass jars which smelled of brine.

The “new arrival” appeared quite suddenly. Edmund supposed that if he thought very hard about it he would be able to follow the chain of events precisely. First, Mummy and Daddy became happier.

This is what happened. I was trying to move my tallboy when it fell on me and pinned me to the floor. I cried out but no one heard — possibly because I live alone and my neighbors work. It took three days for Janice to notice I had not picked up my newspapers or mail.

Jordan and Kate were driving from Milwaukee to Door County to shop for antiques. They had recently bought their first home, a condominium downtown, and it was all but completely decorated. They just couldn't decide what to do with the alcove in the hall.