Dear Foods That I Have Eaten in Cars,

For decades now you’ve been my moveable feast, my chow-down conspirator. You’ve entertained me, sustained me, fulfilled me, and thrilled me in various vehicles across the continent. For your devoted companionship I will forever be grateful. Which is why it pangs me (and I do mean pangs) to announce that, although my feelings for you are as fresh as the day we met, our journey of dietary delights must now come to an end.

Don’t take it personally, Foods That I Have Eaten in Cars. You’re still the sizzling hot sustenance I fell in love with years ago. It’s not you —it’s me.

There are so many reasons to come teach at Dark Canyon Community College.

You want to test yourself under pressure? We got the pressure to test you. We don’t offer tenure to any of our teachers. We call it keeping educators on their toes.

Every catastrophic event starts the same way:the villain devises a new scheme that will grant him dominance over humanity, and unleashes his/her plan on the hapless citizens on the same metropolitan area they have numerous times in the past. The relative peace and quiet of the city streets is shattered as a giant beam of death fires out from across the river and slices a skyscraper in two. Those on the street turn their gaze upward and quickly come to terms with their own death as they drop to the ground, huddle over loved ones, and clench their eyes shut as they brace for the impact.

Just by the way the envelope felt in his hand, Lawrence Breton knew what it contained.

“Another rejection letter, of course,” he said, tossing it unopened into the fire. This was not the fireplace with the white brick, the medieval logs, the eloquent wrought-iron grate, and the Kodiak rug: that was the one he thought he’d have by now. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford it, but that he only wanted to buy it with book royalties. Lawrence Breton was arriving at the opinion that all publishers were soulless reptiles whose categorical genocide of science fiction writers was the greatest literary misunderstanding of the century.

If he tried hard enough, he could make sense of it all. Everything except the monkey. He was stark naked. That–he was sure—was something that happened quite regularly. The guy to his right saluting him with one arm, the other arm trying to hold his guts in place—he was sure he had seen him before in some kind of movie or something. And the guy in front of him, he was sure his name was Dennis or Donald.

“He’s clean,” Dennis or Donald said over a walkie-talkie.

The other man stopped saluting him and said, “It’s good to have you back, sir.”