“I don’t care if you have to lie down in a fucking coffin like Edith Sitwell,” Beelzebub says. “Get me some pages!”

This is my agent speaking. His name is not really Beelzebub—that’s just how I have him listed in my phone contacts. He’s very professional and he’s never spoken to me like this before. It’s just that I’ve pushed him to the end of whatever tether good agents are connected to their writers by. OK seriously—that sentence I just wrote? That is nothing like my usual high-quality prose. But just now, something really bad is happening to me.

Out of all the 18,652 cosmic shapeshifters that had infiltrated the planet, Kymbyrlee was sure she was the only one who had yet to master walking. The thought came with predictable speed the moment she tripped on the sun-cracked pavement, her left heel hitting the pavement a little too hard. The connection sent a shock through her leg, compressing the rough skin of her foot painfully against bone. She caught herself with the other leg and avoided yet another scraped face, but she could feel her posture overcorrecting, becoming stiff and unnatural. She could feel the looks of passersby graze her, and couldn’t help imagining what they thought. She just wanted to get home.

Where does one lose their head? I did not remember ever losing my head before, or even hearing about other people losing their heads. I had never really considered this to be something that could happen. For obvious reasons, I needed to find my head again. However, I could probably find a temporary solution to last me for the rest of the day—at least until after work.

Miss Virginia Fryar’s breakfast was all but spoiled by the sight of the corpse in her back yard. Miss Virginia spotted it as she crossed the dew-wet lawn, carrying a tray that contained her usual morning Danish and coffee.

Not long into the trial of the Steubenville Strangler, the prosecutor and the defense attorney fell deeply in love with each other. For obvious reasons, this was not an ideal development, and the two lawyers decided to keep this fact concealed from the rest of the courtroom.