Five sisters. All named Sylvia. Each nine years older than the next. Each dead at the age of 8. Each believed themselves an only child.
"Sir - sir, I must ask you to please do not practice your pick-up lines on our store mannequins. Please... thank you."
"Hey, since I'm gonna eat you... I've got a shred of dental floss stuck right here... I mean, you can die knowing you made someone happy?"
The Operating System can emulate your mind a thousand times faster than your birth-brain. Inside this world, a minute is 17 hours.
I have the tiniest of headaches. It is little more than a faint sensory pulse, coupled with a growing dread that it will get worse.
"NO!" she cried. "With his mind fully attuned to the Fell Stave, he can send us back five squares - onto a Snake!" Her companion was silent.
Hello, child. I am the slug that taught itself to roll like a ball. Here is a magical leaf - it will let you roll 3 dice on your next turn.
"The sunbeams stuck to her as she entered my office - like a coat of blinding gold" is what he typed, and then, frowning, deleted.
Standing on the roof, he carefully aimed the staple gun at the white sheets on the ground, and fired. Now his Extreme Résumé was complete.
"I can't say if it is a murder." he said, pulling the finger from the socket. "Maybe she wanted to see if fingernails conduct electricity?"
Super Cube: this 20cm gray cube has been doubling in weight every 4 months since we bought it in 1980. It now weighs 7 tons. Yours for $90!
"Here! A contract, written in blood on paper made from spider silk and my own skin cells." "And he used his toenail clippings for staples!"
They awoke to each other's gaze. They gazed in silence for several long minutes. They both had sleep paralysis. Inside, they were screaming.
He watched her depart in rage and knelt to take that which she had thrown in his face. "I'll never wash this handkerchief again," he said.
After technology enabled people to literally blow kisses through the Internet, new scourges soon emerged: kiss piracy, and smooch-flooding.
To be clear, you carve: scary faces in pumpkins, lively faces in watermelons, morose faces in honeydews, and alarmed faces in pineapples.
When asked about his twisted fourteen-fingered hand, he said "When I was a boy, I experimented one day with hydra blood and a meat cleaver."
The iron-masked deathlord clenches a captured rook in his palm, snapping it. His bespectacled opponent says, "Ooh, I didn't bring spares."
"Ever since I shot that guy, the light socket in my office ceiling stopped workin'. I tried changing the bulb. All I got now is moonlight."
"Our wretched society has conditioned us all to favour even numbers over odd. Promiscuous numbers that crumble to pieces like candyfloss!"
"I tore out the book's pages and arranged them in the order in which their page numbers appeared in the text... and there was the Map!"
Plot: paintings of flowers escape to the outside world and try to integrate with real flowers, with bittersweet results.
To his credit, his face twitched not once - but his traitorous cheeks shone a brilliant vermillion as he beheld the debaucheries before him.
"I dislike the term 'anti-productivity software'. Y'see, I say my software makes
the most honest and worthwhile product of all: nothing."
I know you promised me a wedding ring, and the Earth does look so pretty with it on... but did you really have to blow up the moon to do it?
You said so yourself. "When she laughs, earthquakes happen." And that, my friend, is why I employed her to help me terraform Mars.
"Gazer": This sword is mirrored silver, so the victim sees their own face when they die. That this piece of crud even exists makes you sick.
"Accuser": this hammer's head was forged in the shape of a woman's finger, possibly that of a past Queen. You can't bear to even look at it.
"Traitor": Against all reason, this ancient sword has hilts at both ends of the blade. It practically invites your enemy to grab it off you.
"Exa": It is like a regular axe, but the handle is inconveniently attached to the sharp end of the head. You have no confidence in this axe.
"The view from my old window... it was an exquisite view, a priceless view, a perfect panorama. And now, atop this perch, I have it back."
"I loved my office. The building may have been leveled, but at nights I still sit in its original airspace, atop several stacked ladders."
This sculpture consists of a vertical stack of bathtubs, with each tub's drain feeding the tap of the one below it.
He watched both of his eyeballs slide out of his head and into the pond before him. Then he realised something was amiss.
Once again, the ocean zombie was in a new place, a new ocean. One filled with water so clear and gentle that it felt like nothing at all.
How the ocean zombie then managed to procure the means of rising up through the ceiling of the sky is not mine to say.
The zombie had broken through the roof of the ocean only to step upon the floor of another ocean, one filled with a gentler kind of water.
The ocean zombie's memories of life had washed away long ago. To see daylight again astounded it, but it did not recognise it.
An ocean zombie, not knowing what it was doing, pulled a barrel from underneath a shipwreck, and suddenly rose up to the ocean surface.
Ocean zombies walk the floor of the Pacific, weighed down with their sins, unable to even swim like the schools of fish that surround them.
It was poetic that our first interstellar vessels so resembled flying saucers. That symbol of the alien and unknown had been made our own.
Constant reminders are good, but what some things tend to actually provide are constant interruptions.
"I'm old enough to be everybody's grandma, sweetie. Look carefully through your family tree, and you might find... me!"
"Sir, I've been waiting here by your car for three quarters of an hour so I could talk to you about this bumper sticker of yours."
That reminds me of that dream I had about the world map with dozens of tiny Australias scattered all over the oceans. Like a virus!
Wondering how playing-card royals get around with no legs, and whether they keep both or just one of their heads upright.
Accidentally got all 99 of my sticky bombs stuck together. No more cave. Now just open pit. #EmbarassingSpelunkyDeaths
"I'm just staring vacantly into your left ear. Yes, I mean, it's your right ear but my left ear. I mean, it's my left but your ear."
It's tough breaking up with the Plainest Man in the World. You really do see his face everywhere you look.