Their two sets of eyes met across the intimate, linen-covered table. Piles of lobster shells, picked clean of their precious flesh, reflected the candlelight and bathed her face in a soft, rosy glow. The shiny glean of drawn butter highlighted the broad strokes of his dark, bushy, slightly mussed mustache. They fell into each other’s gaze like a like a high board diver at his first Olympic games. But with less splash, and considerably more clothes.

The soft “ahem” of the waiter broke their concentration.

“Would you care to have your bibs removed?” he asked politely.

They looked at their once-pristine paper bibs, boldly emblazoned with the Tilly’s Tails for Two logo. The bright scarlet letters and lobster contrasted with the pure white of the paper and the translucent spots caused by the gentle fall of sweet clarified butter and succulent lobster juice which had rolled from their adoring lips during dinner. She smiled sweetly before she shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I want to keep it forever, just to remember the romance of this night.”

The waiter quietly glided away like a seagull chased from a parking lot as the two lobster loving lovers reached towards each other with butter-softened hands and eyes full of adoration.

Looking deep into her frog green eyes, he suddenly realized that she meant more to him than football, basketball and baseball combined, and maybe even more than professional hockey, but he wasn’t sure since the season had been cancelled and he hadn’t seen a game since last season when his favorite team lost the Stanley Cup, but he was pretty sure he loved her even more than that highly revered sport of sports.

He lifted his ice cold can of low-carb beer to his lips and drank deeply, letting its smooth flavor flow over his tongue and down his throat while its slight alcohol content gave him the courage he sought to declare his love for her.

Jack watched in amazement as the little tiny men stepped off the really big spaceship that looked so small sitting in the middle of the big cornfield that started at the edge of the small town where Jack lived when he wasn’t at college at the big town nearby that was a lot smaller than the farther and bigger town that was a lot further away. The little men seemed to be all men, since none of them looked like women, or at least didn’t look like any women he had seen, though he had never seen anybody wear little silver body suits like these tiny men, or possibly women, were wearing, though he thought that such skin-tight suits would make it easier, rather than harder, to tell if they were men or women. So he assumed that they were all men, even though they were a lot shorter than the men he was used to seeing in his small town, or even in the bigger town where he went to college. Though men weren’t any bigger in the bigger town than they were in the smaller town, there were just more of them.

Jack wondered whether he should run away, or whether he should walk away. If he ran away, he knew he would get away faster, but wouldn’t be able to run as far as if he walked away, which he would do at a much slower pace but would be able to go much farther over the long run, or long walk. As he thought, the aliens continued to pour out of the ship, kind of like eggs pouring out of a frog when she’s laying eggs. But, although these men were very small, they were much larger than frog’s eggs, or else Jack could have easily outrun them even at a very slow walk.

Dar-Rell shielded his eyes from the blistering glare of the nuclear holocaust that had just occurred. He was the lucky one, the only survivor of a devastating clash between the Kom-Mi forces and his own Free-Dom People. Destruction and death were everywhere. Flames licked at the few remaining artifacts of civilization as Dar-Rell neared the refreshing water of lake Li-Bido. His tanned, ruddy skin glistened in the glow of the blast’s fiery aftermath as he stooped to drink Li-Bido’s cool water, his tattered clothing betraying a strong, chiseled young body of uncommon strength and tenderness. Drinking deeply, his biceps rippling, Dar-Rell contemplated his future, and the challenges he would face as the single remaining human on the planet.

Or was he? Something stirred Lake Li-Bido’s stillness. Dar-Rell waded a few tentative steps into the lake to take a closer look. Suddenly Li-Bido’s surface broke. A creature of dazzling beauty rose, and moved gracefully towards the shore. The glow of the nuclear furnace danced in her eyes as she brushed her long blond hair from her face, sending a cascade of water over her ample, barely concealed breasts, which heaved with each gasping breath. The remnants of a once stylish dress clung to the delicate curves of her vital young body, scarcely preserving her modesty.

“How can this be? Who … who are you?” stammered Dar-Rell.

“I am Tiff-Ani,” she replied, hungrily drinking in the visage of the robust young man at the lakeshore. “I … I thought they were all gone,” she said, gesturing towards the scores of lifeless countrymen and women that were visible as far as the eye could see.

“You and I … we are alive,” whispered Dar-Rell, inviting Tiff-Ani into his firm embrace. “Yes … yes, we are alive,” she agreed, offering her soft lips in return. “We are … the future.” As they caressed and waded through Li-Bido, their newborn love stood in sharp contrast to the less fortunate casualties that littered the ground nearby.

Saarda! Just saying her name makes my pulse race like a thousand pages of The Arabian Nights being ratcheted by a perfectly-painted, red fingernail. Thrilling in counterpoint to its trill, is the throb of that blood-engorged organ of love and lust–my heart, for I know between those exquisite extremities lies a consummate fugue, awaiting my indulgence.

Ahh, Saarda! What mysterious warp and woof of sultriness incarnate was wrought by the unholy union of an Arab street-girl and the British aristocrat, Sir Myers-Mee, which gave thee life. A Divine elixir was quaffed that night, Eastern sensuality and Western hubris: Sin in a Strait-jacket of Guilt; from which was born the perfect Dominatrix.

Saarda! The alchemy of her honey-dark voice, seeps sofly into a simpering ear, rendering the siren’s seductive call a callous squawk compared to the amber ooze of Sarda’s sibilant whisper, which slides past the susurrous of the tympanic membrane, inveigling those spaces between the snap-crackling synapses wherein loneliness resides, like the faded hopes which hide in a thousand New York bed-sits, trapped between the termite-busy lives of the teeming millions.

Saarda! The sound twists and turns my soul like an enforced conjunction of the New Jersey Turnpike with the Bakersfield South-Bound Flyover. At once, ecstatically whirling, the next moment a see-saw motion, seemingly without purpose or direction, such that my stomach flips, like a butterfly beset with hiccups over a stormy sea.

Saarda! Come to me, whisper those tantalizing words into my ear; let your voice slide into my inner being, a velvet probe, which seeks to fill nothing less than my whole.
Saarda! At last she comes and I call out her name, all of it, in a Litany of Love-Lost, Lust and Despair.
Saarda! Saarda Myers-Mee, oh, Saarda Myers-Mee!

Her name was Portia - although she certainly didn’t dress like a man nor did she have a husband to defend, nor would his name have been Antonio if she had had a husband - which was ironic (well, maybe not ironic since there isn’t anything especially poignant about the comparison) because she had an effect on middle aged men, the ones with pony tails and gold-plated identity bracelets and the top three buttons on their silk shirt unbuttoned, not unlike a Porsche – at least the cool old ones, because God alone knows what possessed a legendary German sports car manufacturer to build a 450 horsepower fake SUV and name it Cayenne after the pungent red peppers of the genus Capsicum, except maybe for the fact that they both make you cry (the peppers and the automotive engineering blunder, not the girl, although she could certainly make you cry) - and they (the middle aged men, not the German engineers or, obviously, the peppers) pursued her with a passion. She looked around the room – which took a while because there were a lot of people in it and it was a big room, a ballroom the hotel called it even though it was carpeted which certainly would have made dancing a chore, not that there was any dancing on the agenda for a Chamber of Commerce meeting like this - as she toyed with her hair (there was something sexy about the way she would swirl her finger through her long brown hair, even though it’s not a particularly sexual activity), eventually zeroing in one particular man, the man she had been searching for all her life. All she needed now was his name, both literally and figuratively – meaning she needed to know who he was before she married him.

The snow was falling as a bucket of something otherwise light and bright would. First, a single flake fell, floating to the ground like a really flat cat who happened to be bathing in ice. Then, another fell, precisely in the manner that a rock would, had the rock been cold, really small, and had the tendency to float. A third flake fell, this time resembling something else which had an utter lack of heaviness, and instead had replaced such a quality with coldness.

By the time the fourth snowflake had fallen, its weight had begun to pick up, briging it to the likeness of a really crumply piece of paper that had been in the freezer for far too long. The sixth flake, which is a damn copycat, did the same thing. The seventh flake, a non-conformist, tried to act like a speck of toothpaste which had been hanging out with the fifth and sixth flakes for a while.

I hate the winter. Fortunately, I actually live in Bermuda, where it really doesn't snow, and that's exactly where this story takes place...

It was a terrible night for a suicide since it was cold and rainy and foggy with a little bit of snow and the occasional rumble of thunder for added ambiance. Detective Jackson pulled up to the scene in his unmarked car, a late-model Ford Crown Victoria painted an unassuming dark blue with slightly darker blue vinyl seats which gave the whole car a very unassuming look when one looked at it. That was the way he liked his cars and his women to look – unassuming, in an understated, unassuming kind of way.

Leaving his unassuming car neatly parallel parked next to the curb, he opened his standard police issue umbrella to fend off some of the rain and snow, though it did little to help improve visibility in the fog. He flashed his bright, shiny, brass and enamel detective badge at the uniformed officer who was standing next to the door of the house where the body had been found, and still was, and walked into the scene of the crime.

He walked up to the junior detective who was standing next to the headless body of a woman.

“She left a suicide note that said she was going to slice her throat from ear to ear. However, her head is missing much lower than that, so we won’t know if she killed herself until we can find the rest of her neck. But we’re having trouble finding where she hid her head after she slit her throat,” the junior detective informed him.

Detective Jackson looked down at the formerly living woman and took in her plain clothes and jewelry-free fingers. He wondered if her head would have any earrings when they found it. Too bad she’d killed herself, he thought, since she looked like she was exactly his type of woman.

She was jumping up and down like an excited spaniel. But then Misty, my spaniel, always got excited when there was the prospect of going out for a walk. But this would be a walk that would have consequences which neither of us could foresee or predict. If only we had seen what was coming. But I wasn’t psychic and Misty is a dog.

I locked my door. My house was my castle after all and I didn't want anyone breaking in like a rampaging army in the 14th century intent on stealing televisions and VCRs.

The sky was blue and there were twelve clouds in it. It had rained yesterday but today it hadn’t so far but it might later on because it did yesterday after it had been nice in the morning like it was today.

Misty walked ahead. She always did because she was faster than me. I wasn’t slow. I used to run the 200 metres in school but Misty was faster than me.

It was then that it happened. We hadn’t seen it coming, neither Misty nor I, but it happened and it happened quickly so we couldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t see that it was about to happen and Misty is a dog although I did try to stop it when I saw what was happening but I didn’t manage to.

Because Misty was walking ahead of me because she was quicker than me it happened to Misty first, but I wasn’t too far behind Misty so it happened to me very quickly after it happened to Misty.

At first I wasn’t sure what had happened but then I realised.

“My chili is cold,” said Ernesto.

“You should have come when I called you, ten minutes ago,” Clara replied. “And besides, it is not chili. It is chili con carne.”

“So it has meat in it.”

“Yes, it has meat. It has venison from Luisa. She gave it to us.”

“Well, it does not matter if it has meat or not, it is still chili. ‘Con carne’ means ‘with meat’, but that does not preclude its categorization as chili,” Ernesto challenged. “It is chili. That fact has not been changed by Luisa’s venison.”

“’Preclude’? ‘Categorization’?” Clara exclaimed. “Have you been reading the dictionary? You are mad. Eat your chili.”

“There, you see? Even you are calling it chili,” Ernesto pointed out triumphantly. “Chili chili chili. It is, chili, woman, whether it contains meat or is bereft of meat, and I thank you for seeing things my way.”

“Now you are saying ‘bereft’! Must you correct my every utterance, with your fancy lexicography? I cannot countenance your one-upmanship, Ernesto! What has possessed you?”

“Oh-ho!” Ernesto exclaimed as he thumped the table. “Bravo, mi querido! Three contentious words in one mere sentence! Now our citizenship applications are certain to be approved, so that we may continue to hone our linguistic skills in this wonderful country. Bravo!”

“It was two sentences,” corrected Clara. “Now please, Ernesto, eat your chili.”

“My chili is cold,” said Ernesto. “And the burrito has left me turgid.”

After living alone in the woods for 41 years, 9 days and 2 hours, every lonely and isolated day of living alone in the woods was ordinary and mundane, but today was different, it was special. Emmit hiked to his sacred place in the woods and once there, he sat back on his large and hairy haunches to begin today’s very special ceremony of scraping out the thick yellow cream and grit from under his jagged never-been-cut toenails, with the edge of the shortest of his years-grown-long broken and darkened fingernails. He was not a cheat, and this was a day that he had been reverently waiting on for 4 years, 6 days and 7 hours. The magnitude of this moment started to overtake his emotions, threatening to interfere with commencement of the ceremony, so he took several long and cleansing deep breaths before he began, then he individually cracked each knuckle on his weathered and callused hands. Now he was ready, and without a doubt, the ceremony was ready to begin. He observed this ceremonial operation with even more scrutiny than the most meticulous eyed and strategic minded surgeon would ever fathom using. He watched with trembling intensity and with a deep down sincerity of anticipation for a truly productive session as the chosen fingernail began the tedious process. There was no question that this big toe on his right foot was first in the procedure, it’s name was King, and King would become dangerously angry if it wasn’t shown the respect it’d come to expect over the years, plus King would not disappoint when it came to giving Emmit exactly what he wanted, King was the best. The revolting porridge slowly started to curl out from under King’s thickened and heavily ridged nail, Emmit shuddered, life was good.