6

At the Waterfront Village in Downtown Portland with News Channel 8

TV Reporter: Back here live at the Waterfront Village with my friend the zombie, Jonathan—you're looking good; Jonathan just got an awesome face paint job. Jonathan, what do you think?

Jonathan, the zombie: I like turtles.

TV Reporter: Alright, you're great... zombie, and—good times here at the Waterfront Village, open for the next eleven days.

5

The previous affairs of the mayor's wife had become common knowledge, often referenced to and remarked upon at dinner parties of even the most polite nature. On the subject of sexual intercourse, both pre-marital and marital alike, it was said that she had developed an intricate and inexcusable dialect of depravity. Four years prior, so the story goes, she had made love to a recently ordained priest in the parish sacristy before his inaugural mass. Accuracy of the affair was muddled. One version insisted that she had not only slept with the young priest but with the two red-haired altar boys who were thought to have called in sick with the mumps, while another revolved around a bizarre sequence of events involving the holy sacrament, several packets of incense, and the reckless spending of collection money gathered from the five o'clock service.

4

He walked towards the car, flipped a glance over his shoulder, spun around on his heels and bang bang, shot him with two fingers. Sigmund reeled around one and a half times and crumpled to the cobblestone street. “Ah, but you fall so easily, my friend,” the murderer said as he disassembled the weapon into his pockets. Satisfaction was easy to come by with Sig.

Sigmund lay on his stomach, face down, spread out and ridiculous, moaning on a three second interval. Small tracts of breath rose from the side of his head. Despite Albert's apparent disinterest, Sigmund had wanted some credit for a doubly preconceived murder; besides, he had the more theatrically rigirous half of the act. Sigmund continued to whimper and, keeping about with a believable trauma, began to push himself across the uneven street, his right shoulder hunched over as if it was lead weighted.

From the car: “It’s cold, Sig, let’s go. Get up.”

3

Before the king was able to tease the amulet from his naked wrist, the dragon mashed through the stone wall. The king and his courtesans, in a maneuver no less routine than the soon-to-be orgy, flung themselves from the bed. The trio of guards sprung from their posts, rushed past their fleeing king's posse towards the bedroom, and stuck the creature in its neck with three practiced thrusts of the spear. Quickly it collapsed upon the regent's bed, crushing it entirely. One guard, running the point of his weapon against the creature's scales, noticed underneath the brackish grey beast but another nuisance to be dealt with. "I think there is a girl under this foul beast," he told the others.

2

There were no pines to view near the Pine View funeral home showroom. By the home's third year the sturdy trees had long been uprooted, torn apart, skinned, and sent away to their various destinies: a turpentine plant in Oklahoma City, organic number two pencils in Burlington, a peculiar style of Venetian blinds popular in the suburbs of Lakeland, Florida, and a small amount of finely minced wood chips, found and sold as Andean magic dust to an unassuming but deserving classmate outside of Philadelphia.

1

Acting in the best interest of maternal egalitarianism, Donna suspended all clandestine mother-daughter dinners at the Park Forest Galleria food court.