No one had fought back. His friends had not retaliated and morphed into monsters. They had fallen like flies. Perhaps such evil did not lurk in the others. Perhaps he's been wrong. The thought came to him suddenly, stopping his heart as if he'd been yanked from the dance hall and flung countries and time-zones away only to crash into arctic waters. It marked the end of something, as revelations often do.He was the monsters.

A snake's carcass sprawled across a third of the road. It was so mangled she couldn't tell head from tail. Pieces of its shredded skin lifted and drifted in the aftermath of the car's passing.

Fireflies were like fairy tales. They appealed to the young, the old, and the imaginative. In a world of detestable insects, these bugs were the exception. They had an adorable way of flying so whimsically despite their butts being on fire.

When your legs and arms are being torn from your body, you console yourself that you've not yet been beheaded. Of course, right? When you nerves are being extracted strand by strand and your flesh is being dried drop by drop, you simply see past the blood and the bones and think: Hey, at least they haven't torn me apart at the cellular level yet.Unnerving logic.

The vehicle screeched away. A pair of black tire-tracks scorched the asphalt in its wake, as if the ground had sprouted its own set of horns.

His chuckles rumbled, devoid of humor, as if mirth was a kidney stone that had gotten stuck somewhere in the intestinal mess of the phone lines.

She bit her lip, forcing the truth deeper inside until it caved her. She hunched over like a woman protecting her illegitimate unborn child. She brandished forks and knives and set them on the table, each fork crossed over each knife like a coat of arms, a pattern of X's.

Pappou did not look at Lexi. He scratched his nose and swung his komboloi in one hand so that the worry beads clacked against each other like tiny firecrackers, as if he hoped the clicking of them would snap the world back to its senses, knowing also that they couldn't.

Love. It was the only explanation. That was what love did to you. It wormed its way inside you and leeched you of your courage. It made you weak, reliant on other people's opinions and expectations. It paralyzed you.