It was as if a mad scientist had sold all of his important tools and chemicals at a yard sale, leaving a makeshift laboratory of scrap materials that the neighbors didn't want.

It sat proudly basking in the warm glow of the street lights; it wasn't a menacing 'enter at your own risk' sight at all. More of a 'come in if you'd like, if not then have a lovely evening' picturesque artifact of the Old South.

They had thought it was uncharacteristic of him to try and eat his cigarette in the driveway.

Those concocting evil schemes rarely perform them in descending order of evilness, so he could assume phase two was to be worse.

His eyeballs felt as if they'd been removed, dry roasted, salted, and replaced.

...and yet there was one lump in that freshly raked zen garden: a small woman crying into a fish bowl.

The brochures remained perfectly stacked, looming over their conversation, mocking his failure with their pristine tri-folds.

If 'quaint' was a piano's Middle C, Marfa was a B-flat; it was peacefully strange.

He ended up smashing several fax machines for the failure they represented to him, but of course had to pay for them because of what they represented to the Best Buy stores in which they'd been smashed.

Although relocating to a state he imagined he'd not even used in a sentence since grade school was not in his life plan, it had seemed like a glittering offer slid across a table off of which he couldn't afford to eat.