As the saying goes, a star pilot’s flight jacket has no stains, only stories.

The jam had filled the courtyard and foyer and pushed the water out of the swimming pool. Where it touched the walls, little tendrils snaked their way upwards like searching fingers. There was an overpowering stench of strawberries.

There was an Iron Man–shaped ache in my face.

I’d sometimes pictured myself bravely sacrificing my life to save another, but my preference had always been that it be someone I actually liked.

The obedient Pit bull becomes the escaped tiger and it’s got a knife.

He hastily pulled off his dressing gown – revealing austere black boxer shorts and a threadbare T-shirt for something called Mogworld – and began twirling it frantically around his head.

She looked like a drama student who had been told to be a tree, then never told to stop.

Anyway, something tells me that wasn’t the kind of death you come back from.

I don’t actually remember if I was able to get a firebolt off. I have a vague memory of seeing orange light splatter harmlessly against a spiked breastplate, but that might just have been sparks from all the metal rubbing against metal. Then there was a sound rather like a bag of wet laundry being hurled across a gravel driveway, and that was the first time I died.

Readers of my online journal – I refuse to use the word blog because it sounds like something that lives on a riverbed and communicates through farts.