One day Chloe woke at her usual time, showered, dressed, read the morning paper, checked her e-mail, and stirred three heaping tablespoons of rat poison into her morning cup of coffee.

It was a departure from her usual routine and created quite a stir in Abbotsville, where Chloe was known as the most solid of solid citizens.

Five times a week for the past 25 years she’d worked the lunch and dinner shift at Ralph’s diner, serving the same greasy hamburgers and early bird…

Dear Mr. LaBo,

We regret to inform you that we must with great reluctance reject your lovely Hallmark card submission once again. Though this is a distinct improvement over your last effort (“Mommie Dearest, Sorry about the stabbing incident last Thanksgiving when I mistook you for the dinner turkey”) we still feel your most recent submission fails to conform to our high standards.

First, we feel it is longer than we would like as most of our customers have relatively short…

I’m a genius trapped inside this moron’s body – a mind designed for deep thinking, brilliant inventions, scintillating conversation, but the only thing comes out of stupid Sarah’s mouth is drivel.

Need some fr’instances – how about these: I apply to Harvard with Yale as my safety, but stupid Sarah manages to score in the low 200s on our SATs. Do I get into the Ivies; barely make my way into this fourth-rate community college.

Diploma in hand, ready to launch my brilliant career…

Dying wasn’t the worst thing that happened to Lily that Monday morning, though it was the last.

Arriving at her desk with last night’s recycled “leftover surprise” still threatening to recycle itself once more, she quickly sensed something not quite right in the office– the lethal glares from her supervisor and several coworkers, was the tip-off– and the unpleasant thought began to form in her muddled mind that those alcohol-induced rants she’d posted on facebook for a few thousand of…

“So, this is hell?” Spencer said, looking around the somewhat desolate landscape.

“Yep, that’s my guess,” Ned replied, “though it’s not so bad once you get used to it. . . . By the way,” he continued, somewhat sheepishly, “about that little incident at Granny’s Halloween party, . . . don’t know what got into me, really, . . . no hard feeling?”

“No, no,” Spencer assured him, “I had it coming; I’d say call it even and shake on it, but I can’t seem to locate my right…

“Well, this isn’t at all what I was expecting,” Spencer thought. In fact, he hadn’t expected to still be thinking about what he’d expected. “Strange, I kinda thought once Ned decapitated me it would be ‘lights out,’ yet here I am, dead and buried and still conscious.”

It was peaceful though – no unpleasant pain like when he was being dismembered, just that irritating itch, and wouldn’t you know it, they’d planted his arms down below his legs.

“Wonder when I lose consciousness.…

Ned was bored.

Vengeance is hard work, after all, and frankly he was a bit out of shape after lying in the ground for the past year. Wielding that ax he’d found conveniently on the front porch had taken a lot out of him, and once he’d caught up with all the latest family gossip, he was feeling somewhat out of place among the living. Oh, everyone was polite enough, but Ned sensed they were a bit disconcerted with his appearance – or maybe it was that foul odor that seemed to be…

While the kids were mesmerized by Grandpa Kreuger’s chilling tales of great-uncle Freddie’s gruesome exploits, Lori and Kate took the opportunity to raid their trick or treat bags. They’d both heard more than enough about their infamous great uncle. Having such an overachiever in the family tree was just plain discouraging – who could possibly live down to his legendary evil?

“Hey, the kids made quite a haul using Granny’s ‘terror technique’ this year,” Kate exclaimed, dumping out the…

Before she’d downed her seventh shot of whiskey, waiting for the younger set to clean up the bloody mess in her dinning room, Granny Myers was already in full nostalgic mode.

“You young’uns today don’t know how to throw a real Halloween celebration - one congered up corpse, one chopped up body, call that entertainment?”

Granny never appreciates anything I do, Lori thought, blushing deep crimson down to the tip of her twitchy little turned-up nose and beginning to feel…

“Lori,” Kate gasped between wrenching sobs, “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Yes, she could always count on her “loving” sister in times of trouble.

It was Lori, after all, who had conveniently manipulated Spencer into whacking Ned last year – not that she knew she was helping Kate out, of course. And Kate had to admire the poetic justice of bringing Ned back to return the favor.

“Oh, if Lori only knew how much I’d loathed them both,” Kate mused, “she’d be kicking…

“Best Halloween ever,” Lori chuckled inside, while maintaining an appropriately horrified expression at the sight of “poor Spencer” marinating in a pool of his own blood. The perfect crime, really, what with the murderer being dead already.

Lori had had her doubts about that voodoo incantation, but it brought Ned back from the grave to carry out her plan without a hitch. Now she tenderly comforted her grieving sister, Kate, over her latest misfortune. Poor, dear sister Kate – her life…

This just wasn’t Spencer’s day. First the store ran out of Spider Man costumes and he had to settle for a lame zombie costume, then Ned showed up looking so much more authentic, and ranting about how Spencer had offed him last Halloween – and after all Spence’s efforts to frame that psycho drifter.

Of course, everyone took old Ned’s side – he was family, after all, and Spence was just some outsider engaged to Ned’s widow, Kate. It was just like Ned to show up and make a big scene like…

Maddy never put much stock in ghost stories--ghouls and such--but here was cousin Ned, large as life, warming his gangrenous hands at her fireplace, chatting on cheerfully about the family’s big Halloween bash, like the gaping hole at the back of his skull, oozing brain matter all over her favorite chair, wasn’t of the slightest concern.



“Ned,” Maddy finally interjected, “hate to interrupt your train of thought, and it’s always nice to see you – God knows we have lots to catch up…

If I had my own handyman services, I’d call it Half-Assed Home Repairs, in the interest of truth in advertising; my motto, if I had one, would be “why do today what you can put off till tomorrow then make it much worse?”

So my kitchen ceiling sprung a leak, courtesy of Hurricane Irene and tropical storm Lee, and more rain in three weeks than we usually see in three years. It’s in the same spot, over the back door, where just a few years ago water had dripped relentlessly for about…

He was an irritating, in-your-face little pest, taunting and mocking my impotent attempts to escape his relentless harassment. My homicidal rage rose like the temperature of a mad-dog Englishman broiling in the proverbial noonday sun, until my whole being screamed out with the insuppressible urge to squash him, crush him into to oblivion.

Yes, I admit I’m far from perfect; I have a surprisingly short fuse, I suppose, when push comes to shove, and this time I did a bit more than shove.…

On one particularly cold and rainy day in late November, Seymour discovered the meaning of life.

For decades he’d been puttering with a mathematical equation designed to prove once and for all the existence of God, even reveal the essential details of his great plan for the universe, and it suddenly dawned on him that what he had here was the key to all the great questions that’d plagued humankind for the past few millennia!

This was shaping up to be one of his greatest…

His name, he said, was Ishmael, lone survivor of an old man’s mad vendetta against the great white whale who’d left him crippled and half mad.

I understood better than most of his listeners the lessons of his tragic saga; unlike his doomed captain, I alone survived the wretched fate I brought upon my shipmates with my sinful deed. Why I shot the harmless albatross I can’t recall, an act of thoughtless cruelty, and the weight of his innocent spirit yet hangs round my neck as I roam the…

It took me half a lifetime to understand the way she made me feel, like nothing, worthless, never good enough. A simple word of praise was all I ever wanted, but her words were never simple and rarely offered praise.

Mother let me know from early on I was her greatest disappointment; her maternal sacrifices were acts of duty only, never love.

When I finally made my way in the world, somewhat late in life but with some success despite the burden of her martyrdom, I felt I’d…

It was the heat. As the mercury climbed over 100 degrees, her anger rose to the boiling point and her self-control evaporated into the stratosphere. Just breathing the thick, oppressive air sapped all her energy.

The shiny red Porsche came out of nowhere, cutting her off six blocks from home – just minutes away from that cold, refreshing shower and tall frosty glass of thirst-quenching ice tea she’d been anticipating all afternoon - and she lost it.

Sweat dripping from her…

The kiss was stolen, maybe a little desperate, but all the more precious for its very unexpectedness.

Had he really intended it to show affection, even love, or mere contempt? Was she a fool to not have slapped his insolent face, put him in his place before it was too late?

She stood there, rooted to the floor as the elevator doors slowly slid shut, closing out his leering smile . . . or was it pure desire she saw there? She had so little experience with these things; romance…