1. Their kiss was cunning in its entirety—not a slow, amateurish smooching or a quick, pornographic slither-like darting of the tongues—but like the expertly interwoven strings of a loom produced not by an overworked laborer at a Chinese factory but by the proud hand of an American master craftsman.

2. Gaius Lucius Serpentis, his muscles ripping under their own weight, raised his gladius above his head in a mocking salute to his opponent who, being a Gaul, just mispronounced morituri te salutant in his ingrained desire to keep the Gaullic language free from the foreign influences, and now was about to be condemned to death by the vulgar Latin-speaking audience.

3. When the ship emerged from hyperspace, lieutenant commander Dated found with horror that his finger that he had picked his nose with just prior to the warp jump, now was inside the shirt of Dr. Natalia Chekhova, perhaps guided there by the forces of Smith’s law that dictates that males are attracted to females at the rate that twice exceeds the gravitational speed; but fortunately it was prevented from sliding further down not by Wilson’s law making space travel possible, but by the tightness of the good doctor’s pants.

4. Blinded by the blue rays of the planet Avatar, the craft overshot the base, clipped the top branch of the Tree of Life, was swallowed by Shmeleopterix, passed through its digestive tract, was cut from the theatrical release and left in a pile of guano waiting for the director’s version.

A pile of last season’s hot peppers, snow-bled and sun-blanched, sat in the field like a mouthless set of prehistoric teeth. It convinced me a minute I was seeing something that wasn’t. Once the crawling feeling between my shoulder blades passed, I put the bottom of my boot to the top of the pile and the husks came apart with the same startling satisfaction as the hollowed bones of a baby bird.

I pulled aside a few of the pepper shells left intact and placed them in a row. Choosing the biggest two for canines.

My brother appeared, head to neck to chest, over the ridge between this field and my shed. I nudged my toe at the mud and when I looked back to the ridge my brother’s whole self had arrived and his right hand showed that he’d took our daddy’s rifle from up over my wood stove.

“Looks like you got monsters in your field, brother,” I said.

He just never stopped looking at me.