My daughter’s chihuahua, André, looks more like a rat than a dog. Last Saturday she asked me to babysit him when she went out of town, and I only agreed because I’m a doting father and like to think chivalry isn’t dead.

He wondered if he died there, would he grow into the poplar and live forever towering over the valley? It appealed to him, but dying could wait. At sixteen, life offered too much.

There was a long conversation then, and many qualifications and a great deal of sympathy; but the long and short of it was that I had aggressive macular degeneration, which is a fancy way of saying: I was going blind.

The rain fell on him as he died and kept on well after he was dead.

Red meat wasn’t hard, once he put his mind to it. He’d been thinking about it, off and on, since a first-grade field trip to a family farm.

‘Bloody hell!’ said Detective Constable Bright. ‘It’s a minefield!’ ‘There’s more …’ replied Detective Sergeant Dawes with a grimace.

I hate Interstates. They’re boring, dangerous, and packed with people who pay little attention to what they’re doing. I love two-lane roads: the ones that meander through the countryside.

As expected on a Monday morning, the clinic’s waiting room was crowded. There were a few old couples who were quiet, with the wives generally reading and the husbands looking around or watching TV.

Deacon Park is where they bury the bodies. For a cold-blooded killer, a huge tract of wild land in the middle of the city can be an indispensable resource.

ulissa Ye relished all the comfortable little routines and quietude defining her part-time job at The Bookery, downtown’s last small, locally-owned bookstore.

With her degrees in neuroscience and engineering, and her specializations in prosthetics and robotics, she was more than capable of producing a pair of mechanical ears that would replicate the abilities of true human ones.

Laura used to wonder if all this planting of bodies would ever make anything grow. Then, one night, just as she finished a grave, she found it did.

Most of our problems involve Grandma Grace, or rather her ashes. “It’s a public health violation,” Mom loves to snap at Dad. “We can’t have your dead mother on a shelf next to the food.

I sawed through a fledgling nest. But it was an accident.

On the first day of ninth grade, Fitzhugh Hardee Rainwater met the girl who immediately took up permanent residence deep in his heart.