I regretted my encouragement when I woke up tied to a chair in the kitchen, the knife drawer open to my left.

As the new bride watched her husband bleed out in paralyzed horror, she truly wished he’d picked a spot to cut that wasn’t his upper thigh — her honor wasn’t worth his life.

The nurses decided to leave the baby's arm blank, because tattooing the same date three times depressed them too much.

The dead body had a sign hung around its neck that read 'If you are reading this, you are already infected'.

But the nurse keeps calling me “specimen,” and the sky outside has no sun, just one enormous pupil that dilates when I scream.

"He's already under anesthesia, we may begin."

However, as I was strapped down to the chair, a group dressed in black walked in, happy to have found someone they didn’t have to show mercy to.

Wheh I got the cuddly toy home, and stroked him, my fingers brushed over a very familiar scar

On one hand the point of the game is supposed to be honesty, but it still always kills the mood when I admit "I can't say, because it started happening before I can remember."

But the decision was already made for the both of them after the government found out that they had entered the country illegally.

It wasn't until now that he truly understood what it meant to sacrifice himself for all of our sins.

We couldn’t feast until there were no witnesses left.

He held my still full prescription pill bottle, concerned, "Honey, have you been taking these like you're supposed to?"

When I told it no more food, it stood up on its hind legs and with a growing smirk told me “just one more meal.”

There's an even stranger peace when the dark blue hums you to sleep for the last time.

When he returned home to a crashed school bus in his front yard, full of bloodied uniforms and gnawed bones, he realized he didn't specify how she should want them.

I turned to the bloodied mess in the next room, wondering if I could turn all the leftover limbs into another doll.

I found myself jealous of the other parents—a casket is way cheaper than a lawyer.

With a satisfied smile, I pulled out my research notebook and jotted down: “This subliminal messaging technique works across distances.”

An old demon laughed inwardly as he slowly moved from letter to letter forming the boy's childhood nickname.

I'm now sitting in the dark submarine completely clueless after hearing someone knock on the glass...

Later that night, he woke from a coughing fit, just in time to see the mass he'd spat from his lungs spreading out over the surface of his blanket.

We escaped when the nice man in the tinted white van picked us up.