The brine, like hay, gets in my clothes

Some kittens are stranded there, too.  At least their scratches.

I'm a people person but it isn't because I'm an optimist.  So this talking fish is at the center of this unreachable story.

All around, dogs close in, chewing meat as if it were a piece of clothing.

My story, and the story of the fish, is a strange and amazing one, which if it could be engraved with needles at the corner of the eye, would be a lesson to those who would consider.

It's just an old husband's tale, the inscription read.

The fish seems to be talking with or without its hands, but in reality it's only breathing.

In one experiment, they put man and fish together in the interrogation room.

From behind the glass, the experts couldn't determine who was the one really talking and so rewrote the whole story.

Scratches have ghosts, and even the furniture carries their ruin.

There's this woman and she sure is bad—she sure as hell burned chickens alive in her townhouse.

There's this cousin or husband or somebody and he's wearing a left eye-patch.

She thought up how to change him into her own island and wake him up by lighting frankincense under his nose.

The punishment seemed to take hours and the falling in love five or six seconds.

It wouldn't do to have a child right out here in the middle of the sea during a seastorm, they said, but when a child is out, it's best to just keep shouting its name until it disappears.

The whole thing could fill altogether a few pages, instead we watched tv for hours.

My story, the story of the fish, is a true and unhappy one, which if it could be captured and written down, might fill a bottle with needles.

People, mostly optimists, drowned during the trip even though they purportedly liked the show.

What went wrong?  The hanging lamps found their art deco and a few syllables were exchanged over a drink or two, some pirate's beard caught fire like a book.

The glass eye has melted into a glass rooster and now fits the eye socket badly.

The man can't figure out who ought to be turned into a dog, or who is already a dog, black as the night is already black.

The child had already been seemingly obsessed with methods of burial.  She knew of three: in the ground, as ashes, and now this exotic variety, the Burial at Sea.

So seldom do the top animals get sent to their own prisons.

Decadence took a turn for the worse, with the world's top oceanographers scolding the world's top fishes with stories in their bellies.

It's the ultimate game night.  You're on an island.  You have only this, that, and the other.  How long before you burst out in madness and die within minutes of rescue?

I want some cherry strudel and I want it now.