From "Don’t Kid the Goldfish: A Linguistic Portrait of My Mother," by Kay Haugaard:

From The False Clue of the Twisted Red Herring's Footprint, by P.J. Fitzsimmons:

From "Erotica Made Me The Writer I Am Today," by Charlie Jane Anders:

I even found a story that I had submitted a year or so earlier, which I now realized was completely wrong for Black Sheets magazine — I had the dubious pleasure of writing myself a rejection letter.

from The Sea, the Sea, by Iris Murdoch:

From "Frank," by A. L. Kennedy:

From Death by the Clock, by Rufus King:

From The Beckoning Lady, by Margery Allingham:

From Cousin Cinderella, by Sara Jeannette Duncan:

***
Mrs. Jerome Jarvis came in, like an exclamation.

***
She looked at us with a spark of caution in her eye, as if she recognised in us the emergency she had always to be prepared for.

***
In her eye I thought I saw the recognition of us as attendant circumstances which she might well have been spared.
***

From "Fractal Paisleys," by Paul di Filippo:

From "Touched by a Salesman," by Tom Holt:

From Feathers Left Around, by Carolyn Wells:

From Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody, by Andrew Lang:

From The Penciled Frown, by James Gray:

From Monday Morning, by Patrick Hamilton: