The kids at school bullied the smart, red-haired girl with the silver coat and NASA rucksack relentlessly, calling her "Space rocket".

The girl entered the pastry shop looking like death warmed up. She could only have been 18, 19, something like that, but she looked wrecked.

I took my wife to watch the sunset again, and with her gloved hand clasped in mine, asked, "Will you marry me?"

"Quiet!" the three students snickered, after breaking into their class and mixing up the lecturer's containers and labels.

It’s a silly thing, but the two business partners had initially bonded over their spouses having similar names.

"The rain just wouldn't stop, and then my windscreen wipers started malfunctioning..." the woman with two black eyes sobbed as she stared at her boyfriend's pinned corpse.

Mark’s mother’s lip curled viciously as he stood in their doorway. He hadn’t visited his parents for almost a decade.

Having never transformed before, I locked my bedroom door and swallowed the key, thinking "this could be my last night on earth" as I watched the moonrise.

"I still love you," the girlfriend said, "but I can't tolerate this much cheating..."

I Was Sentenced To Ten Years Hard Labor. Tomorrow I Finally Get To Go Home To My Family.

My daughter was a brilliant impersonator, able to mimic the calls of most birds and certain local animals.

The girl, whose sister often took things from her room without asking, bought a curse kit from the joke shop she often visited and "hexed" all her stuff.

2024 has come and gone.

When our daughter, who was an avid bookworm, developed a genetic disease that quickly destroyed her vision, our little family fell into a period of deep despair.

I lit a candle by the altar and whispered a prayer for my son, relieved that I finally knew what had happened to him.

"It's no use turning on the waterworks," the headmistress warned the difficult boy, whose hand bore the telltale mark of a ruler's slap.

"There's no other way to know who's telling the truth," our mother smiled at my identical twin brother and I, after one of us had taken some money from her purse.

[JAN25] "Bloody hell, you like a break don't you!" the jealous keeper barked at his new colleague, who'd quickly become their manager's favourite since joining the zoo.

“So how old are we thinking?” Joe’s sister Maia asked as they set up his online dating profile. “How far into cougar territory are you willing to go?!”

"Like the cherubs of legend, our tradition states that if you hit him, it's true love!" the mother laughed, passing her son's new girlfriend a pretend bow and arrows.

"Can you do Daddy a favour?" the estranged father asked his daughter, who'd arrived home early to find him upstairs emptying her brother's piggy bank.

[JAN25] "It's all just so new to me," the artist smiled, "it's been a whirlwind few months!"

“No further?” the biology student asked, readjusting her head scarf as a shower of sand entered her mouth.

[JAN25] The builder's daughter was obsessed with unicorns, so they bought her a new pony with a pretend horn and settled it in the field by the tool shed.

"Apparently we're the same age, but he looks ancient!" the woman cackled to her friend behind the bar, unaware that her blind date had just returned from the bathroom.