flake
n.— «A big flake of straw thrown out onto the snow, along with some scratch feed, made it a bit more tempting a place to explore and soon half the flock were out in the sun.» —“Spring cleaning in January” by Vicki Biggs-Anderson Cook County News-Herald (Grand Marais, Minnesota) Feb. 2, 2006. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital is a sensuous, exhilarating meditation about the strangeness of life on a space station, with its mix of tedious tasks and jaw-dropping views. And: a musician who rode the rails in his youth shares the slang he...