monster
n.— «My mother, who i do not smoke around, has been here and she doesnt even know why Im coughing. She found i smoke years ago but she doesnt know the symptoms enough to see the monster in her son. And I dont have that heart to tell her why. She leaves tomorrow. No hospital imprisonment, no parental shame, just me and my monster.» —“6 days after surgery, struggling” by tempslave@hotmail.com Usenet: alt.support.stop-smoking June 29, 1998. (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...
A librarian opens a book and finds a mysterious invitation scribbled on the back of a business card. Another discovers a child’s letter to the Tooth Fairy, tucked into a book decades ago. What stories are left untold by these forgotten...