"Where did you say the restaurant was, again?" Smile asked.  They were lost somewhere in Ann Arbor.  He was at the wheel of Dori's Neon, and Khalid and Sheerin were silent in the back seat.

"I didn't say," Dori said.  "It's in downtown Ann Arbor on Liberty, but I don't know where we are now."

"It's impossible to find your way around this town," he muttered.  "Is it even any good?"

"Does it matter?  Do you know of another vegetarian place?  You should've listened to the directions I gave you."

Smile glowered.  "So give me directions now."

"I can't do that unless you want to start over from home.  I have no idea where we are now."  Picking up Khalid had turned into a complete clusterfuck, of course.  He and Sheerin wanted to go out to eat, but it had to be a vegetarian restaurant, and Smile had no idea where one was.  Dori did, having flirted with vegetarianism on and off in the past, but directions weren't her strong suit.  Smile hadn't paid attention to the directions she gave, and now they'd been driving around in circles for half an hour. Add a comment

Based on the sentence below, write a story of anywhere between 500-5000 words. As before, genre, etc. are wide open. This time I'll choose the five best stories to post--though I reserve the right to add to that number for thoroughly awesome entries--and I will link to whatever blogs, etc. the author would like me to as well. Stories remain the property of the contributor. (These challenges are becoming more and more popular, so in the event that I ever decide to publish a collection of said stories, I will contact contributors for permission and discuss compensation at that time.) Using the sentence in the story itself is a plus, but not necessary. Meaningless bonus points are added if it's the first sentence:

It was several seconds before Thomas realized that the baby in the sky was headed straight for him.

Submissions should be emailed to me via emmy (izzat) elepent.com. Format doesn't matter; I can accept email enclosures or attached Word documents. The deadline for entries is March 1, 2010.

Melissa looked from the gaping wound in her chest to the still-beating heart in her hand, and said, "Fuck."

A small creature wormed through the muscle, teeth chittering as it spun its arrow shaped body through flesh and sinew, bisected tongue flitting against still pulsating strands of broken vein and artery.  Dark stains wafted from its end, latching onto the organ and slowly eating it away, a full dissolution that pushed through the walls of the atrium and ventricles, prompting Melissa to drop it before it could reach the skin on her palm, shrieking.  The heart worm looked up and smiled, coiling and leaping, popping free as corrosion smeared around it.  Melissa caught it between thumb and forefinger, then crushed its tiny head.

“These fucking things,” she muttered, dropping the lifeless chitin module to the ground and grinding it with a heel.  “Just one more time, Jack.  Just one more time and I will spell stuff your ass into another dimension.  And not one full of Fairy Queens and topless Banana Women, either.  Someplace really lame.”  Melissa coughed a stream of blood as she chastised her Terrier, which had three times that week attacked her through arcane reality folding techniques with the intention of murdering her, despite the fact that she'd saved the creature from a lifetime of malodorous cage living and a head full of electrodes that day she visited the Dumb Friends League in Juneau, Alaska.  It irked her to live with such a villain, but how could she kill him?  She didn't have many friends and his face was so damned sweet.