Here’s a little scene from one of my short stories in progress:

She beamed and all the darkness fled. Melissa watched her go, her chest constricting.

“A girl like that stands too much to lose,” Joe insisted, eyes serious, then drifting to follow the stride of a tall blonde basketball player in a red and white letterman jacket. Melissa coughed and Joe’s eyes were again on hers, abashed but not sorry for the digression. “Really, though,” he said, “All of us stand to lose something if it comes out. It’s not worth it.”

Melissa agreed with Joe, of course she did. Everyone in town knew about that boy that was found dead off the highway just last month in Jasper, the next town over. The boys at school who liked to exaggerate, who found their manhood in the gore, said he’d been stuffed with living snakes, that when the police cut him open to see what had happened, or more accurately, to see what lie they could invent for the sake of his parents, one of the cops had vomited at the sight. With the boy’s chest flayed open, everyone could see that inside him, where the lungs and heart should be, was a mess of snakes. Snakes of every single color. A rainbow, hissing and poised to strike. Coral snakes, copperheads. Cottonmouths iridescent as an oil slick, black and glinting. The type of snake varied from story to story. But always, at the end of the telling, they insisted: the dead boy had writhed.