Val was sitting there wide-eyed, as if someone had slapped her with a dead mackerel.

Not a dead, slimy mackerel or cod of the kind you see on the supermarket counter, but a bright, healthy, swimming fish, a beautiful fish, a Shuhunkin perhaps, or a Koi carp.

But just because a man likes the sea doesn't mean he wants to sit next to a ton of dead mackerel.

"Anybody who thinks they know how a bus gets to shine like a dead mackerel, and how a woman gets herself frozen solid in the middle of September, they have to be going bananas."

S&G arrives at your television like a gift-wrapped dead mackerel.

A few of their numbers go the unneeded extra mile, like the serenade to the dead mackerel whose jaw they lip-sync to the music.

Alex had the good sense to stay unconscious, and I arranged his limp form neatly alongside Mary's on the landing, like a couple of dead mackerel.

Prince Bittern has the face of a dead mackerel.

"Colder than a dead mackerel," Chief Sebastian War- nicke cracked as he readied an HE grenade.

He slows down along Ninth Avenue, where a fish wholesaler's truck sticks out like a dead mackerel on the otherwise cleared street.