Every time they patched a hole a new one opened up as if the were forever playing whack-a-mole with their roof.

After that night they only saw each other in their dreams.

She wore designer labels and liked to label people.

Smitty insisted on speaking in code, believing that "Hollywood types" were out to steal the "bon mots" falling from his lips.

The well was running dry and the nuisances of daily life were fraying the writer's nerves.

The small band of fighters easily took the dilapidated fort filled with fat and slothful government troops.

Chaos ensued after the Tea Party candidate admitted he hated tea, preferring coffee with a shot of whisky in it.

Spring arrived early that year bringing both new life and petty crime.

You could smell and even taste the sea - like a raw oyster when it slides down your gullet - before it came into view.

Her identity revealed, Lucy went into hiding, not sure whether she was more afraid of the government agents or her family.

A switch clicked and Guy, who had been a sweet, high-minded gentleman, began to frequent the low bars of the waterfront.

My fist sank into his face before the snide remark had finished slipping out from between his now bleeding lips.

"A good time used to mean a bottle and a long-legged babe, these days it's a decent bowel movement and sleeping through the night," he sighed, then sipped his herbal tea.

The wild wind howled that night sounding like the Earth had cracked in two and the damned were singing a chorus from the darkest depths of Hell.

"Just wait," wheezed the old man at the young couple sitting at the next bench.

The neon sign reflected off the bottles behind the bar.

She thought of herself as a juggler who was constantly having new balls, some large, some small, thrown at her from several directions, forcing her to constantly scan the horizon as she kept them aloft.

"I'll be sure to say a prayer for your little boy tonight," said the man with the knife, a cold smile creeping across his thin lips.

"I swore I wasn't going to cry," said Sylvia as she stood before her yoga class, "but the beach walk was so beautiful."

Louise felt the cold ice crystals in her hair that had floated in through the porthole and wondered where it could possibly have come from until they heard the crash.

I watched her walk across the field, her wind-whipped dress outlining her body, her arm shielding her eyes.

The clouds hid the moon like a veil across the face of a carnival Tarot card reader.

"I'm often wrong and never imitated," said the Count proudly, and while it seemed to make sense at the time, over the years I have often wondered exactly what he meant.

Darius' fear grew incrementally with the passing of each of the watch's second hand.

The men scattered back into the woods, their objective all but forgotten.

"He could make that horn moan like a Baptist preacher," the old man recalled.

Her imagination was like a cannonball careening.

A copse of tangled vines hid them within the wild wood.

The desiccated remains were topped by a pompador as sleek and full as it was on the day Elvis died, leading many to agitate for sainthood for the King.