The sailors grumbled that they were headed to certain doom.

The belle of the ball, Tricia had her choice of any man, but preferred women.

Stax was an inveterate gambler and itinerant preacher who relied on signs from God to choose which horse would be a winner.

Jane believed she was addicted to a laundry list of things, from caffeine to porn, when in fact she was just a hedonist too lazy to change.

 "You can't be in two places at once unless you're dead," realized Brutus, dumping the last of the bags into the East River.

Half-finished novels and whiskey bottles littered the dead writer's room.

His creative well was dry, but his thirst remained.

Once immigrants themselves they turned on those who would dare to attempt to scramble up the ladder below them.

The tales were all tall, the men all squat in the village of Dunderdee.

Maloney was a cold cut aficionado whose one desire was to visit the famous cured meat museum in Spain that he had heard about when still a child from a well traveled uncle.

She studied physics because she wanted to find out why she was always late.

He flinched only the first or second time a shell exploded nearby and he was soon rushing headlong towards the enemy, his fears of cowardice left behind him in the trench.

"Toodaloo," Shelby told him with a smile and a wink as he was led away in cuffs.

Chicken McSorley was a man of many words, which he used as both a weapon and a shield.

With every swing of his sledgehammer Taylor pictured the face of his former partner who had turned state's evidence after the botched robbery.

Ted looked so much like a young Jim Morrison that although he couldn't carry a tune his caterwauling was overlooked by the still-dreamy-eyed ladies who came to the nostalgia conventions where he performed.

She treated her pets like children and her husband like a mortal enemy.

Judy flashed her most provocative smile at the teller, placed the note on the counter and pulled out the sawed-off shotgun from beneath her raincoat.

He scanned the horizon, unaware that his ship was in danger from an iceberg he could not see.

As a retired English teacher Lucille could not abide seeing misspelled Facebook posts or texts with incomplete sentences, truncated words missing their vowels and those irritating acronyms.

The music was already in Eustice's head, but getting it on paper was another matter.

He was a killer for hire, it's true, but what he really wanted to do with his life was to paint landscapes in the south of France like his hero Matisse.

Tia always smelled vaguely of mackerel and we always knew where she was by the mewing of the town's hungry cats who followed her everywhere she went.

When it began raining blood the theologians argued, the politicians made promises and we began hoarding food and weapons in anticipation of the end.

He felt as if his debt were a sagging ceiling that would eventually come crashing down on his head.

The refinery explosion killed whatever will the town had left.

Dale used to love fast bikes and wild women but now he would get pissed off if he heard the roar of a motorcycle pass by his front door as it would set his Pekingese to barking and upset his easily angered wife. 

"It was a starless summer night just like this one," the counselor began, his face obscured by shadow.

He was the son of a famed linguist but was constantly tongue-tied.

We sat at the bar with the ghosts of our past and our current demons.

Terry missed the Summer of Love thanks to his summer job at a local insurance company.