"Darlin, it's way past time for you to hit the road," she told me, drunkenly waving the pistol around.

The sky glowed a sickly yellow and seemed saturated with menace.

The critic yawned and the play closed that day.

As the bullets flew, my last thought before losing consciousness was, "at least I'll die with my boots on."

Dawn broke like an egg on a sizzling griddle that summer morning.

  Teresa spent more time making lists than checking anything off of them.

The metal door yawned and squawked as I swung it down and placed the package into the mailbox knowing that once it dropped nothing would ever be the same.

Doris hated similes like a dog hates a squirrel.

Once hard as steel I had become as lumpy as oatmeal.

He taped a picture of a smiley face over the television screen and was much happier staring at that image in the evenings.

The old pundit was mostly off the mark.

The hour was late and they were running out of things to say.

Paige soon realized finding a publisher was the easy part of the process.

Although bejeweled and beautifully  dressed, her finery could not disguise her beastly demeanor. 

With a bedraggled beard and wild eyes Ike was heading towards the zenith of his messiah complex.

That summer at camp provided the material for all his obsessions.

She awoke each morning wondering whether this would be the day he would decide to leave.

Like their parents they were over-educated and underpaid.

I awoke to one of the most beautiful smells in the world: bacon.

"They said the truth shall set me free, but then locked me up when I confessed," Bob "Dirty Birdy" Dalton groused to the other inmates.

The torn tarpaulin revealed the desolate interior of the residence.

The road was a brutal life. 

Time, it turned out, was not on his side.

She dreamed of turning her Pekinese, "Pookie,"  into an Internet sensation but the dog, who slept 16 hours a day just to avoid his owner, stymied her efforts.

Brian realized he was no genius, merely a besotted mediocre poet with a lot of bills.

The flickering light and echoing dialogue floating across the field gave the drive-in a haunted feel.

The parties were shorter and the hangovers twice as long.

Fresh off the farm, they faced the greatest fighting force on Earth.

The secret psychological study determined that people hated to be toyed with.

 In dawn's half light he looked the same as when they first met.

He saw the ghosts of his parents when he looked in the mirror.