Time was in short supply but forever loomed like the shadow of a shark just below the surface.

She chalked up her success to well-managed good luck.

In only a decade the city had managed to kill off the last of its seamier haunts.

Professor Blane, tired of facing the onslaught of trash culture, sat on the beach sipping a tropical drink and imagined himself playing a fiddle while Rome burned.

She left, but the devil stayed.

Too drunk to land a decent punch, Bobby didn't stand much of a chance of making it out of the bar in one piece.

Our world felt like a damsel in distress tied to train tracks by our own stupidity with no hope of a last-minute rescue by a glamorous hero.

He flung himself off the swing in an attempt to impress his grandfather but instead bungled it and hit the ground hard, arms and legs akimbo, at the old man's feet.

Out of step with the mainstream and unable to tap into the zeitgeist, Adele's work died with her.

She had no compunctions about asking the most intimate questions of strangers.

As he grew older, Garrett's quest for risk only grew bolder since as a gonzo journalist his career lay in writing about his own exploits. 

Backsliding was what Bill did best.

We sat on the cold sand in the dark with the crashing of the waves loosening our tongues as we revealed our most secret selves to each other.

A darkness was coming and it wasn't just because the sun was sinking below the horizon.

He had become like a piece of beach glass: his rough edges smoothed out by the constant hammering of the outside world, the clarity of his vision slowly clouding.

Death loomed in those days, sat at the dinner table with us, and was there when we went to bed at night and woke the next morning.

"You called me a freak and halfwit, but now that my ship's come in, here you are hat in one hand and your other out hoping I'll drop a little scratch into it," said Willy with a world-weary sigh and a knowing shake of his misshapen head.

Only the names of the victims changed.

Some mornings nothing seemed as important as soaking in the sun pouring through the window and listening to the birds outside.

She was considered a queen by the city's deviants, oddballs, and degenerates.

The bottle was empty and the story only half-finished.

Paranoia and hospitality ran rampant in the family so much so there was either a gun under your pillow or a mint on top, and sometimes both.

Dave's perception of women was colored by the 1980s ZZ Top videos he watched growing up.

They were both as disappointed with each other as they had been the first time they had made love thirty years earlier and realized why they hadn't stayed together in the first place.

My life felt stuck in fast forward and that I'd lost the remote control between the couch cushions years before.

All he could focus on that morning were the gaffs he'd drunkenly made the night before.

With the party over, Dana felt like one of the half-inflated balloons that forlornly floated a few inches from the floor.

That first night outside of the city he was unable to sleep as the sounds from the forest seemed louder than those of the old neighborhood.

I woke up that morning with a feeling that the world had subtly changed overnight and I had become the butt of a cosmic joke.

They all rolled over on their backs, wagged their proverbial tails, and let the demagogue have his day.