He slinks along the wall in the dark hoping that his pounding heart and ragged breath don't give him away as he moves closer to the door..."Man, I hate surprise parties," he thinks.

Arty didn't drink much during the day, but while on vacation in New Orleans he found himself with a Kamikaze shot in one hand and a mind eraser in the other in the early afternoon and realized the beauty of a daytime drunk, that is, everything seemed brighter, the people friendlier and the crystal-blue, cloudless sky the most beautiful thing in the world.

The interviewer stumbled through the questions,managing only to get guttural responses from the writer who clearly thought the man was suffering from late-stage syphilis.

James threw more wood onto the fire as the howling heard in the distance continued, but now seemed to be coming from more than one direction and getting closer.

The men sat at the bar, their clothes dripping wet, and spoke in hushed tones and sometimes glanced outside at the ever rising waters in the wind-whipped street.

Tadpole Jones didn't like playing ball with the other kids, preferring to spend his time in the woods with a three-legged dog named Scraps and a one-eyed girl that everyone called Jinx.

The men stood toe to toe, their faces distended in anger as they yelled at one another and nearly came to blows over whether a proper roux should be dark brown or merely a light caramel color.

The wooden beam buckled and gave way sending the dance party crashing to the floor below, but with no one seriously injured the party kept going in true Las Vegas style.

The first night after Jane arrived, broke by the bus fare, she slept under an overpass of the freeway, a knife tucked in her jacket.

The feral cat that had a limp and was always pregnant decided to make Brad and Tom's apartment her home base and gladly accepted food from them but bit anyone that attempted to show her the slightest bit of affection.

The scars and the bars, blood and pain, gunshots and early-morning whiskey shots were Jim's happiest memories as he lay in the hospital for the last time.

"Surviving isn't just enough anymore," she said while applying lipstick,"You're going to have to do better than that if you want me to stick around."

The slovenly pill-popping talk show host was known for his roving hands until the day he invited a radical feminist on the show who happened to be skilled in Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art.

He watched the lights go out of the old man's eyes and with it, the slamming shut on a vast storehouse of knowledge.

Ripped from her arms that were covered in needle marks, the boy was taken by protective services.

Adrenaline and hatred kept him going long after his body should have collapsed,but he was slowing down now and still hadn't reached his destination or the man he blamed for his desperate situation.

"Justice? This isn't about justice," she spat, "this is about winning—pure and simple."

The boy was fascinated with the old woman across the street and would spend hours watching her slowly rock back and forth on her front porch and would sometimes get close enough to make out the ceaseless flow of words that came from her.

Nearly blinded by the whipping snow, he figured the glowing figure in front of him was just his numbed mind playing tricks on him, but he soon came to realize that it was as real as the cold that was slowly killing him.

Tip-toeing past the old man asleep behind the cash register, Bernadette—still groggy from the night before—put her apron on and began loudly cleaning tables to ensure that upon waking her boss would see her hard at work.

The skeletal hand creaked open, waiting for payment to the other side.

Stephanie split her time between watching soap operas and listening in on her neighbors' conversations, which floated through her apartment's thin walls and were often more dramatic than the television broadcasts.

Billy won the taco eating contest but at the cost of losing his girlfriend to the apple pie eating champ due, most likely, to his post-game flatulence and bad breath.

When the ship began to sink Turner acted quickly, breaking into a stranger's room and donning a dress and a floppy-brimmed hat, and making his way topside in order to guarantee he would be one of the first on the lifeboats.

"Whoa buddy, wait a sec," the guard said to Dick, who feared that he wouldn't make it past him with the gun tucked into his boot, only to find that he merely wanted to ask Dick whether he had seen the leggy blond that came into the courthouse before him.

He was first on the scene that night and for the rest of his life he had nightmares that revolved around the Biblical passage written on the wall in blood.

The house was a wreck, his clothes were covered in pet hair and his seven dogs of various sizes ruled his life, but Stan couldn't resist rescuing animals and so he gathered up his brood and went to get the eighth dog from a local shelter.

The aliens considered Earth a dumping ground, and so like an RV surreptitiously pumping out its waste into a camp ground lake, spacecraft from all over the Galaxy would swoop down into the planet's atmosphere let fly with the contents of a long journey and return to space.

Randell, stopping briefly to get a rock out of his shoe, soon lost site of his friends and wandered blindly though the woods, his fear and shouts rising steadily into the night.

Drinking in the tropically themed bar that overlooked the beach, he realized that in a town where there is nothing but tourists, if you hung out at the same bar more than once they treated you like a regular.

"Where do you think you're going?" he asked, his hand on Jasper's arm and the other reaching for his gun, "We ain't done yet pal, you still owe me for what happened at the bank."