After his favorite restaurant burned down Ludwig would often stand in front of the charred remains and loudly reminisce about his favorite dishes hoping to engage passersby in what he considered polite dinner conversation.

Wearing a ape suit to break into the house seemed like a good idea at the time until the dogs woke up.

The general stood at the crest of the hill looking down towards the field were his starving army was camped and made the hardest decision of his life.

"I only married you because our twin siblings were in love and I was cornered," snarled Estelle to her husband of 59 years as they stood in the kitchen one night.

The cat sat at the window taunting the dogs that walked past, batting at the glass to try and catch their eye.

He dreamed big but his output was small, something the other computers often razzed him about.

She had a secret life as a gossip columnist and would often be forced to report on her own nefarious activities to maintain her anonymity.

The lion paced back and forth, back and forth, ticking off the moments until its eventual demise.

They sat in the nosebleed seats spitting sunflower seeds at the top hats of the upper classes who were filing in.

As his plane careened toward earth Abe's last thought concerned his career choice.

"Mai Tais and fast women were my cup of tea back then," he told his grandson with a faraway look in his eye as they walked through the park one afternoon.

"He's so smart because he used to read encyclopedias while on the toilet as a child," Ralph's mother gushed to the announcer after he won the quiz show.

The little white ball bounced and spun around the numbers while we held our breath, praying that it would stop on ours and pay out on the last $20 we had.

The city skyline was a beacon, a marker that drew them onward, like pioneers looking towards Chimney rock as they headed west.

The day the devil came to town the sky looked like boiled blood.

The coins shimmering in the fountain were little hopes and dreams.

Chase banged drunkenly on the piano and howled at the moon.

He could hear her laughing over the crack of pool balls and running commentary from the sports channel on the television and continued on past, quickening his step.

The children often passed the still-charred house where a man fell asleep with a lit cigarette causing a fire that killed his entire family and by dint of this had become fodder for their imaginations and a legendary ghost.

Her sanity had become threadbare and as each letter passed by her on its way to its far-off destination her mind began to drift towards the myriad ways she would kill every person who had written to another.

He smelled like fried food and cheap cologne.

The falling man kicked his legs as if he was trying to ride a bike as fast as he could, but was having no success.

the old man held his hand, unable to communicate in any other way.

Everyone on death row vociferously proclaimed their innocence except one man—"Country" McLure—who freely admitted killing half a dozen city-dwellers and always ended his stories by saying "Hell, they knew they had it comin'."

The ghost hunters sat in the dark sure that if they yelled such insulting things as "hey spirit, you're too scared to come out," whatever was floating about from the "other side" would be forced to show its hand and reveal itself.

"You know when you cut yourself really badly, there's that moment before there's any blood or pain, but you know it's coming?" Shane asked, "well that's how I feel all the time."

The rise and fall of the waves mirrored her emotions as they stood hand-in-hand and he confessed a long list of past sins while the sun slowly sank behind the darkening blue.

His first night in the field he drank bathtub gin and vomited in his sleeping bag and for the rest of the war he was reminded of that night every time he tried to get some shut-eye.

C woke up feeling like the world was somehow off and when she turned on the television that morning she found that there was indeed something terribly wrong—on Good Morning America Cecil B. DeMille, appearing as he did in the 1930s, was being interviewed by Johnny Carson, circa 1970.

Frank would get teary-eyed whenever he heard a song from the 40s, appearing to reminisce about an era he hadn't lived through.

Vanessa thought of her life as an airplane endlessly circling the airport.