Paul didn't miss the all-night parties, the intense debates or even the random hook-ups with attractive women, he simply missed his hair.

It turned out to be a toy gun.

What was left was bundled into a garbage bag and unceremoniously tossed into the coroner's car.

Seventh Avenue was so quiet that day that those who remained stretched a net across it and played a game of volleyball, a brief respite from the events of that week.

Close to 70, Shakey was tired of the stand-up circuit—the bad food, cheap motels and the dwindling crowds—but had done nothing else for too long to change course.

The real estate company, which owned a few crumbling beachfront condos, tried everything to spruce up its image, from changing its name to something with a bit more panache—Global Terra Worldwide—to painting live manatees with their logo—a manatee juggling the Earth—but nothing seemed to work.

Overweight, alone and despised by everyone including her dog, she wasted her days typing away at a blog that had an audience of one, namely, her.

Forced into early retirement after the shooting, the detective found himself staring into the abyss of television watching and Florida vacations.

He peeked upstairs hoping to catch a glimpse of the acrobat, but the room was empty except for a pile of hula hoops and a sweat stained towel.

Raj walked the city streets thinking that perhaps he had become a ghost since everyone who passed by looked through him, their eyes barely focused.

"Sometimes violence is the only answer," Danny said, sliding his knife from its sheath.

We waited for him to come home that night and 20 years later I still do, my heart jumping a beat, his name catching in my throat, every time the doorbell rings.

She woke up that morning sick of the sun and her neighbors' sunny dispositions and decided it was time to head home to Detroit.

Since retiring, Charlie spent his days in either the airport or the hospital, not due to his going anywhere or being sickly, but because that's where all the action was.

She considered her sister's plainness a prideful sin.

The crow breakfasted on the dead hare, its claws lightly resting on the animal's side as it ripped past the fur.

My ink started to itch and I knew trouble was brewing.

Scott missed the old Coney Island like a sailor misses the sea.

The remaining patches of dirty snow sat on the earth like mold on a half-eaten can of black beans found at the back of a refrigerator.

The glass came down with a dull thud.

That moment played through Carrie's mind on a never ending loop, sometimes slowed down and stretched to a near infinite point or in real time, as fast as the sweep of her eyelashes.

"Tell her I'm sorry," he croaked from between cracked and bloody lips.

It seemed the whole world came down on us that day with the hail killing the crops, the bank man nosing around and the news from the front nothing but bad.

The ravaged and windswept valley waited impatiently for the end to come.

She was lulled to sleep by the warm and somewhat scratchy sound of an old Buddy Holly record that had belonged to her father, whose body lay in bed in the next room waiting to be removed by the undertaker.

"My unflagging belief that there was someone else looking back at me in the mirror and, in fact, another entire world just behind that man, was what landed me here," he told the group sitting in a semicircle, their faces covered in a milky light that was coming through the barred windows.

The dancing did not let up, forcing Tulip to find a dark corner in which to seek solace.

The answers, not forthcoming, would have to be drawn out by force, thought the investigator, not knowing that he was dealing with a mute.

Snide, arrogant, devilishly-handsome, J.S. was hard to resist.

He lay in bed convinced he was alone on a life raft drifting further and further out to sea.

The massed crows rolled across the darkening sky like a wave on a night-black ocean.