Coco's laugh sounded like the frenzied playing of a drunken marimba player.

He believed himself to be lazier than he actually was.

They welcomed the summer with open arms and open containers.

He always seemed fastidious and fussy, appearances belied by his overarching love of  female mud wrestling.

She enjoyed going on dates with Earl since he never stopped talking, which allowed her to enjoy her meal without the nuisance of an actual conversation.

The tree outside the bedroom looked like a Japanese watercolor.

What he believed would be a simple home repair became a Sisyphean task that sucked away his summer, fall and the greater part of winter.

In her little river town time was marked by when the boat docks went in and when they came out.

Summer never came.

The torturer was a family man who had no trouble leaving his work behind when he returned home each night.

It was a lopsided conversation with his ego which always managed to outshout the better angels of his nature.

The brothers' plan began to unravel after their unplanned robbery.

following her accident the world seemed to Haley to have shifted slightly — everything just a little out of place —  enough so that she had trouble recognizing her home, her husband, her family.

Twenty years after Drake gave his off-the-cuff speech to his class about how illegal drugs aren't inherently evil, he continued to wonder if it had contributed to Brian's overdose a few months later.

She drove toward the coast as the blood seeped into the seat hoping to see the ocean just once before she died.

Cici couldn't live without the hum and flow of the city.

Deuce awoke following a two-day bender to find he now had misspelled knuckle tattoos that should have read "REAL DEAL" but instead spelled "REEL DALE," which happened to be the name of the fishing store where he worked on weekends.

He stood watching them, the handcuffs cutting into his wrists, as they piled his collection of guns onto the front lawn, their own weapons at the ready.

Tracy was fired from his job as a video game designer after a string of highbrow ideas — a game in which you have to navigate the unstable mind of Vincent Van Gogh to create masterpieces, another based on Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" — did not fly with the 12 to 25 market.

She finished her story and realized she hadn't really told one, but rather had written a series of unrelated statements strung together by 'and' and containing at least 20 etc's per page.

His new screaming eagle tattoo looked more like a dessicated vulture.

They wore disguises for their illicit rendezvous and drew unwanted stares when Sally, in a bunny costume, was seen French kissing Frank, who was dressed as a clown.

Through the haze of the smoke-filled bar he saw Big John lumbering toward him with an evil-looking knife in his meaty hand and a look in his eyes to match.

He was a huckster, a charlatan and a world class cheat, but he was my old man and I'd be damned if I was going to let anyone else call him out.

Bill shot the computer, set fire to his Iphone, and headed south.

She thought of his love for her as a soggy, rain-drenched coat she was stuck wearing.

Only able to work at night on her romance novel after long hours as a copy editor, Lucy realized her lack of sleep had infused the book with a hallucinatory darkness and a palpable sense of dread. 

Bill "Beefsteak" Swift was a cheap political thug who carved out a fiefdom by bribery and threats, but was smart enough to know he was too dumb to make it to the big time.

Whistling down the lane, thinking about the girl he loved, he ran into a former-flame and changed his tune.

The roasted rat meat was a welcome reprieve from their usual gruel.