Through toil and trouble they slogged towards that dim light at the end of the tunnel.

Eventually, everybody got sick of the Internet and went back to talking to each other in person.

Her lilac-colored dress moved with the breeze as she walked through the park toward him, an image that became Carl's lifelong idea of everything that spring represented.

Kate felt like she was constantly walking a tightrope over a yawning abyss while carrying her family on her shoulders.

His life was a half-remembered fever dream.

Fear was Dave's main motivator and his greatest inhibitor.

The river's winter skin began to crack.

Irene used her big, baleful eyes like a master puppeteer to get what she wanted.

His lips clung to the cigarette — one of two he allowed himself a day — like a drowning man holding on to a life buoy.

The sound of gunfire began to increase with the warm weather and Drake could tell summer would be there soon.

She drove her coworkers insane every March when she would win the office pool, based, she said, on which uniforms she liked, but the truth was she was an avid basketball fan with a complicated system for determining the best teams.

Although the alley was dark and narrow it was the fastest way home.

That year, spring was like a coy young girl who refused to come to the party.

He began the harassment with anonymous phone calls in which he did not speak, but soon realized he needed to step up his game to get the point across.

The old editor felt like pulling his hair out every time he sat down to read the stories of his younger reporters who had no qualms about inserting their opinions into the news.

The chip on Brad's shoulder was so large it often kept him off balance.

Suzie believed every sneeze was the onset of a deathly disease.

"We destroyed our past to save the future," the old politician told me from his hospital bed.

The bugle's plaintive melody hung over the graveyard like a heavy fog.

"She's a back-stabbing, fast-talking trollop who subsumes everything in her path," thought Jane, "so why is she my best friend?"

The clock was ticking and his test paper was still blank.

Stan's nose for news had become stuffy of late.

she didn't feel like a racist, after all, her maid was black.

The beauty of the world was sometimes too much for him to take.

The sun, so long hidden, made a brief appearance that month, teasing the townsfolk before again slipping back behind the black and boisterous clouds.

The school's rules were arbitrary and mean-spirited in order to keep the children off-balance.

Bernice and Barb fought over clothes, boys and what shows to watch on television, but never over books, since both considered them tedious and boring.

They felt like spring was around the corner even as another nor'easter rolled through the region.

Like Jesus with the money changers, Bill felt that beating the neighborhood bully to a pulp when he caught him torturing a kitten was completely justified.

After Frank's forced retirement he found himself stalking his former coworkers who he felt were lazy and breaking into the office at night to check up on their work.

He beat the Devil in a tap dancing contest, or at least that was the rumor around town.