Attempting to grab hold of the bits of memories floating through her mind Alice realized she couldn't remember where they had come from or if they were even real.

With just a tip of his hat and a rakish wink Elena was hooked.

Sitting in the decrepit apartment staring at the wall, watching it breathe in and out, Seth realized with growing fear that this feeling of euphoria and connectivity with the universe couldn't last.

Through the open barn door I saw them riding up, their hands hovering near their pistols.

He'd gone from whiskey to warm milk, but Hank's penchant for orneriness hadn't dwindled one iota over the years.

The tinkling of silver on fine china and the murmur of quiet conversation were soon overwhelmed by the bombastic belaboring of the tourists who had somehow found their drunken way from Bourbon Street.

With no pen at hand he promised himself he wouldn't forget the beautiful phrases that were leaping into his head, but alas, they were gone as quickly as they had appeared.

Sherie was only half as hard on her friends as she was on herself.

Hector stood perfectly still while the men with batons raced past, beating anyone foolish enough to run.

His folksy demeanor belied his Harvard education and blue-blood background.

In her memory their parting was filled with dramatic music, fog, and shadows, but in truth it had been a bright sunny day and neither she nor he seemed much perturbed by the breakup.

There were little reminders of her everywhere I turned.

That morning, after years together, Anna realized she knew her husband no better than she had on the day they met.

They went from tadpoles and tiddlywinks to boardrooms and carpet bombing with the same mentality.

He crawled forward across the floor but the unseen force continued to pull him backwards into the dark room full of malevolent whisperings.

Expectations haunted Henry like a pack of half-starved wolves in a dark wood.

She wept inconsolably on her 18th birthday knowing she would now never be considered a child prodigy.

The corpulent old gentleman liked to imagine himself sitting atop a massive pile of his cash like Scrooge McDuck, but knew it would remain a dream since all his wealth was little more than binary code bouncing from the bank to Wall Street and back.

Sometimes she would stare out from between the bars seeing not the gawking humans before her but the wild plains of her homeland, only to be returned to reality by the harsh cry from one of the smaller of her captors.

A rainy-day ballet played out on the city streets as the crowds with their myriad umbrellas danced through the morning commute in an attempt to avoid puddles and each other.

Their anger rose in a wave and found voice in a demagogue whose only desire was self-aggrandizement.

The well had run dry for Jim in both literal and figurative ways.

Time was a backstabbing bastard with no regard for well-laid plans. 

Forever trying to recapture the brief period in his life when he was free and happy, he became a sad relic of a forgotten world.

Told to dig deeper within himself, David came to realize he was a shallow, shallow man.

"The only folks who complain about the system being corrupt are those who aren't benefitting from it," he laughs, blowing an acrid cloud of cigar smoke in the reporters' faces.

They woke that July morning to a blanket of snow that never let up.

And then the unexpected happened as it is wont to do.

Lizzie told herself his swagger and bravado were a turnoff and yet her thoughts kept returning to their chance encounter.

Only ghosts were able to stanch her loneliness.