The sun soaked the room with warmth and light, burning away the cold darkness that fed on the couple's nightmares.

The city, once the jewel of the region, had by then become little more than a moldering corpse.

A cold chill slowly crawled up my spine as my eyes began to adjust in the half-light of the old building and the outlines of something vaguely human came into focus.

"Halloween is half as scary as this year's election," Irene said, turning off the television.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I couldn't look away from the door as the strange scraping noise continued just outside my room amid a growing smell of putrescence and freshly dug earth.

Suddenly, her absence hit him like a sharp, deep physical pain even though she'd been dead for years.

There were so many problems in the world, but none of them were hers.

Eventually, life with their poltergeist became unbearable not due to fear, but its bad habits like never cleaning up after itself and watching tv and listening to the radio late into the night.

"She was the meanest drunk I knew, but her voice could melt the most adamantine of hearts,"
says Sully, hoisting a tumbler full of whisky aloft, as the rest of the bar joins in.

He died with a smile on his face after surviving long enough to see acclaim bestowed on his friends, and his enemies' reversals of fortune.

The chains were loosed and the creature sent out into the world, a tempest of destruction wherever it went.

There were a lot of bad hombres out there.

The flimsy fence finally gave out and the bodies came pouring over.

Dead now for nearly a decade I sometimes had trouble recalling my friend's features, but his sonorous voice and the feeling I had in his presence remained like a soft fur coat I could pull on to bask in the warmth of his spirit.

We arrived expecting open arms, but were met by jeers and spittle.

The movies in my head were better than any on the big screen.

Ellen wondered if she had somehow given off the wrong signals not realizing he was and always would be a predator.

He wandered through a desert of his own making.

whitened teeth, hair plugs, and an army of spin doctors was the minimum requirement to play.

Like a Bourbon Street reveler the country wobbled and weaved taking two steps forward and three steps back on its way to a bleak future riddled with hangovers.

"Bob Dylan nailed it back in 1964 with 'Only A Pawn in their Game,' and yet the poor whites still don't get who their true enemy is," he laughed, shifting the Porsche into high gear.

His mask, hideous in its own right, slipped off to reveal something even more disturbing beneath.

As the car started to roll, Isabel wondered why she couldn't muster anything more then a lackluster sense of regret she had never left her hometown if these were indeed to be her last moments of life.

In a city that had become a sea of white-bread uniformity the downtown remained an Island of Misfit Toys where we could still let our freak flag fly.

She dug the old book out of the trash bin not giving a fig about the stares of the passersby who thought she was dumpster diving.

I walked out of the building, the paperwork sticking to my sweaty chest, wondering whether I'd be labeled a hero or a traitor.

While our choices seemed to be expanding infinitely in truth it was all the product of a few companies that owned everything and merely made a label change here and a shiny new cover there.

The feeling of being left on the outside looking in stayed with her no matter what she managed to achieve.

As they attached the microphone to his lapel and brushed a bit more powder onto his face Rudy wondered if selling his soul for a modicum of political traction was worth all the lies.

She threw the covers over her head and repeated over and over, "it's all in your head."

Empathy had become a dying art, replaced by a brutish clannishness that would inevitably end in barbarism and pestilence.