Over the waterfall we fell towards glory or oblivion.

The stars were closer out in West Texas but everything else was far away.

Strangely, she was happy when he switched from telling her implausible half truths dripping with sentimentality to stark facts that cut to her core.

He took immense pleasure in the simple things after the accident—the way his dog kicked her legs out in a smooth rhythm while swimming; the seemingly random flitting of a Monarch butterfly along the shoreline.

Through the forest path we walked towards the flickering firelight.

"They changed the names, but it's still the same ol' shit," said Pauly snapping off the television with finality.

The world left enlightened thought and science behind for baseless fear and ritual magic.

The counselors at the weight-loss camp soon realized that a pie eating contest may not have been the best choice of activities for the kids.

Where Will had been and where he was going was the same place, but like a gerbil on a stationary wheel he kept on pumping furiously anyway.

All we wanted was escapist fantasies, but what we needed was more reality.

The dappled sun across the water's surface was the purest art.

It turned out to be the small gestures of kindness and the helping hand to those below that mattered in the end and not a corrupt empire of stone and steel built from the bones of the innocent. 

The town was a desert for desserts, a wasteland for the waistline.

With the words "carpe diem" floating through his mind he got up extra early and took a drive down the mist shrouded country roads outside his city to think about life.

The world, it turned out, was more interested in cute kittens, than in the plight of millions.

Trish was always fascinated by the fact that in what amounted to the blink of an eye she could start her morning in one part of the world and end her night in another.

He stumbled, fell, scraped his hands and knees, stood up and did it all again until one day he reached the finish line.

The excitement Ike once felt as a child waiting for the family's annual visit to the state fair had devolved into counting the moments until Saturday nights at the bar where he could get away from his own family.

In that hallowed hollow the trickling of light led them down towards emprise and blood oaths.

"I ate as many humans as I could, but still I gained no insight into how they worked," said the old lion to his pride.

Weeks went by without a word written followed by short bursts of creativity then more silence as if the telephone line to her own mind had been cut.

A second, less bloody, civil war had arrived led by Internet trolls using blather and snark rather than bombs and bayonets.

The night ended in mourning.

She slipped the documents down the front of her blouse and headed for the door believing she would be hailed as a hero and not a traitor.

The air was choked with dust from the marching army and the smell of fear from the fleeing villagers.

The rain washed off the blood, but not the feeling of betrayal.

When the tipping point came he was into his third martini.

The smell of boiling crawfish and the strains of that old song "Jolie Blonde" sent him straight back to his childhood and the feeling he once had that the world revolved around good food, drinking, dancing, and endless laughter.

We took on the world and in the end everyone lost out.

The returned soldier's soliloquy was drowned out by the loud speechifying for his dead comrades.