The empty chair was a constant reminder.

He thought of his dreams as messages from his hidden brain, the part of him that was gagged by his ego when awake.

They were know-it-alls and boisterous bullies and didn't have a clue why they were shunned.

The hawk took the mourning dove leaving nothing but a pile of feathers and a sense of trepidation among the other birds.

After the breakdown Elise avoided parties believing her friends would watch her with a laser focus looking to see if anything she said or did appeared at all aberrant.

The simple joy of strumming a guitar was better than a thousand plaudits.

We replaced the poets with pop culture and selflessness with selfies.

All it took was a quick search of the latest news to know time was running out.

Shane began to suspect his overdeveloped sense of empathy was an impediment to getting ahead in business.

It dawned on her that if she spent half as much energy on the rest of her life as she did in choosing her outfits she'd be president by now.

That morning Mike woke up feeling battered and fried like a fat Gulf shrimp a week past its prime.

Sussing out the things Sheila couldn't control from the ones she could directly affect gave her spirits a lift.

It was getting harder and harder to figure out what to bewail and what to let slide as nothing more than a canard.

The building blocks of reality - facts - had become an amorphous sludge barreling down on our world and burying everything in its path.

Alice was torn between writing about what beauty was left in the world or the dystopian nightmare her country was marching towards.

The quiet was punctured by the birds outside squabbling over the seeds tossed on the frozen ground.

Whenever he was under the weather he was suddenly a 12-year-old again whose only desires were to sleep, play video games and watch cartoons.

The shots rang out but couldn't deafen the voices calling for equality.

The struggle, it seemed, would never be over.

The girl and her little brother, their arms sticks, their bellies bloated, stared pleadingly at me from below the window but alas I had no food to give them.

Cracking open a pecan his thoughts drifted to how his mother would make him help gather the nuts in the park across the street and the embarrassment he felt until they were safely back inside and the pie was in the oven.

She felt their breakup was tantamount to theft and mentally pictured the trial she would hold for her ex.

After Art realized no one was really listening to anything he said, he felt free to make outrageous statements without fear of retribution.

Lost in reveries of past loves and adventures Alice didn't see the future softly creeping forward, a bitter blade in its teeth.

The winter bore down on him like a hawk swooping low to take its prey.

Footfalls crunching through the snow were echoes of an ancient past.

Chaos reigned.

Like his intricately built hairdo everything about the man was a lie wrapped in a brittle, badly colored shell.

An island of calm amid an ever escalating cacophony of shrill citizenry Harold chalked it up to never buying a smartphone or bothering with social media.

He sat like a slab of raw meat on his thrown wondering who to harass next.

The new day dawned exactly like the old one.