Sheila recalled that summer day with sheer delight while everyone else remembered only an embarrassing encounter in which she threw herself at Hank who diligently ignored her advances.

Absurdities abounded in the new world that felt as if it belonged in a B movie comedy and not as our day-to-day reality.

But hadn't all the stories already been told?

After a meteoric rise from the mean streets of Miami he was now living above his means and inching closer to being back on the street.

The endgame was to never have the game end.

The dreamers couldn't wake up from the nightmare.

The biggest thrill in our little town that summer was watching the firefighters try to get an infamously pugnacious cat named Felix out of an ancient and decrepit pine tree.

The wind sliding through the trees was a soothing lullaby for her fevered mind.

The Apocalypse wasn't physical but rather the breakdown of the mental constructs erected over the last two thousand years.

The Devil was sick of being blamed for man's folly.

The senator felt he'd pulled himself up by the bootstraps, after all his father had only given him a few million dollars to get started, and believed all Americans should do the same.

The shipyard, once filled with the hum of hard work, had become a tumbledown ghost town.

Aftr I accptd the nw ordr my wrtng grtly imprvd.

Tad was a tippling toddling old bore who could talk the bark off a tree.

He hid his poet soul behind a mask of bluster and bravado.

The winter was short but coursed through our veins all year long.

She was as dramatic as a Louisiana rainstorm and twice as unpredictable.

Sarah spent her life on the fringes of fame in the hinterland between celebrity and anonymity.

They talked and talked and talked in a whirligig without end or reason. 

Their route was as twisted as the roots of an old oak.

The DA was a man who considered justice a game to be won at any cost.

Her memory had become a haunted house filled with secret passages that led nowhere and trap doors that dropped into darkness.

The bell tolled a final time and then went silent.

The new day dawned and the dream was forgotten.

They pretended they were super rich for the weekend and prepared to spend the rest of the year paying the tab.

She went from la vida loca to la vida lento when she hit forty.

The ancient cobblestoned streets beckoned.

The night time revelers, of whom Ike had previously been a dues-paying member, know just made him angry and kept him up to all hours with their boisterous foolishness below his window. 

The dying artist dreamed of his unfinished masterpiece.

When he counted up the years they'd been apart the realization was like a sucker punch to his soul.

She seemed to enjoy her misery as if it were a relaxing bath she was too comfortable to leave.