When Dora's foot went through the floorboards, she began to have second thoughts about the purchase she made, sight unseen, during those dizzying days of the housing boom.

The death, mud, muck and mayhem sometimes got to Billy, but it was the letters from home that hurt the worst.

They drank beer and watched the waters rise.

I stumbled along blindly across an endless expanse of white, my tears freezing to my wind-whipped cheeks.

Kelly knew her career was in peril when no one noticed her leaked home sex tape and she was passed over for a celebrity reality show that had stars living in wolf packs in the Arctic.

When Travis got out everything had changed—the slang on the street, the clothes people wore, the things they cared about.

The creaking of the old house kept in time to his creaking old bones.