They’re not exactly what you would call your friends.  More like associates.  They come with the profession, the rules – the lifestyle.  They wear expensive suits with black as the base color, matching the iron hidden beneath their suit coats.  Fair-haired women sometimes accompany them, dressed to impress, smiling uncertain smiles.
Brandon L. Rucker

Kids playing schoolyard ball would notice me: conspicuously white.  At first, they’d mug, “Hey, Officer.”
Eventually, they figured out I lived in the neighborhood and was just buying beer and cigarettes.  Then, they’d shout, “Marlboros and Budweiser!”
Sometimes I’d call back, “Newports and King Cobra,” just to be smart.
…
Nothing.
Tommy Mac

The night crept up imperceptibly and smothered the whisky coloured day with darkness.
Leon’s bones creaked with shame and guilt as he smashed the hammer into Milton’s face.
Later, his stomach growled with hunger and fear as he fried the corpse of the only other human left alive.
Paul D. Brazill

First the engine screech, then the tire flung gravel pocking the tin shed. Clanking a menthol cough drop against his molars, Herb Bernstein looked straight over the dash, his jaw creased, foot on the pedal, mumbled “Fatty” under the growing roar of the engine, and dropped the shift into gear.
Doug Bond

I lost four friends this year. I like to think that they’re not really gone.
But that hope is hard to maintain when they persist in not picking up their end of the phone……

Karen Schindler

She was away when her uninvited friends sat watching me type at the computer. I offered water and food, but they weren’t friendly. After she left me one of them telephoned to berate my careless hospitality, and that was a day I think I wrote one of my best stories.
offbeatjim wittenberg

The moon hung fat and gibbous as Nathan Draped Oliver’s cold, dead skin over his own pallid flesh. Shivering, he breathed in the scent of cheap aftershave, cigarettes and booze as sour memories trampled over his thoughts with bloodstained feet. Together, forever, he rasped as tears filled his bloodshot eyes.
Paul D. Brazill

David looks upon the supine form of his wife, lying in a drunken stupor on the couch. 
 He curses the traffic that delayed his journey from work.
 His horrified gaze returns to the frozen chicken, nestling in his baby son’s crib. 
 He opens the oven door – and oblivion engulfs him.
 John Saxton

He left just like he came, one messenger bag, one suitcase, one book for passing time on the Turnpike. No embrace, just a mumbled “See ya” in the basement of Port Authority, a slinking away from their possibilities. In Brooklyn, she set the futon on the curb that same night.
Karen Lillis

And so he’d buried his dad. Shattered, Vince switched off the bedside light, eerie darkness causing a shiver.
 Relieved his wake speech went well, he wondered how he’d cope. Where was dad now? So much vitality, dispersed.
 Suddenly he was engulfed by surreal warmth. Paradoxically he froze, then soon realised the overwhelming love therein. 
 ’Dad?’
 Col Bury