The morning drizzle tightened the District’s notorious braided-knot commute into a noose of traffic. - Scott Drayco

Both men were pictures of the kind of grief that cauterizes open wounds in memory and turns them into black scars.

The smell of beer surrounded him in a cloud as if he’d been doused in Eau de Frat Boy cologne.

He was one of the few men who didn’t aspire to be alpha as long as he was in on the hunt.

The M.E. dissected pieces of a corpse to tell a story, while Drayco tried to bring them back from the dead, jagged piece by jagged piece.

The sliver of sun turned water crystals among the coal-colored clouds into the halo of a sundog.

He launched into the color-tsunami of Prokofiev’s fourth piano sonata. It soon carried him onto a distant shore where the only thing broken was the silence.

The blight of office cubes housing lawyers and lobbyists had popped up like chokeweeds in the manicured lawn of the family homestead.

With so many people lulled into believing everything they found on the Web, he expected computer shrines to pop up in homes soon. Worship the new Oracle of Dell-phi.

She was a tornado in a skirt.