The smell of fried chicken brought tears to his eyes as he stumbled down the street that morning and reminded him just how far he had wandered from home.

The poet sought heartbreak since she was always in need of inspiration.

The surgery that made it possible for him to walk changed how he saw himself, leading to a slow slide into an intense depression.

High above the Hudson, swinging erratically in the wind, he worked the key around from the back of his mouth to between his teeth as the crowd far below waited with baited breath.

Tom O'Bryan was a planner, so much so that he had already picked out the final words he would say upon his deathbed—"Whiskey for my friends, water for my horses"—a phrase he felt would nicely sum up his life's philosophy.

Their casual banter soon turned towards politics, religion and personal hygiene, all subjects they had profoundly different takes on.

After moving into his new apartment, no matter what Driscoll set out to paint the image of a figure with hollow black spaces for eyes continued to emerge from within the swirls of paint.

Harold was no hippie, he was a business man—plain and simple—so when he took over managing the local food coop there were naturally problems, such as the long held believe that book keeping should be done "organically," meaning there was no order that he could discern from it.

Roger went into the janitorial business based on the erroneous belief that his ancestor had been in charge of the chamber pots on the Mayflower.

The body lay in a sun-dappled clearing in the woods.

"The only editor I need is a bottle of Jack Daniels and a razor blade," growled "Sandpiper" Watkins, the oldest reporter on the paper.

I saw the fear in his eyes as he huddled in the corner and understood at that moment that I could never be the soldier I had wanted to be.

Paranoia ran rampant in the family, from the grandfather's belief that the neighbor's dog was an FBI informant spying on his day-to-day activities, to 8-year-old Timmy, who thought his math teacher was an escaped Nazi scientist experimenting on his classmates.

The walls were thin in the apartment, so thin that they imagined they could almost make out the neighbors as they went about their daily routine of binge drinking and verbally abusing one another.

The caller's voice was thin and reedy, but packed with menace and unbridled hatred.

The small park was covered in litter and its scrawny trees barely clung to life, mirroring the men and women who sat in the darkened corners with dreams of poppies dancing in their heads.

"We hated each other you know," the old man told me with anger in his voice, speaking of his relationship with his old Vaudeville partner, a wooden dummy named "Chuckles."

The cold, grey fish eye stared at Charley from its newly opened can, which was perched on the lap of the man next to him on the train whose meal emanated a smell that combined the deepest depths of the greasy sea in tandem with what Charley believed was the body odor of the worker whose job it was to seal the sardine containers.

The dancer sat waiting, rubbing her ankle with a bored lethargy.

The painter's work all contained the same colors and reminded Jim of a drunk he once knew that told the same stories over and over whenever Jim happened upon him.

The sound of the bagpipe matched the dreary day.

The popcorn grew cold and the children in the back row snickered as Trish and Brent began to kiss passionately at the climax of the action film, which had sparked something between the two.

That night they discussed the finer points of frying bologna, the seemingly only thing they cared to share.

As an anthropologist Dr. Brunsman wasn't at the top of the heap by any means and his latest gaff—mistakenly labeling a group of middle school students on a field trip a yet unknown lost tribe of pygmy-like people—only knocked his reputation that much further down the ladder.

He stood watching the couple, laughing in the Italian summer light, from a darkened corner of the piazza.

Life was all down hill after his stint as a child spokesperson for the meat industry as "Hamburger Harry."

The fire sputtered momentarily and I, my heart beating in my ears, perceived something moving just beyond the light.

When Judith shaved her initials into his chest while he lay sleeping, he wondered whether it was a strange sign of her affection or a hint that he was a bit too hairy for her taste.

Even after death the junk mail kept coming.

Every April 1 Didier was the butt of numerous practical jokes, but this year was going to be different, unfortunately his sense of humor tended towards the macabre and the joke he played on his coworkers involved a decomposing rat.