"Don't you get my Irish up," yelled McFadden, his arms windmilling erratically as he stumbled toward his son who easily dodged the old man.

Game shows, the obituaries and her neighbor's every movement filled the bulk of Glenda's days.

The candy apple red Cadillac that had once been the glory of State Street now sat on blocks, a rusting hulk.

They watched in horror as he picked up the steak with his hands and swallowed a large chunk of the meat like a crane ingesting a koy.

The house was a hive, a constant humming of comings and goings that drove their neighbor Al to contemplate killing.

"It was a tit-for-tat with a rat-a-tat-tat," Smokey told me, a thin smile briefly crossing his pallid face as we lay in the hole.

Burt's love of the English language landed him in front of Judge Stewart twice in one year:  once for vandalism stemming from the correction he made in spray paint to a shop sign that had misused an apostrophe and a second time for a fist fight over the correct spelling of "encephalopathy" with Burt getting 30 days in jail in the second case after correcting the judge's pronunciation of "battery," as in "assault and."

Her abrasive personality and tendency to cut people off made her the worst undertaker in the business and nine times out of 10 her clients went running for the door, tears streaming down their faces, and into the new funeral home down the road.

The tears rolled down like collapsing ice flows in a dark sea of anguish and shame.

The hammer clicked but there was no bang, resulting in a rapid change of the situation.

They tap danced through his imagination, the only memory he had of his parents.

The king suffered the indignity of a barrage of rotten vegetables and catcalls with reserve, but would not abide the same for his little dog and burst into tears when a head of cabbage bounced off of the pooch's back, eliciting a yelp.

Lucy was an escape artist able to extricate herself from the messiest, most convoluted relationship with no regrets and little drama.

While living down by the river in his van, he grew to hate Saturday Night Live.

The mourning dove outside the window sang the saddest song for me.

Tara lived on New Orleans time while in New York, meaning she went out for cocktails just before closing time, showed up an hour late for work everyday and missed the beginning of every movie, concert and play she attended.

Ted's clumsy come-on to Betty, the woman sitting next to him at the bar, produced a chain reaction when Betty, shocked at Ted's cold and clammy hand on her thigh, spat her mojito into the eye of Billy, drunk since noon, who fell off his bar stool, tripping Tracy the waitress who spilled the bowl of chili she was carrying onto the back of Stan, scalding him just as he was about to propose to his long-suffering girlfriend.

Joe felt his soul leaving his body as he drove home that day and struggled to keep it from rising straight out of the top of his head and out of the car to be blown about like a leaf on the wind.

Time poured over him like a hot shower, his hands grasping at memories as they leaked away.

They grudgingly accepted the existence of one another.

The wild dogs in the hills to the south descended.

The full brunt of what happened didn't hit home until the mail arrived.

The argument articulated, the exchange now over, they sat staring at the judge who seemed to have dozed off during the high-volume, emotion-filled hearing.

Crawling through the underbrush on her belly looking for the ring she had just flung at her fiancé's head, Tilda questioned her motives for agreeing to marry  a lumbering idiot with surprisingly quick reflexes.

He chased the grandchildren around the house having convinced them his tiger-striped slippers were in fact savage beasts that enjoyed nothing better than to sup on small children.

The troubadour rode as quickly as possible through the dark woods, having heard the tales, and even passed them on himself, of the evil that roamed there at night.

The fireworks fizzled in the wind-whipped rain.

The crows sat on the barbed wire fence in a row watching and waiting.

Phylis stood before the judge wearing her best pajama bottoms and an expression she hoped conveyed innocence, but was more akin to haughty displeasure.

Tom's revelries were cut short by the sound of car wheels on the gravel drive.

Regina waddled over to the dessert tray, but turned away when she saw the waiter look at her disapprovingly.