Sunday, December 21, 2014

Twitter: Where Cowards Go to Grow a Pair



Friends liked to say Andy Harrison was so passive he ought to be a Quaker.

Andy, who worked for a local advertising firm, avoided confrontation like some men avoid marriage, or the dentist, or shopping with their wives on Sunday afternoons during the pro football season.

That isn’t to say he was happy about everything. As a matter of fact, his closest friends knew he had a complaint about most things. He would just mutter about this or that and no one would pay attention.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

Nathan Gets a Blister Popped and All Hell Breaks Loose


Nathan Scanlon was a man with a seemingly endless list of fears.
 
He was afraid of heights, afraid of water, afraid of big dogs (and some small dogs if they barked loud enough), afraid of going swimming less than one hour after eating, afraid of sitting too close to the television and, it goes without saying, afraid of clowns.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Toast and Toasters


Biff Furlong’s real first name isn’t Biff.

It’s Buford, but since Buf sounded funny his parents decided to nickname him Biff.

In some circles it may be argued somewhat convincingly that most right-thinking people wouldn't christen their son Biff. Despite this, Biff and his wife, Anita, named their own son Biff. And to top it off they insisted he be called Biff Furlong Jr.

Saturday, November 15, 2014

An Inexact Science




Eddie Fulmer wasn’t particularly good at things.

He was a nice guy, but tasks that would be simple to a lot of people were seemingly insurmountable to Eddie.

He couldn’t really fix things, or make things, or put things together. He had trouble reading directions, struggled to understand directions when someone read them to him, and seldom got it right even when someone showed him what to do.

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Tombstones




Carl McIntyre’s home on Patterson Avenue is about a three-block walk from his place of employment: Sunnyside Cemetery, where some of the town’s most prominent people have been laid to rest after doing whatever they did – good or bad – to make them prominent in the first place.

It made no difference to Carl, who was the cemetery’s maintenance supervisor, because by the time he had to deal with them they’d all reached that unavoidable point in life where their doing good or bad was over.