Sometimes Adele dreamed of becoming a modern Blackbeard or Captain Kidd.

Will wondered if he could still call the place he left so long ago home.

The buzzards circled overhead with the intensity of Brooklyn drivers looking for an open parking space.

The arrest for small time hustling prevented him from achieving his goal of becoming a banker, which he considered the apex of bamboozling.

Neither nature nor nurture did Angela any favors.

The pithy comments were becoming harder and harder to come up with, he found.

They'd grown so used to the neighbors drunken arguing that the sporadic moments of quiet were unsettling. 

It was the seeming randomness of life and the mind-boggling chain of disparate events that led to her being born, much less the cascading circumstances of the following years, that frightened Rachel.

I watched the morning sun slash across the mountain range and recalled that first moment I'd seen those peaks so long ago.

Brad told Becky he'd love her until the end of time but it was really only until the end of that first year they moved in together.

Always too late or too early, time was something he simply could not comprehend.

The old attorney thought he'd seen it all but was happy to find a bit of novelty with his newest client whose trained monkey burglarized businesses for him.

Danielle dumped the powder the agent had given her into the coffee out of a misguided sense of patriotism without knowing what the results were going to be.

The end of the world was coming fast but all Bert could think about was beer and cheese fries.

She was too old to die young.

They wanted heroes but found only fellow humans as flawed as themselves.

A blinking cursor on a blank screen was such an annoyance that he'd write any old thing to make it go away.

The glittering city with its constant construction of even more lavish towers dedicated to wealth still contained a multitude of the forgotten and infirm.

Confounded by technology and frightened by change they systematically began banning anything that smacked of the new.

The thought of what might lie around the next corner was enough to keep Kim going, even on her worst days.

Spring never came.

The psychological wall was harder to tear down than the physical one.

Lucy wondered why, on a beautiful morning with the sun slanting into the bedroom and warming her face, she was thinking about her own demise.

He'd seen it before, the government's push towards anti-intellectualism and the twisting of science for its own ends, and it never turned out well.

The enormous weight of venal corruption cracked the timbers of the great experiment that was sagging towards its end.

The struggle was as much against her inner demons as it was with the publishers.

His blood is the river that carries us forward on a raft made from the bones of the men and women murdered for the color of their skin.

The digital dividing lines were dug and each side prepared their stockpile of social media stones with which to pelt their enemy.

Paranoia had become the only reasonable mental construct by which to live one's life.

Back when Bert was a Marine infantryman he never imagined he'd find himself trading recipes for strawberry scones and egg custard pie, but he had learned over the years to expect the unexpected and that there was nothing better than the smell of dessert baking in the oven.