The coughing and departed crowds kept breaking through their dreams of caviar and fast cars.

The Earth had had enough.

Do words still matter?

Politics kept trumping art.

The mental itch was scratched until he was a bloody mess.

We were the virus.

Alice went around and around but never did see that brass ring everyone always talked about.

The birds crowded the windowsill, chittering, wings flapping, jostling for their food like customers at the grocery store fighting over toilet paper.

The distance brought them together.

The president saw the pandemic not as a problem but as an opportunity for a power grab.

There were no silver bullets just empty chambers.

As Bonnie gnawed on the bones of her neighbor she wondered how she'd gotten to this point in her life.

The pandemic revealed the true disparity between the powerful and the poor.

When the conspiracy theorists met the gullible social media junkies all hell broke loose.

The heist went off without a hitch until the tire blew.

Anxiety society shrinking away from contact (social contract no longer intact).

The true plague was wilful misinformation.

They were alone together.

The sound of the rain on the roof drowned out the accusatory voice in Darren's head for a few precious moments.

Bad timing was only half the problem.

Sheila looked around at the other 80s-revival band concertgoers and wondered who all these old people were, never realizing she was one of them.

It sounds foreign so it must be bad, she surmised.

Matt felt like he was addicted to social media, porn, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, caffeine, cigarettes, and alcohol, but not work, never work.

The man couldn't play the fiddle but that didn't prevent him from idly watching the city burn.

He wasn't ready for the end of the world, having never been to Disneyworld.

So many shoes dropped that week it sounded like an army of adversity on the march.

They really knew how to work the "divided we fall" angle.

He wondered what all his wheel spinning was for.

She was California cool while he was just Pacific Coast passive-aggressive.

Wendy's whole life was spent waiting.

The dust was all that remained.