She wondered if it was possible to eventually run out words.  

The same technology that could connect more often cleaved. 

 Let there now be dancing in the once blood-stained streets. 

 Walls kept her in and blocked her way and sometimes gave her succor. 

The little charleychaplin man who had taught me the art of the highwire finally fell. RIP LF.

 The statistics were friends, lovers, fathers, daughters, mothers, grandparents, and brothers. 

The loss of empathy is a far greater pandemic. 

The snow crunching beneath his feet matched the rhythm of breath made visible as it hit the icy air.  

 Scott sometimes wondered if he was a sociopath or had just stopped giving a crap.

Their friendship was mainly based on boasts and taunts. 

The electronic Dark Ages filled with flat earth theories and QAnon conspiracies had arrived. 

The music in Michelle's head suddenly stopped and she wondered if it was merely a caesura or whether it had been at the coda and had now reached its end. 

 "Whenever I get too big for my britches, I simply stare at the stars in the vast night sky and realize my insignificance," Slim said before letting fly a perfectly aimed gob of spit that hit a lizard scurrying across the cracked earth. 

She felt like a cast iron pan in need of reseasoning after it had been thoroughly scraped clean by a novice cook. 

 Their only recourse for revenge was the hope there was a hell. 

A single mourning dove sent the gang of starlings fluttering away in a cacophony of angry chattering.  

Light did not equal warmth nor quiet, peace. 

 Lost in a half memory, he followed it down a dark electronic hole from which there was no return. 

There was indeed a conspiracy afoot, but it wasn't any of those trafficked on Facebook. 

Farah feared life. 

The photo had faded but the memory remained vivid. 

Triumph and tragedy tended to run in the same circles. 

The wolf often wondered when his inevitable stumble came whether his pack would leave him to die or protect him until he'd recovered. 

Sean's recipe for success included fear and shame, with a sprinkling of self-loathing, that set him squarely in middle-management. 

She thought of her new life as a dark, empty, endless hallway without doors, windows, destinations. 

Gary gave up on trying to understand God's plan or even his own. 

 White on white on gray was the day. 

 We love nature as long as it conforms to the conditions we set.