His summers had no ice cream nor beaches only distant gunshots and hiding from drunken violence. 

They had lived in peaceful isolation for thousands of years but we couldn't allow that (so we shared our diseases and corruption). 

 To whom did the rules apply and what allowed some to circumvent them with such ease? 

 Something was fundamentally broken but Frank wasn't sure if it was the world or himself. 

 Put down your phone and breathe in the night air and stare at the stars and wonder at the immensity of it all. 

What he considered a well-tended and ordered soul now seemed like a barren field strewn with salt where nothing could ever grow again.  

It was as if she hadn't left—the pillow still had her indentation and the bathroom still held her makeup and toiletries—but she was indeed gone (forever). 

 Dad had prepped for every conceivable situation we might encounter while on vacation. 

 The eagle's screech, the crow's caw, and the black-capped chickadee's repetitive call had become the only voices she heard anymore. 

"So much more dying is coming," the climate scientist said, as the tears began to leak out, not in anguish but in frustration.  

That beautiful sunset cost a million trees and counting. 

She perpetually rode the night train to nowhere. 

The feel of the loaded brush against canvas after so long was like waking from infinite slumber. 

They say words have power but sometimes when they get seemingly randomly strung together and then just go on and on and on and on they perhaps lose not only power but even a sense of cohesion like maybe they start to just float off into the 

                                                           e

                                                               t

                                                                   h

                                                                       e

                                                                           r

                                                                                .

"You can kill the messanger but that doesn't change the bad news," the soldier shouted at the general as he stood before the firing squad. 

"Tsk, tsk," went Tara's brain every time her thoughts strayed back towards her true desires. 

 We all need to pull that thread. 

 Tend to the words, watch them grow into sentences, and from there—if properly weeded—into something bearing fruit. 

They replaced the seasoned investigative reporter with an algorithm that could efficiently generate short pop culture stories with clickable headlines and no one noticed since the readers had all lost the ability to focus for more than a few seconds anyway. 

We loved scoundrels as long as they were honest about it. 

Drinking with the locals, Dave believed, was the only way to get to know the truth behind the sunny small-town facade. 

Let's talk about the weather: killers born of industry and driven on by greed and now unleashed upon us with no prison that can possibly hold them. 

Theresa looked out at her garden gone to seed and could really relate. 

 It turns out you can control the world through mere memes and emojis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Will thought that by fifty he should have become wise but now realized there was an infinite amount of knowledge and he'd merely scratched the surface.

There were no bad ideas except for all of Burt's, the rest of the office seemed to agree on. 

They agreed on most things except for their chores. 

 "Maybe it's time you learned about what happened to the colonists who supported the Crown," the teacher told us, unsmiling. 

 "Sure, I've fantasized about killing you," she smiled as she furiously hacked at the chicken carcass on the cutting board. 

Their conversations didn't end after her death but became more amorphous (but no less real) since they now only occurred in dreams. 

Hal professed a love for classical music and haute cuisine but the truth was he preferred classic rock and hot dogs.