The older he got the more he felt bad about being lazy, which made him depressed so he stayed in bed thinking about being old, which made him feel bad about being lazy. 

Filters fake faces so you can smile through the pain placidly.

Shelia thought she heard Bessie Smith's "Backwater Blues" on the wind that morning, moanin' low as the waters continued to rise. 

Ever since Greg left, he felt a deep sense of guilt any time his hometown got hit by another storm.

Vic reminded Francis of the feeling you get after you've sliced your finger but right before the pain and blood race in. 

 She dreamed about the future but never planned for it. 

That morning, the plaintive moan of a ship's foghorn was our wake-up call.

While Ivan jogged he plotted coups, assassinations, and his dinner plans. 

 The momentary rainbow between the intermittent rain showers was both literal and figurative. 

And then came the ineveitable denoument, but unlike the theater, none of the strands of her life came together in a tidy package. 

Getting the dog to take its pills was a bigger struggle than any Greg had suffered through, and he was a Marine. 

Sheila believed poverty had a certain smell and doused herself in perfume in hopes of masking it. 

It was only after the fact, and it happened almost every time, that Tim realized he was a terrible conversationalist who interrupted others and hogged the spotlight. 

 Create more and consume less was his grandfather's only advice.

The crush of bodies pushing against a gate that refused to fall was two decades in the making.  

The last mile was always the easiest. 

After Abe got older and stopped hanging our at his local bar,  he felt cut off from the rest of humanity even if the other patrons had only been the dregs. 

The virus swept across the land and its symptoms, wild conspiracies and cultish fealty to a charlatan, laid to waste everything in its path. 

 She never could wash the Florida—like a sheen of self-tanner—off of herself. 

Through the broken shade, Harry stared out at a world he no longer understood. 

As the train rattled down the track towards another city with a million faceless faces the conductor dreamed of changing his name and walking off into the darkness. 

 Strip everything down to its essentials (starting with this sentence, but wait, by adding this paranthetical phrase I've already gone too far and there's no turning back so I guess I'll end with a flourish: embellishment can be beautiful). 

Beside the river lay tiny fragments of a forgotten past that Clarissa spent her time collecting, believing that mudlarking was the only way to truly understand our history. 

 All he wanted was to recapture that fluttery feeling of giddy anticipation he used to feel just before entering an amusement park. 

 The droning of the cars on the road was her lullaby. 

 The birds still sang and the sun still shown but it really didn't seem to matter anymore to Sean. 

 They rattled their self-made cages and decried a system they'd helped build year after year. 

He sang about equality while living in luxury. 

A glitch in the system and the glitch whole world glitch feels the glitch. 

 When Chase woke up in the middle of the night thinking not about work but about his long-unfinished novel, he knew something had finally shifted for the good. 

 The music of the midway was a cacophonous siren song.