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Immediately after reading Robert’s post last week which included a section on Ryan Habermeyer’s opening sentences and paragraphs I started making a collection of my own. I’m always intrigued by this question of what makes a great opening. And I’m for killer first lines, though I’m also willing to play it quiet for the sake of the story.
I once read a book about first paragraphs (an idea I still like) and I hated it. I’m trying to avoid its sins by not making any commentary. I will read these and have my own thought. If you wish to read them and have your own, I’d love to hear them. But I won’t comment unless upon someone else’s comments.
What you find below were taken from my published short fiction currently online (either free at the link or available for purchase; there are more published works but they’re a bit harder to come by).
I was slightly undecided between first sentence or first paragraph. I ended up including the first paragraph but only linking off the first sentence. So you can stop reading at that point without putting much effort into it.
Here we go.
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Four years had passed since Mary had died; Torrance still wasn’t comfortable dating and yet here he was, getting married. Five years with Mary may have been too short, but it was still a lifetime’s worth of love, and for Torrance it was enough.
Satan and the snake had watched each other for a long time before either spoke. It was mid-morning—it was always mid-morning—and the breeze was pleasant and warm in the thick tangles of shining dark leaves. The snake, a long purple shadow, was hanging in negligent coils from a branch of the tree hanging with blue-spotted white flowers and dark red fruit. Her large head rested on her casually muscled form and she watched Satan, who was sitting on a rock in a dusty clearing, rubbing his shoulders where his large black wings sprung, grimacing from time to time and keeping a close eye on the snake. (cowritten with danny nelson)
The angel was having a hard time explaining the concept of a year to Adam & Eve. Having lived so long in a place with no time, the idea of things changing with the passage of what? What do you mean passage? was as foreign a concept as death or childbirth or burnt sacrifice, concepts the angel had tried to explain on earlier occasions. He sighed and looked heavenward, but he knew that they were his problem—at least for the moment.
I was born when they were building it, you know. And I was just a boy—about your age, I guess—when my grandfather opened the doors and we walked back into the open air. Before he let us out, he had shooed out the hungrier, meaner ones—to clean things up, he said. I didn’t understand then, but— I wish he had never said it.
Solomon stood atop his palace in his famous gardens smelling jasmine from Aramaea, saffron from Thrace, and the blossoming ume tree from Zhou. In the middle of his garden, in an elaborate pot of gold and jewels and lupis images of a sheban goddess, was his most famous flower of all. A blood-red jule rose—the sole honest one among the thousand fakes delivered him by the Queen of Sheba. As he watched it, a bee crawled from the topmost bloom. The best of omens—no matter how much that old fuddy-duddy Ahimaaz groused about omen-finding being pagan. It was like Solomon told him: God didn’t come to your bedroom and make you the wisest man in the world so shut up. It was appalling how those priesthood types thought they knew more than him. No one knew more than him! He was Solomon!
Look, you know this Jesus stuff, right? You seen that Da Vinci movie? Ever read the Gospel of Thomas? That $#!X’s hardcore, man.
From: zechariah@jew.judah.prs
To: ezra@temple.judah.prs, nehemiah@governor.judah.prs
Subject: New Prophet
Frank walked around the chapel comforting his family, aware yet unaware that they were mourning him, that he was no longer with them. He told old jokes to old friends and reached out to wipe his beloved’s tears, his hand passing through her cheek just as his punch lines had passed through the air unheeded, unheard, unpresent.
The signs were all over the city. The positive response to Mayor Graff’s reelection bid had astonished the newspaper editors and local political blowhards. When the major opposing candidate, “Long” Joel Smith, had cornered the mayor with a local news crew, he could hardly have guessed that his sneering reply to the mayor would become the most successful campaign slogan Boitown had ever known. Mayor Graff’s campaigners had even taken to saving time at the end of their tv spots for the clip:
Across the bay and beyond the hills from San Francisco, the city lights reduce to a dull orange glow behind a hill. Browning wild grasses blanket the gentle slope, and father and son lie together and look at the sky. Off to one side, the blinking lights of planes attempt to outshine the stars, but the boy ignores them. And remembering the question he always used to ask, says, “Where were you, Daddy?”
Maurine slapped down onto the plush double bench across from a man in a well kempt but slightly old-fashioned suit. His face seemed to grow out from a pair of small round spectacles and a graying moustache. He did not seem to have noticed her as his eyes remained directed at his book. She set down her satchel and tried to peer over the top and see its title.
Laurel Wistian refused to be called “Miss” Laurel which set all her professors on edge. Particularly since it was well known that her family provided the university with the massive Wistiana Endowment shortly before her birth, providing income to run both the Agroästronomy Department (which Wistian money had founded a decade earlier) and the College of Engineering. The faculty also well knew that her father in particular was none too happy with her rebellious turn into the School of Journalism. “Nosy hoodlums,” he would bark before calling the libel lawyer he kept on retainer. His daughter meanwhile perpetually squinted her eyes behind her blocky black spectacles (worn only during classes and interviews) and demanded that her professors call her Laurel Just Laurel. She wore Dior Noir sweaters customized to accentuate her ample bosom and hide her absent waist, and pleated skirts that fell just so at her knees, and was so clad as she knocked at the door of Dr. Mortimus Alexander Fitzbottom, PhD, AlcD and he called out something she chose to interpret as a welcome.
The stronger winds of last year’s late-arriving hurricane never hit Alabama, but the hot and heavy rains came far enough inland and lasted for days. The basement apartment we rented to the Mormon missionaries had flooded days ago, and they’d gone to stay somewhere else. We would see them around town picking up fallen mailboxes or boarding windows or piling up kudzu, and they told us they’d swing by on Mondays to pick up their mail until they moved back or found somewhere new. Janice and I hoped to get the apartment back together quick enough to keep them—they were quality kids who always paid on time. But no point getting on that till the rains let up.
Ours is a make-believe world. Santa is real but constrained to maintain his seeming fancy. When his presents arrive, parents always assume the other or some other brought that little extra, and Santa knows exactly how much he can get away with. Which means the rich kids get much and the poor kids little and there’s nothing Santa can do about it. He may hate it but that’s the way it is. He can’t risk being discovered by those with the power to legislate and to enforce and he is, after all, make-believe. Even children only believe that he is some sort of realer make-believe—not that he is real—and thus it must remain. He wouldn’t have it any other way, and thus he is limited.
I sit at my desk taptaptapping. If the great Mormon novel of the 20th century was ever written, it was set in the Rocky Mountains. To stick the 21st-century version there would be hopelessly shortsighted. The Church isn’t stuck in its mountain-home-so-dear any longer. But then, to ignore the weighty presence of the West specifically and America generally is to miss the Mormon experience entirely.
A couple of chairs, a couch—sometimes a studio audience, sometimes not—the business hasn’t really changed in the last thirty years. The main thing is smile, ask a bunch of dumb questions,a bunch of easy questions, laugh readily, let them promote what they’re here to promote–and if it’s all gone well, end with a question that will let their eyes well up with tears. And, if you’re really lucky, the polish will slough and the audience will glimpse a human being. The stars keep coming because they’re sure they’ll win. The ratings keep coming because those watching know sometimes they don’t.
“Did you hear that?” Dave fiddled with these and those switches and dials and flung his hands across a dozen touchscreens. “Huh.”
Usually only toothy, nether-dwelling monsters or horned, vase-breaking imps hide out of sight of the adult mind, but she didn’t seem like a monster or an imp at all. When the boys of Miss Garner’s third-grade class saw her pass the school yard during afternoon recess wearing nothing but a Polly Pocket backpack over one shoulder, they hid behind the evergreen bushes and watched, fearful the monitor would see them and call their parents. It didn’t occur to them that a woman without clothes next to an elementary school might be the one who would get in trouble—or at least in more trouble than the naturally curious third-grade boys watching her. She was grown up, and grown-ups don’t get in trouble. Boys get in trouble.
Angry Sunbeam does not want to wear a pretty bow in her hair. Angry Sunbeam does not care for raisins in her oatmeal. Or for oatmeal, which, best you recall, was her favorite food yesterday. Angry Sunbeam does not like that you have moved her seat to the passenger side of the car. Angry Sunbeam will not fold her arms or bow her head. She will not just look at the Friend. Angry Sunbeam probably does not need to pee for a third time but neither can you risk not taking her. Angry Sunbeam yells at you to leave the stall so you stand outside and hold the door closed while she sings “Come as You Are”—the part about the gun—how does she know this?—and, as you will shortly learn, unspools the toilet paper onto the floor. Angry Sunbeam has to be dragged to Primary, then bursts into tears when you pick her up—“I don’t know why! She was so good today!” says her perky twenty-year-old teacher with the enormous eyes and the tiny breasts and the impossibly cute dress and about whose waist is hung the arm of a cut-jawed husband clearly desperate to get her home from church and out of that dress. In the car, as you buckle Angry Sunbeam in, she shows you a picture of herself holding hands with the father she hasn’t seen in three months and of a dinosaur, the dinosaur she says ate her real mother, a dinosaur of sharp black angles and spilled green wax. Angry Sunbeam giggles, then falls asleep as you drive home. And stays asleep when you lay her on your bed, snuggle up to her, kiss the top of her head.
I never got to do it when I was a twelve-year-old Mormon boy even if it is, technically, as much a duty of a deacon as passing the sacrament—and I doubted anyone in my presidency ever did it when they were twelve either. Certainly, the boys we’re responsible for had never done it so, when the bishop referred Jake Miller’s widow to me, at first I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right.
Stanl33 was excited to be turning eight. Besides finally being old enough to take a personal pod offworld to his school, he was going to be baptized by his father, Stanl32, this Saturday!
The first time I saw Devin, I had just gotten into bed and was still wide awake when there he was, crouched over, dirty little talons holding onto the pole that swoops up from the footboard of this old bed from Grandma’s. He was maybe two feet tall, and my first thoughts were, like, he had come to drink my blood or something. But he was silent and still and pretty much has been since. Sometimes he closes his eyes and sometimes he opens them, but I’ve never seen him blink.
Old George sat on an upturned half-barrel cleaning his gun. It only ever shot blanks these days, but that didn’t matter much. A fellow outlaw’d once told him the state of your gun’s the state of your soul and George liked the sound of that religion as much as any other he’d come across. Least it had clarity; that much was sure.
Dear the Last Time I Carried You Back to Bed:
In 2025, to ensure the local availability of a sufficient teacher workforce for local schools, West Contra Costa Unified School District set aside $25 million dollars and a) purchased land between the train tracks and the bayshore bordering the western edge of the former Seaview Elementary School property now utilized as additional administrative facilities, and b) built a series of six-story apartment buildings, the purpose of which was to house district teachers, providing them reasonably close access to their teaching sites without the cost of housing generally associated with living in the Bay Area. When applications were first accepted, 3,000 were submitted for the 600 units. At first, the district implied they would be biased in favor of teachers with children, but a threatened lawsuit led to a purely random assigning of units to applicants.
DAVIS — UC Davis has one of the nation's most vigorously scientific agriculture programs and has been making important advances in food production for decades, most recently in lab-made meats. Advances not only in cultivated animal proteins but in meatlike products made from plants and fungi are so promising that certain other projects are now being shut down. The most exciting of which to many was Daisy, the sentient cow.
When the elders first saw Kim Kumi, they mistook her for a child. She walked down the bus aisle and sat in front of them, turning her body to engage Elder Kim in conversation. When Elder Charles inserted himself, she was amazed that this waygukeen spoke Korean. When it was time for the elders to get off the bus, Sister Kim had asked them to come visit her. They replied they would need to ask her parents’ permission but—
Benjamin Haezer, age 35, vice-president of a chain of hospitals across Michigan/Wisconsin/Minnesota, stood shivering outside his car. The car itself was crumpled, its sexy Tesla face wrapped around some huge pine maybe ten feet off the road. The car’s rear seemed almost cheerfully unaware of its frontal trauma—bright red LED eyes, shining innocent in the night.
After one of her parents’ weekly reminders to “do something Sabbath,” Margaret decided to google the more irritating ward members in search of facts hypocritical. And thus she found Upside Daisies on Amazon and read the free ten percent of its seventy-four pages, only to find herself unexpectedly moved by this:
Nikos Gregopolis worked on merchant vessels. Although he had set foot in every port, island, and pier across Europe and up and down the east coast of the Americas by 1887, he did not care for any of these places. He went ashore mostly just to remember steady ground and why he lived on the sea. He might try some food or pay for a woman, but the full horizon was his homeland.
I don’t know who was sick. Maybe it was you. Let’s say it was.
It appears a standard orchestra. Smallish, perhaps, just a couple dozen musicians, all women, in black dresses. Experts at their craft. But as the music proceeds, instruments fall out as certain women put down their instrument and slide a hand into a modestly designed slit in the fabric of their dress and begin to masturbate. Masturbation is an unpredictable process and these are regular women, acting outside their musical training, and not porn stars accustomed to this type of public performance. They do not come when their conductor directs them to. Sometimes they do not come at all. Perhaps we should not be surprised that they generally come when the music, too, climaxes, but this is not always the case. Sometimes their cries or whimpers of extasy seem entirely out of alignment with the music. This is part of the artistic statement the orchestra is making.
My grandmama taught me something about craftsmen. True craftsmen. And craftswomen. Craftspeople’s probably not a word. Crafters is something else entire. Anyway, you’re the writer, not me. And this pen I lifted from a roadside motel from a nowhere Nevada town. Nowhere Nevada town’s not so bad. I’ve written enough books now to recognize a good phrase. It’s necessary because even the best writers still write a crapper now and then.
1. My mother died in my infancy.
Sister Bowden was relieved, while in Provo at the Missionary Training Center, to hear what percentage of her time would be spent “in service” rather than “proselytizing.” Not that she was against teaching people the Gospel—she just…had an easier time imagining herself feeding orphans and building shelters than knocking doors or soapboxing on street corners. She believed in helping people. And physical needs were more immediate, easier to see. Jesus gave the people fish. That’s what she wanted to do.
The rain is heavy, but I stand in it watching plants take a beating from the source of their lives. “A Flower Speaks the Impossible,” I say into my phone, and my wife laughs. “A Flower for the Scrapper, maybe,” she says. She’s always been inscrutable like that.
Jarom was old. His skin was tight rather than wrinkled and the sunbeams from the window caught his long white beard as he entered the room. His robe was a simple brown, but embroidered with enough detail to make it expensive. He cleared his throat and leaned against a stool as he looked over them. His voice was strong but scratched, as if he had let a cat play with it before joining the boys as they sat on short stools intended for much younger students.
Hello. And welcome to Great Ironies of History. This episode, Ice Orgy, takes place on July 17, 2094 at the residence of Shad Mellstone Oguaga. The markets had, the month earlier, made him Earth’s eighteenth trillionaire and, to celebrate, he had spent $600 million―briefly negating his trillionaire status―on the longest core of Antarctic ice in private hands―for a definition of Antarctica, say, “Define Antarctica”―outside the collection nonpareil of Hydrogen Port cofounder Weichang Buarque, over 2,000 meters in length and ten centimeters wide. Its previous owner was Zsófia Szabó, who you may see attacking Oguega and being forcibly removed from the party at the two-hour mark, in the northeast corner of the ballroom, should you wish to experience that moment. As an added irony, her moment of violence may well have saved her life.
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