I spelunked through my notes and scrounged up some first sentences (or so) to stories
I never finished. I am posting them below mostly for my own benefit, so that I can
reference them easily if I ever find myself without an idea. They may, however, be
of some limited entertainment value to you. Enjoy, if you can.
There was something more ominous about the doorbell in the morning.
When Annie moved in, her roommates were still away for the holidays. She had a week to herself, alone in a new city and new apartment. During the day, she enjoyed the freedom and the solitude. With no sisters to tease her, she sang loudly in the shower, no longer just mouthing the words. With no nagging roommates, she let the dishes pile up. She'd get to them before Sunday.
Johnny wasn't afraid of the dark.
They screamed when they died. Death came at any hour, but there were always more screams right before dawn, as if the victims could not bear the thought of another day.
The busboy was dead. The manager had insisted that they be called servers' assistants, but the new term never stuck. The knife, however, did. Its dull black handle quivered slightly between the busboy's shoulder blades.
Home Hunters
Eleanor: On today's episode of Home Hunters, I'll be helping newlyweds Patrick and Judy find their first home in the big city. How exciting!
His phone buzzed. “You have two memories today," it read. He smiled. He liked memories. He hadn't been given any in a couple weeks. He hoped these would be good ones.
The large Dunkin iced coffee perspires onto the ground in front of him. The light changes and the T screeches toward the stop. The man hurries across the street to get to the platform, ignoring the oncoming traffic.
The realtor, Z, unlocked the door and then led us down the long, dark hallway into the kitchen. Once in the kitchen, he gestured vaguely and said, “Yeah, take a look around.”
There were no stairs in the stairwell in the apartment building where the vampires lived. From the sidewalk, passerby might notice the stairwell’s lack of stairs, but most would dismiss it as a trick of the light, or an effect produced simply by the angle of the windows. Some people were not so easily self-deluded; they raised questions at city council meetings or tweeted about the mysterious building without any stairs. These people were hunted and drained of their blood.
When Sam Worthers, a stock broker at Lilith & Sons, arrived at work on Tuesday, he knew immediately that something was wrong. All the graphs had started going up and to the left. Up, Sam had learned, was good, but they usually also went to the right. Sam banged the side of his monitor, hoping to straighten out the bug. Undisturbed, the graphs crawled leftward.
On the living room wall hung an elegant oil painting of a pistol. In a neat
cursive beneath the gun, the artist had written
Ceci n'est pas tchekhovien.
Two figures are lying uncomfortably on a snowy mountainside.
In the dark and bright heavens above, God was plotting his revenge.
Frank thought carefully about his next move.
Eliot hadn't always been a wizard.