Sunday, November 12, 2006; M04
I am an invisible man. Call me Ishmael. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. These sentences are the first lines from novels firmly wedged at the top of the pantheon of American literature. Here are the opening lines from local WriMos' novels-in-progress that may someday join them.
---
It was at precisely 8:07 a.m. on March 6th that Lucy Boots found a dead elephant in her garden.
-- "Freak Magnet" by Rebecca Gordon, Alexandria
After it was done, Omar sent a letter to each of the women whom he had allowed himself to touch immodestly in his youth, informing them that he had lopped off his hand.
-- Dan Fowlkes, Stafford
"God, I hate these cardio bitches," Beth murmured to Peyton.
-- "Bitches in Bikinis" by Karen Quintiere, Bethesda
Someday you will want to know the story of where you came from, and I won't tell you the old fairy tale about the stork with his long bony legs who clutched your sling in his fishy-breathed beak and carried you over oceans and mountains and then finally landed on our roof and dropped you down our chimney like Santa Claus, and when you hit the ground you magically bounced up into my arms and suddenly I was a mother.
-- Katrina Blodgett, Washington
There's a woman lying next to me, at least, I pray that it's a woman, but the outline is hazy.
-- "Vodka" by Pablo Paldao, Arlington
Torian Barber woke up in the back of his Escalade bound at the hands and feet, tied to the door handles, and naked; his clothes were burning in a pile outside the door--and the K-mart was just now opening up.
-- "Marry Me" by Mike Long, Burke
They didn't think that I could hear what they were saying in the kitchen, but I could.
-- "The Aluminum Album" by Jennie Quick, Washington
I would like to clarify at the outset that my motivation for writing this book is only, in part, to fulfill the community service hours sentenced to me by one Judge Elaine Reinhalter, the presiding sourpuss of the Circuit Court of Cook County, who has never tapped her cloven hoof to a single beat in the whole of her severe and unsmiling existence (how else to explain her "inability to grasp" how anyone could start a mosh pit at a Veggie Tales concert).
-- "Superfan Incorporated" by Christopher Kush, Washington
One more reason to drink . . .
-- "Moral Bankruptcy: A Story of Family, Friendship and Cosmic [expletive]," by Darlene A. Costello deVega, Temple Hills
Once.
-- "The Hungry Season" by Tammy Greenwood, Takoma Park
Some people believe that overexposure can desensitize a person: that a doctor, for example, becomes so used to seeing naked bodies and their various parts that he can no longer see the person lying next to him in his own bed; that the massage specialist becomes so tired of caressing the skin of her clients that she can no longer feel the touch of others as they caress her; some people believe that by teaching a soldier to kill, you make them forget the sanctity of life, or that a funeral home director no longer feels the sting of death when the life drains out of the ones he knows and loves.
-- "Dead Ends" by Eric D. Goodman
Tommy Dola was having a very bad day.
-- "A Baby's Bones" by Mary Wise, Burtonsville
