Things I Know I Know

There's a discussion on a list I'm on about opening lines/paragraphs of stories.

I have to admit that I think I'm pretty good at openings because, since I don't actually know how the story goes until I get to the end, I need an opening that I'm really interested in to get me to do the work required to get to the end.

Here are openings for stories I'm currently working on.

Twelve:

John Henry thinks the wind is coming to get him.

The King thinks this is ridiculous. “You can’t listen to dogs,” he says. “They’re hardly ever right.”

The King is hardly ever right either, but it only makes him angry when I point this out to him. To be fair, he never expected to be King, being the second son of the third cousin of the old King’s half-brother, and perfectly content--the way he tells it now--to be a captain of the Guard in Posteria-that-was. Now, he’s the only King we have.

Tanny and the Bruiser:

Tanny caught the Bruiser his first night instation.

We were playing cards with three rousters from the Bomano when she slid up behind him and put her gun against his temple.

"Unusual," he said, "you don't see Kenett-Spring loaders around much any more. How do you power it?"

"Women's orgasms and men's screams," she told him, her breath like the whisper of a summer's breeze against his skin.

"You must run out of fuel a lot."

"You'd be surprised."

Waking Up Dead In Iowa:

Joe Crowley came back first, which didn’t seem all that strange at the time. He’d only been dead an hour and a half and nobody even knew it yet, except Joe himself.

“I blew my head off with a shotgun,” he said to me, as I was finishing my morning coffee on the front porch of my double-wide residence/office/medical clinic. “How come I ain’t dead?”