Opening lines do important work in storytelling. When you reach the end of a story, an opening line may read completely different than it did when you began, because the story has changed its meaning. An opening line may be a hook, a light in the darkness, a way forward.
I try to take a picture of the eerie. (The Passenger, Emily Lundgren)
She came out of the peat like a sixpence in a barmbrack, her face shining like wet iron between the spade-edge and the turf, the bright rusty plait of her hair broken like a birth-cord around her neck. (The Creeping Influences, Sonya Taaffe)
He descended on the town like a saint sent from Dark Heaven six-guns shining like twin torches in his hands, down to the border where we had our battle on. (Salamander Six-Guns, Martin Cahill)
It’s Midsummer’s Eve, and even this close to midnight there’s no darkness, only a long, translucent dusk that will eventually slip into dawn. (Hare’s Breath, Maria Haskins)
As part of our final issue ever (!), we solicited some authors who were there in the beginning. Mary Robinette Kowal was Shimmer‘s art director when the magazine started, and though she’s gone on to much greener pastures (her science fiction debut,The Calculating Stars, came out just last week!), she also published with Shimmer last year.
We invited Mary to be part of the final Shimmer and she suggested we turn part of her story over to you, the readers.
Comment on this post with a killer opening line to a story you’d like Mary to write. Beth and I will go over all the entries, and pick a winner, which Mary will then write a story for.
Comments open until JULY 20. Beth and I will vote that weekend, and announce a winner on JULY 23.
And in November, you can read Mary’s story in the final issue of Shimmer!
Note: Many of you are submitting whole paragraphs and not a single opening line. We are not approving these. Thank you!
The world ended when the guillotine dropped, but thus was born a new one.
The page loomed over the writer, and debated what to do with her, as she had been laying there, blank, for weeks, prompting the quill to express some concerns.
Suspended in the dark mater bile, the cat, the portable cellphone charger, and sentient house, spewed forth from the curved lips of the star dragon.
The hardest part of loving him had always been killing him.
There are only ever supposed to be three on top of the hill, but I made it four and this was a really stupid thing to do.
The destruction of Manhattan, while unfortunate for New York City, was a boon for far-flung museums, musical theaters, financial companies, and—crucially—research universities looking to snap up some previously hard-to-dislodge talent on the cheap.
“We intended to live; I assure you of that.”
Whoever said ‘all good things must come to an end’ definitely knew what he was talking about, but that didn’t make him any less of an asshole, she thought.
There was no time until we put a clock on the wall.
It was on the morning after my 500th birthday that I decided that I was long past due for a change.
They say you can find darkness everywhere, but they won’t find it here.
The three children were following the half-overgrown trail to the old Chestermann place, when the path was blocked by the mushroom, big as a dinner plate, shimmering in the silver light of the full moon.
And though for just a moment, it somehow seemed there was this implacable stillness.
Grandmother’s rocking chair is made of iron.
I looked at the sky and saw the stars fast disappearing, as if a curtain is finally drawn on our momentary history at the end of a cosmic second.
She squeezed the great emerald of her ancestors that hung between her wizened breasts and stepped out, perhaps for the last time, upon the high bronze balcony.
Even a year ago, a dragon suddenly appearing in the center of a major American city would have seemed like mere fantasy, but by now, it’s just another story on the local news.
It was noon, and the sky was very, very dark.
A lady should apologize when she has, through malice or negligence, caused harm. She should not apologize for merely existing in the world, and she absolutely should not apologize for necromancy.
We crawl slowly across the night sky.
There is only ever supposed to be three on top of the hill, bit I made it four and this was a really stupid thing to do.
Every fire has its own smell, a unique mixture of the things that burned, like wood or canvas or plastic, and the things that were lost, like hopes, or dreams, or sometimes lives; this fire stank of black magic and and evil, and the flesh of its victims.
It was easy to tell that the rabbits had not been trained to fly the plane, but Jake could tell they were certainly doing their best.
When Joan responded to their friend’s call for help, somehow they weren’t expecting it to involve going to the carnival, but that’s just what you get when you befriend a cook with a love for the bizarre.
Dawkin’s stomach, overpowered by the luscious, wafting aroma, begged his conscience to throw off its clinging adherence to the vestigial belief in human exceptionalism, succumb to the latest fad, and FINALLY taste the human flesh steak, seasoned to perfection, that lay before him.
*Being of sound mind but increasingly infirm body,* he had written, “I, Alber Smith of Five Pennycourt Lane, Dayton, Ohio, bequeath to my daughter Esma the sum of two thousand dollars, and the moon.”
In retrospect, buttermilk was a poor choice for the fairies’ tithe.
What use is a magician that won’t do a trick?
“Now, at the place of my reckoning, I no longer want what I haven’t got,” is the lie that I tell myself, as it’s the only way I’m going to get through this alive.
Failure to care is not a virtue.
The future was supposed to be an unwritten country, a book with all blank pages, but someone had been filling in the spaces already.
She’d come back from the mudflat reeking of salt, draped in seaweed; she sat at the kitchen table – dripping, dripping – and did not speak.
My soul likes to ride seagulls all the way to the tops of thermals, then leap out of their bodies and plummet back down toward earth, down through the negative space between skyscrapers, down through the layers of tissue and bone and tissue again, and startle me awake with a cruel hypnagogic jerk.
It was always during the darkest part of the night that she fell into the unicorn dreams
It was so hot and dry that the organic components in parched soil burned.
My horse, my dirt bike, and my boy chuck wagon outrider were my life in grade 12 but that was before a Hadrosaur emerged from our gravel pit.
The hardest part was putting all the blood back into Jerry.
It was a dark and stormy night and had been so for verging on six years.
The worst thing about being bound to a Lovecraftian horror from beyond space and time was, surprisingly, not the awful things it required me to do, but rather its inability to understand the simple human concept of “time to sleep”.
It was a ritual now: to go out in the early evening and watch the horizon for any sign of it, to see instead only the long grass against the setting sun, and to turn back inside.
I can’t believe I would ever say this, but now, for the 2nd time in my life, I’ve woken up to find myself naked and hanging upside down from a tree.
The thunder came, and then the lightning.
She remembered it sometimes, the fall from the sky and the wind dying, unable to catch her.
[Character name] hurriedly tugged the ridiculously tight and fragile lace over his knuckles, thanking the Source of Music and Magic that spells outlasted fashion, and hoping his host’s arrogance would not outlive both.
The wealthy foreigners planned to turn New Zealand into a post-apocalyptic fiefdom; instead, they spent their time fighting the people, the land, and each other.
With the “brrp?” sound of a surprised cat, the holobadger shimmered into existence.
Every time he looked in the mirror, he wished he could remember.
My husband says grandmother is too plump to fit in my suitcase, but I know how to make her portable.
“It doesn’t… matter,” the alien ambassador said, as the Earth winked out of existence.
Whenever the storms rolled in, lightning ran beneath the witch’s skin.