how ending starts
Apr 30, 2011 22:30:29 GMT -5
Post by phunke on Apr 30, 2011 22:30:29 GMT -5
One of my good friends posted 100 first sentences/paragraphs of stories she started but never got around to finishing on facebook. They were incredibly well-written - far surpassing my own writing abilities, and this is no overstatement - and really kind of inspired me to try something similar. I always have short stories floating around in my head but never want to put the effort into finishing them.
Here goes - sorry if these suck :/
Manuel had often noticed that you could tell a lot about a person's mood and general attitude by looking at their handwriting. The observation crossed his mind once again as he stood before the small dry-erase board, squinting slightly to make out the words written there in streaky blue marker.
The girl with the long-strided walk who talked so fast the words blurred into strings of unfinished melodies never could bring herself to find much in others - probably because
Later on, after they'd faded into the smeared graphite backgrounds of teenager's minds, she'd swear that the rumors had bothered her. But that was only because it wasn't supposed to be nice the way people saw her when they looked at her for those few weeks, even if right afterwards their shifting bodies followed their eyes away because no one wanted to admit they believed the rumors.
The sand was prickling agony on her waxpaper skin but all she could think was were the others okay.
Staring at nothing in particular she rolled onto her stomach, weaving her fingers through dew-moistened strands of grass. "Do you really believe they'll stop fighting, though?" she questioned. "I mean, this is your parents we're talking about here..." Once again, he'd been letting unbridled dreams and futures seep into his voice, tying strands of them together into something that felt like the sunlight creeping onto both of their bodies as it slowly engulfed the field they'd escaped to. He tested his grey breath on the air, quietly watching it dissipate while she on the other hand was determined to fumble her fingers more tightly into the long wet grass as though it could tie the both of them to reason. "No, I guess I don't," he mused quietly.
She glanced up at his closed eyes and mourned the life that had already left his voice and the flash of hazel now covered by his lids. Grass in her fingers. Tangle, untangle. Exhale. The sun soaked both of them in a frail warmth best described as melancholy.
The day she squeezed shut her eyes at exactly 11:11 PM and found that the black on her retinas was no different, no more promising or thrilling than the monotony of white walls, was the day she realized she'd never find a soulmate.
The warmth when he slid his fingers into hers on an average April day was as nothing compared to the explosion of light and heat happening in her mind that was too immeasurable for outward manifestation.
The man felt as if he were constantly caught in a crossfire within his mind: between Judgement and the Fool. The fact of the matter was that the Fool was him, for letting himself be the middle instead of the whole. God only knew from where Judgement came.
Thea had time to think on life, squatting out in that field crawling with ticks, painting fences and endless dripping white. But she had nothing to think about, really; it was more that she wanted to think on life and the world, just never was the type to which those sort of musings occurred. Sometimes the paint dripped onto her knees.
Sometimes the paint dripped onto his arms and the boy was immediately thrown into a whirlwind of thought and feeling and everything else that is art - he was covered in paint, the watercolors spread down his arms and sent shivering tendrils across his body as alternate shades slipped up his legs, soaking him in thoughts he'd never be able to jot down in time. Lee's eyes snapped open and he stared tiredly at the white canvas of a paper, mind tired from another dreamlike flash of something he could never recall. He rubbed his forehead tiredly and set the brush down, determined to go get some real work done.
Sometimes he wondered why he even entertained the notion of trying to paint something. It was a silly idea, really. Lee was one of those average people, the kind that mean what they say but not what they think, the kind that tip exactly fifteen percent at a restaurant, the kind that hurry down the street with quick little steps and pretend not to feel the whirl of noise and color that envelops every single person who takes a breath of the world.
One week. It only took one week for the entire world to be blown off its metaphorical hinges at the moment when everything had begun to swing smoothly.
Often she wished she was the kind of person who changes the world just by being in it.
"Maybe," Katie said, smiling as she slid the once ice cream-laden spoon out of her mouth and jabbing it in his general direction, "maybe it's not what you do that makes you important, it's what other people think of what you do. For instance, right now I think it would make you a great person if you were to let me have a bite of that double-chocolate ice cream. I've almost finished mine anyway..."
He smiled blandly, suppressing the spark of hope in his mind that whispered maybe she knows exactly the meaning of what she is saying, and maybe she thinks about the world and the people just like you do and just maybe- The spark was extinguished, and with it the images of the two sitting on a dock just talking about the tides and what it all meant and what happiness was even though the act of doing so would show them. After all, Katie was just a teenage girl like every other teenage girl, and it was no fault of her own that she'd never stopped to wonder exactly what it meant to smile at someone you'd never met.
But she was nice enough.
Now remember- crackled the man with the deep voice through his transmitter, into the ear of someone who entirely did not care -we don't know what the re-re-rep- crackle -reperc-
The voice fizzled out. -Chhhhhh.
The crackling white noise was so beautiful and the lone man thought that maybe knowing it was beautiful made him unique; he'd never been unique before. (Most people would have said that being the first person to travel back in time made him unique, but he preferred the white-noise theory.)
No, no, no, no, no. This time she didn't need a reason.
We built that house with the crumbling planks and aspirations Daddy left us in the lumber yard that day the truck done hit him. Wasn't like he had it coming or nothing. Sometimes life just happens and all you do is pull your tired feet out to the lumber yard and stare at the wood that you just know has something left from his hands on it, like orange on a skyline even after the sun done set. You just know it's there and that's when you cry. But we done built that house anyway, and nothing ain't gonna change that, not the tornadoes or the forest fires. I don't believe in forest fires anyway. Nature don't do all that work for itself just to put it back in the ground, just like us building that house.
Then again, Daddy's in the ground now.
Each sideways rock of the boat makes him sick, and not sick in his stomach or throat; sick in his mind because every repetition of the ongoing motion strengthens the whispers in the back of his mind saying he can't run away from his problems forever. The oars pause tantalizingly just above the murky surface of the water, and as he stares at the reluctant drip of liquid from the paddle and the rippling circles that echo from every collision of a tiny drop in the vast ocean, he is reminded of the way his mother cries when his father yells at her so hard the sound backs her into a corner. The boy looks up, ahead, and resumes rowing. The water welcomes his oars back below the surface, whispering that that is where they should have been all along. (He is still not sure.)
When I feel lost, I think about being like sunshine. Sunshine never gets lost; it always seems to find its way to the right place.
Seeing him curled on his side, cheek against the naked cold of the floorboards, was more painful than the way her cheek stung with every slap he delivered. It changed her, seeing him there. Traces of reluctance, lingering in the face of this new pity (how was she to know that low self-worth and pity for her husband could be so interchangeable?), shuddered the usual flow of her delicate hands as they removed the tattered blanket from around her own drooped shoulders and draped it over his shivering body. She backed quietly out of the dark room, closed the door with all of the tentative finesse one shows to a baby's cheek, and sighed sadly for all the wrong reasons.
Sometimes on her walk home she stops at the warehouse on Lakeshore Drive just to run her fingertips along its coat of peeling white paint, because sometimes on her walk home life just doesn't seem all that significant anymore.
His extended hand was like an invitation to which she wasn't sure whether she should RSVP, so when he asked "Are you coming or not?" the girl sighed in relief because words always made things more straightforward to her. At the same time, she was disappointed behind the enthusiastic "Yeah!", because part of her mind wanted the extended hand to mean so much more - but the beauty of words was that they crushed her silly insignificant thoughts, even the ones that were correct.
The saddest thing is that the girl never finds out those thoughts were correct; this girl lives her whole life and dies in her sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-six without ever realizing that the boy's extended hand meant exactly what she dreamed it could.
Almost as sad as that is that she could have been someone, could have been made special by love as love is apt to do. But she stayed herself her whole life, and that is a shame.
People are just people until they are loved.
Out of all the awful things that came out of the destruction from the bomb, the most awful of all was that everyone in that town was doing something important when it happened. Not one person was writing another poorly-researched essay on feudalism or watching the evening news and wishing they could feel any response to it. Nor was anyone researching the latest developments in stem-cell research or performing a heart surgery. But the woman taking her adopted dog on a walk down the street was handing several dollars to a homeless man on a whim and he could have used them to buy some food for the first time in days. So she was doing the most important thing in the entire world and so was every other person in the town, only none of those outlandishly incredible stories could ever be finished because that was the moment the bomb went off.
"Yes, yes, of course, I'll never leave you," she crooned, feet itching towards the threshold. It was simply inconvenient when his panic attacks made her late for work like this, she thought.
The sound of her whimpering as she begged the mirror to let her off her knees was never anywhere near as satisfying as the loud shatter that rebounds through the bathroom now. It seems to resonate right down through her chest and somehow pulls everything together, stitching tight the fragments of her mind in a way she hasn't been able to do in the last seven years. The girl catches a smirk - her own, surprisingly - on one of the shards on the floor and stands, flexing her bloody knees. She knows that the victory has come at the cost of pride - it's her actions that define her now, where her own mind failed - but that doesn't stop the flow of satisfaction coursing through her veins like quicksilver.
No longer is she a slave to the mirror, and never again will she be.
[[note: this next one is nonfiction]]
"So, tell me what you want for Christmas this year."
"Nothing." She pushed the word from her mouth naturally, as though it had always been waiting there.
He set the pen down and glanced up at her under raised eyebrows, searching his daughter's face for a coy smile or maybe even a hint of sarcasm. His search revealed nothing but a faraway feel in the droop of her eyelids that scared him somewhere inside. "There must be something. Tell me...your heart's desire!" His words had a flourish, as usual; but unlike usual, she abstained from a sarcastic response, instead staring at a blank spot on the wall behind him and thinking.
"My heart's desire?"
He nodded.
A moment passed, a blink, then she spoke. "A time machine."
Her father frowned and picked up the pen again to distract himself from the screen of apathy - he knew what was behind it; he'd seen her transformed, after all - and murmured, "I can't get you a time machine." Sorry died on his lips. There was no sorry about it. It was just a statement of fact. The girl's father, unlike herself, was capable of nonfeeling at times like these.
"That's fine," she whispered, getting up from the table and leaving her father to his work.
The floor is strewn with the dirty carcasses of well-worn jeans. It is her idea of home.
Grinning and curling up in the seat of the big soft armchair that attracted her to this apartment in the first place, she tugs down the sleeves of her overlarge sweatshirt and looks up innocently. He grins the way she knew he would and lightly scuffs his toe against the ragged carpet. Even though his smile is on her List of favorite things in the world, she watches his nose instead: the way it wrinkles lightly when he's happy reminds her of her sister. Of home. Sometimes she wishes she could bring herself to regret leaving.
Now isn't one of those times.
She scoots over so he can fit beside, and as the light fades from the dingy windows she smiles serenely and rests her head on his shoulder. (The way she feels when he leans his head on top of hers like this is also on her List of favorite things.)
Here goes - sorry if these suck :/
Manuel had often noticed that you could tell a lot about a person's mood and general attitude by looking at their handwriting. The observation crossed his mind once again as he stood before the small dry-erase board, squinting slightly to make out the words written there in streaky blue marker.
The girl with the long-strided walk who talked so fast the words blurred into strings of unfinished melodies never could bring herself to find much in others - probably because
Later on, after they'd faded into the smeared graphite backgrounds of teenager's minds, she'd swear that the rumors had bothered her. But that was only because it wasn't supposed to be nice the way people saw her when they looked at her for those few weeks, even if right afterwards their shifting bodies followed their eyes away because no one wanted to admit they believed the rumors.
The sand was prickling agony on her waxpaper skin but all she could think was were the others okay.
Staring at nothing in particular she rolled onto her stomach, weaving her fingers through dew-moistened strands of grass. "Do you really believe they'll stop fighting, though?" she questioned. "I mean, this is your parents we're talking about here..." Once again, he'd been letting unbridled dreams and futures seep into his voice, tying strands of them together into something that felt like the sunlight creeping onto both of their bodies as it slowly engulfed the field they'd escaped to. He tested his grey breath on the air, quietly watching it dissipate while she on the other hand was determined to fumble her fingers more tightly into the long wet grass as though it could tie the both of them to reason. "No, I guess I don't," he mused quietly.
She glanced up at his closed eyes and mourned the life that had already left his voice and the flash of hazel now covered by his lids. Grass in her fingers. Tangle, untangle. Exhale. The sun soaked both of them in a frail warmth best described as melancholy.
The day she squeezed shut her eyes at exactly 11:11 PM and found that the black on her retinas was no different, no more promising or thrilling than the monotony of white walls, was the day she realized she'd never find a soulmate.
The warmth when he slid his fingers into hers on an average April day was as nothing compared to the explosion of light and heat happening in her mind that was too immeasurable for outward manifestation.
The man felt as if he were constantly caught in a crossfire within his mind: between Judgement and the Fool. The fact of the matter was that the Fool was him, for letting himself be the middle instead of the whole. God only knew from where Judgement came.
Thea had time to think on life, squatting out in that field crawling with ticks, painting fences and endless dripping white. But she had nothing to think about, really; it was more that she wanted to think on life and the world, just never was the type to which those sort of musings occurred. Sometimes the paint dripped onto her knees.
Sometimes the paint dripped onto his arms and the boy was immediately thrown into a whirlwind of thought and feeling and everything else that is art - he was covered in paint, the watercolors spread down his arms and sent shivering tendrils across his body as alternate shades slipped up his legs, soaking him in thoughts he'd never be able to jot down in time. Lee's eyes snapped open and he stared tiredly at the white canvas of a paper, mind tired from another dreamlike flash of something he could never recall. He rubbed his forehead tiredly and set the brush down, determined to go get some real work done.
Sometimes he wondered why he even entertained the notion of trying to paint something. It was a silly idea, really. Lee was one of those average people, the kind that mean what they say but not what they think, the kind that tip exactly fifteen percent at a restaurant, the kind that hurry down the street with quick little steps and pretend not to feel the whirl of noise and color that envelops every single person who takes a breath of the world.
One week. It only took one week for the entire world to be blown off its metaphorical hinges at the moment when everything had begun to swing smoothly.
Often she wished she was the kind of person who changes the world just by being in it.
"Maybe," Katie said, smiling as she slid the once ice cream-laden spoon out of her mouth and jabbing it in his general direction, "maybe it's not what you do that makes you important, it's what other people think of what you do. For instance, right now I think it would make you a great person if you were to let me have a bite of that double-chocolate ice cream. I've almost finished mine anyway..."
He smiled blandly, suppressing the spark of hope in his mind that whispered maybe she knows exactly the meaning of what she is saying, and maybe she thinks about the world and the people just like you do and just maybe- The spark was extinguished, and with it the images of the two sitting on a dock just talking about the tides and what it all meant and what happiness was even though the act of doing so would show them. After all, Katie was just a teenage girl like every other teenage girl, and it was no fault of her own that she'd never stopped to wonder exactly what it meant to smile at someone you'd never met.
But she was nice enough.
Now remember- crackled the man with the deep voice through his transmitter, into the ear of someone who entirely did not care -we don't know what the re-re-rep- crackle -reperc-
The voice fizzled out. -Chhhhhh.
The crackling white noise was so beautiful and the lone man thought that maybe knowing it was beautiful made him unique; he'd never been unique before. (Most people would have said that being the first person to travel back in time made him unique, but he preferred the white-noise theory.)
No, no, no, no, no. This time she didn't need a reason.
We built that house with the crumbling planks and aspirations Daddy left us in the lumber yard that day the truck done hit him. Wasn't like he had it coming or nothing. Sometimes life just happens and all you do is pull your tired feet out to the lumber yard and stare at the wood that you just know has something left from his hands on it, like orange on a skyline even after the sun done set. You just know it's there and that's when you cry. But we done built that house anyway, and nothing ain't gonna change that, not the tornadoes or the forest fires. I don't believe in forest fires anyway. Nature don't do all that work for itself just to put it back in the ground, just like us building that house.
Then again, Daddy's in the ground now.
Each sideways rock of the boat makes him sick, and not sick in his stomach or throat; sick in his mind because every repetition of the ongoing motion strengthens the whispers in the back of his mind saying he can't run away from his problems forever. The oars pause tantalizingly just above the murky surface of the water, and as he stares at the reluctant drip of liquid from the paddle and the rippling circles that echo from every collision of a tiny drop in the vast ocean, he is reminded of the way his mother cries when his father yells at her so hard the sound backs her into a corner. The boy looks up, ahead, and resumes rowing. The water welcomes his oars back below the surface, whispering that that is where they should have been all along. (He is still not sure.)
When I feel lost, I think about being like sunshine. Sunshine never gets lost; it always seems to find its way to the right place.
Seeing him curled on his side, cheek against the naked cold of the floorboards, was more painful than the way her cheek stung with every slap he delivered. It changed her, seeing him there. Traces of reluctance, lingering in the face of this new pity (how was she to know that low self-worth and pity for her husband could be so interchangeable?), shuddered the usual flow of her delicate hands as they removed the tattered blanket from around her own drooped shoulders and draped it over his shivering body. She backed quietly out of the dark room, closed the door with all of the tentative finesse one shows to a baby's cheek, and sighed sadly for all the wrong reasons.
Sometimes on her walk home she stops at the warehouse on Lakeshore Drive just to run her fingertips along its coat of peeling white paint, because sometimes on her walk home life just doesn't seem all that significant anymore.
His extended hand was like an invitation to which she wasn't sure whether she should RSVP, so when he asked "Are you coming or not?" the girl sighed in relief because words always made things more straightforward to her. At the same time, she was disappointed behind the enthusiastic "Yeah!", because part of her mind wanted the extended hand to mean so much more - but the beauty of words was that they crushed her silly insignificant thoughts, even the ones that were correct.
The saddest thing is that the girl never finds out those thoughts were correct; this girl lives her whole life and dies in her sleep at the ripe old age of ninety-six without ever realizing that the boy's extended hand meant exactly what she dreamed it could.
Almost as sad as that is that she could have been someone, could have been made special by love as love is apt to do. But she stayed herself her whole life, and that is a shame.
People are just people until they are loved.
Out of all the awful things that came out of the destruction from the bomb, the most awful of all was that everyone in that town was doing something important when it happened. Not one person was writing another poorly-researched essay on feudalism or watching the evening news and wishing they could feel any response to it. Nor was anyone researching the latest developments in stem-cell research or performing a heart surgery. But the woman taking her adopted dog on a walk down the street was handing several dollars to a homeless man on a whim and he could have used them to buy some food for the first time in days. So she was doing the most important thing in the entire world and so was every other person in the town, only none of those outlandishly incredible stories could ever be finished because that was the moment the bomb went off.
"Yes, yes, of course, I'll never leave you," she crooned, feet itching towards the threshold. It was simply inconvenient when his panic attacks made her late for work like this, she thought.
The sound of her whimpering as she begged the mirror to let her off her knees was never anywhere near as satisfying as the loud shatter that rebounds through the bathroom now. It seems to resonate right down through her chest and somehow pulls everything together, stitching tight the fragments of her mind in a way she hasn't been able to do in the last seven years. The girl catches a smirk - her own, surprisingly - on one of the shards on the floor and stands, flexing her bloody knees. She knows that the victory has come at the cost of pride - it's her actions that define her now, where her own mind failed - but that doesn't stop the flow of satisfaction coursing through her veins like quicksilver.
No longer is she a slave to the mirror, and never again will she be.
[[note: this next one is nonfiction]]
"So, tell me what you want for Christmas this year."
"Nothing." She pushed the word from her mouth naturally, as though it had always been waiting there.
He set the pen down and glanced up at her under raised eyebrows, searching his daughter's face for a coy smile or maybe even a hint of sarcasm. His search revealed nothing but a faraway feel in the droop of her eyelids that scared him somewhere inside. "There must be something. Tell me...your heart's desire!" His words had a flourish, as usual; but unlike usual, she abstained from a sarcastic response, instead staring at a blank spot on the wall behind him and thinking.
"My heart's desire?"
He nodded.
A moment passed, a blink, then she spoke. "A time machine."
Her father frowned and picked up the pen again to distract himself from the screen of apathy - he knew what was behind it; he'd seen her transformed, after all - and murmured, "I can't get you a time machine." Sorry died on his lips. There was no sorry about it. It was just a statement of fact. The girl's father, unlike herself, was capable of nonfeeling at times like these.
"That's fine," she whispered, getting up from the table and leaving her father to his work.
The floor is strewn with the dirty carcasses of well-worn jeans. It is her idea of home.
Grinning and curling up in the seat of the big soft armchair that attracted her to this apartment in the first place, she tugs down the sleeves of her overlarge sweatshirt and looks up innocently. He grins the way she knew he would and lightly scuffs his toe against the ragged carpet. Even though his smile is on her List of favorite things in the world, she watches his nose instead: the way it wrinkles lightly when he's happy reminds her of her sister. Of home. Sometimes she wishes she could bring herself to regret leaving.
Now isn't one of those times.
She scoots over so he can fit beside, and as the light fades from the dingy windows she smiles serenely and rests her head on his shoulder. (The way she feels when he leans his head on top of hers like this is also on her List of favorite things.)
