Orphan Openings: Suburban Edition

It was with a certain irony that Samantha recalled complaining about suburbia, "You can't imagine a real drama taking place in this neighborhood, only genre fiction: mystery, romance or farce," as she stood over the corpse of her husband's lover, wondering where in this hideous McMansion she could hide a bloody knife.

Orphan Openings: Lifechanging Incident Edition

Journalists did not, unfortunately, have the insight of biographers. The headlines would read, "Senator Williams attends funeral of mentor's son." Perhaps some reporter, who had done his homework, would add the prefix, "In gesture of forgiveness." Few would remember that August day back in 1982 as anything but one on which a misfortune proved to have a silver lining for the young George Williams: Senator Jackson standing by his hospital bed saying, "Where are you going to college in the fall, son?"

"Stanford, sir." And with the sudden intuition that at this moment humility would be rewarded. "Well... Maybe. I'm on the wait list."

The older man's eyes lit up. "Wait list? Let me make a call, son. I think I might just be able to do something about that. And about this... accident. Believe me, son, my boy and his friends are going to be in a world of trouble as it is. Trevor's appointment to West Point has already been withdrawn. There'll be justice. But I think you understand... That this was stupid boys in a car with beer. They weren't singling you out," the words said with deliberate slowness, "in any way." A pause. "Were they son?"

"No, sir. I don't guess they were."

Had they? Hadn't they? Had he?

Though the images of that day -- the car in the afternoon sun, the sounds of the big block engine revving, the shouts of, "We're gonna get you this time, Williams!" -- could be readily summoned to his mind even now, he could not say why he had darted right instead of left. Had he, at that instant, understood the full implications of a white senator's son running down a black teenager three months before an election? Surely not.

And yet the one thing he was clear about, as he saw again the sun glinting off black enamel paint and chrome in that instant before being hit, was that he'd dodged the wrong way intentionally -- and that as he'd done so and heard the startled screams from the car, going too fast to stop, he'd sensed that he had won.

Orphan Openings: Old Gods Edition

"It's only a chicken."

"Take a chicken to the butcher's and have it killed, and no one can possibly object. But if you sacrifice a chicken in the temple of Mars, you commit a grave sin against Christ."

Marcus Tullius's broad face was set in a stubborn expression, his arms folded across his chest. "If I had known about Christ when I was stationed on the Rhine I would have prayed to him. But at the time, didn't know him. So I swore to Mars that if I survived the battle on the bridge I would make him an offering each year on the anniversary of the battle for ten years. He kept his side of the bargain, and here I stand. I can't believe Christ would want me to break my oath."

"But surely an oath to a false god can be no oath at all. Satan has no good in him, and you can owe him nothing."

"I didn't promise anything to Satan, I promised a chicken to Mars. Mars isn't Satan, though I understand now that he's not God either. And I don't see how my oath to Mars is voided just because he's not the sort I took him for at the time."

Orphan Openings: Housework Edition

Women scope out other women's housework like men scope out women, and so when the children opened the door opened to her knock, the neighbor involuntarily glanced around the living room. Scraps of paper lay drifted like snow across the floor; toys radiated out from the area around the playpen; books were piled high on tables, on chests, on shelves, on the floor. The children, though dressed, had the kind of fine hair that always slips out of barrettes and clips and elastics. The place was not exactly filthy, but one would be hard-pressed to call it clean. The neighbor, having children herself, made allowances.

The lady of the house came jogging down the stairs with her baby on her hip, pausing to kick a pair of old tights under the desk. The neighbor explained her plight: the air conditioner was being repaired; could the kids spend the morning over here? The lady of the house was amenable; the kids charged shrieking upstairs to form a new club and exclude the little brother. The neighbor stepped out into the heat, torn between relief that someone else's house was messier than hers, and a twinge of guilt reminding her that at least she'd known in advance that someone was going to knock on her door this morning.

Orphan Openings: High School Vampire Edition

Amber stood staring at her mirror and wishing that she could see herself in it. She was certain that the bite mark on her neck, especially against her increasingly pale complexion, must be garishly obvious. She could feel a smooth, tender, barely healed patch of skin (if one could speak of "healing" with the undead) and in her imagination it was a livid, red, scarred patch. But with her inability either to cast a reflection or to twist her head into whatever contorted position would be necessary to see her own neck, she could not be sure, and it vexed her terribly.

A scarf, perhaps. But in the summer?

Perhaps this, she thought, explained the regrettable fashion instincts of female vampires in TV shows and movies -- a large, metal-studded dog collar would cover the problem, but changing her entire fashion ethic merely because she was now a vampire seemed horribly unfair.

Orphan Openings: Trauma Team Edition

Though hardened by fifteen years service on the Fruit & Vegetable Clean-up Team, Kurt felt a tightening in his gut as cleanup vehicles flashing lights played across the carnage: some three dozen watermelons fallen off a pickup truck onto I-35. Broken rinds littered the road, the lights of the emergency vehicles making them first more livid red, then purplish blue. Pulp and seeds were thrown every which way, with tire treads running through the carnage and spattering it up on the guard rails.

"You expect to see this kind of thing in a war," Kurt told the reporter from News Nine, trying to assume the tough but sensitive man who's seen too much demeanor that would lead her to call him later. "But this is no war. This is right here at home. Seeds and pulp thrown all over like an artillery barrage hit an infantry battalion."

One of the other men dropped an armful of broken rinds into the cleanup bin, touched the crucifix hanging around his neck, and murmured a prayer.

Kurt shook his head. "How can you believe in God when you see things like this?"

Orphan Openings: Apocalypse Edition

For nearly twenty years, Chris Mortimer had been predicting that civilization would collapse, and so it was a with a certain grim satisfaction that he watched as it did -- after a fashion. When the peak oil theory surprised even its own firmest proponents by being true beyond their wildest dreams, Chris watched the rioting crowds after the collapse of the Saudi monarchy, the Russian federation and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, and wondered how much longer television would be broadcasting.

When gas prices jumped from $3 to $20/gallon over the course of a month, and the electric company announced that it would only be providing power from 10am to 4pm, he got his hand-cranking grain mill and solar oven out of the spare bedroom and took inventory of the canned goods and bottled water. He was prepared. They were not. Survival of the fittest.

Somewhere along the way, however, the event he had long anticipated deviated from the mental script he had crafted for it. Where he had pictured a need for rugged individualists who knew how to hunt and gather and perhaps eventually farm and ranch, others with skills he had despised were, maddeningly, well equipped to thrive in the new world.

Most maddening of all was that his boss, whom he had at first envisioned begging at his door for canned goods and solar battery chargers, had turned a penchant for "networking" into a trading empire that encompassed control of key aqueducts, solar trading schooners, and the southern overland trade route to California. That this short, nervous-looking man who doubtless did not know three different ways of starting a fire without matches could, in this new world, say grandly to people, "Would you step into my office? I have air conditioning," made Chris feel as if the collapse of civilization was simply not all it was cracked up to be.

Orphan Openings: NFP edition

"Come on upstairs with me," she said dryly.

Orphan Openings: Corporate Edition

The human mind is a creature not easily deflected from its current path by a change in circumstances, especially one that takes place in such a short period of time that one can hardly convince oneself that it could be truly consequential. It had been a mere twenty minutes between when Sarah's work was interrupted by a young man who said, "Sarah Wolfe? Could you come down to see the director in Conference Room A for a moment," and the present moment in which she found herself walking across the parking lot with a folder under her arm marked "Severance: Wolfe, Sarah".

That such a brief and low-voicedly polite exchange -- The company is grateful for your twelve years of service. This bears no reflection upon your performance. If you will sign this release, the company would like to offer you eight weeks severance and two pre-paid sessions with a certified career coach. -- could mark a major turning point in her life seemed impossible.

Her mind continued on the track from which it had been so abruptly distracted. Jeff in distribution would have to be called about those processors. Sales would have to be informed of the lead time change. Too much of the morning had been spend on cleaning up messes that could easily have been avoided -- she would need to craft a new PowerPoint about the detailing the standard operating procedures for commodity procurement and emphasizing the importance of obeying them.

And yet little jarring details stood out as she crossed the parking lot. The light was wrong, neither lunch-time glare nor the sinking sun a the end of the day, but bright mid-morning. The rows of cars stretched on unbroken and silent. The lot was full, everyone at their desks. And the street beyond was quiet. All these betokened that the natural order, long reliable, had suddenly been thrown off its course. And her parked three-series, when she reached it, had changed form -- looking no longer like a badge of success but rather like a payment due on the twentieth of every month.

Orphan Openings: A Search for the Worst Pun

Looking back on the years she'd spent with Alastair, it was hard for Melanie to feel regret. At first the only basis for their relationship had been the similarity of their dietary restrictions; but with time, affection and opportunity, even a small similarity can be built into a substantial edifice in Aphrodite's honor. Even with her painful awareness of what had followed, Melanie could not help but see their love as having been a many-Splenda-ed thing.

Orphan Openings: Cooking Edition

[It's time for a new feature on DarwinCatholic, and since we're much better at starting things than finishing them, the task of writing openings for fiction that we have no intention of completing seems an obvious one for us. We can promise many more, but for the quality improving, I cannot speak.]

Working in the hot kitchen often made Gertrude cross, and so it was with her stores of patience already depleted that she discovered that her husband, so often obstinate in life, refused to fit into the cauldron unless completely deboned and sectioned.