The pale painted boards of the deckchair hut shone through the scribbles of snow falling on the shore. Something else showed through too, something grey, drifting in and out in the surf.
Only the sea crows saw it.
The Christmas trees leaning from the buildings became brighter, the amusement arcade music became louder and a single dog walker stopped and peered towards the unfamiliar object caught in the tide.
She paused, and eventually, her dog at her side, walked over the shingle and stopped. She examined the thing at her feet.
She’d taken it for a bird, but it wasn’t a bird.
What she’d thought were seagull wings was a grey hoody with white sleeves.
And, lit by the pretty lamps behind her, was a body, drifting in and out, in and out.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ Cruel Winter With You by Ali Hazelwood
In an ideal world, Marc Compton would be acting like a total dick.
I’m not asking for much. Some gloating, maybe. Obnoxiously raised eyebrows. A sneered, “Well, well, well. Look who showed up unannounced on Christmas Eve.” I’m not picky: any of the above would make me feel exponentially better about the situation.
But no. Marc opens the front door in a blaze of towering midwestern good looks, and when I look up at his handsome face, all I can detect is genuine surprise to find me standing on his parents’ snow-covered porch.
Surprise that quickly morphs into worry.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ The Ghost of Spruce Point by Nancy Tandon
The bloodred moon casts an eerie glow over the bay. Fog lifts off the ocean and swirls around us as the lapping splash of the incoming tide sways the thick wooden posts of the dock beneath me. If there is a perfect time and place for a ghost story, I’m sitting smack-dab in the middle of it.
“Tell it again, Dad. Please tell it!”
Dad steps back from the telescope and sits next to me, our legs dangling above the dark, churning water. He tightens the hood of his parka against the late-May chill and takes a big sniff of the air. I do the same. If one of the fancy tourist shops in Bar Harbour ever made a candle called Spruce Point, it would smell like this: a mix of spruce, pine, and fir trees layered with the heavy scent of briny ocean.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ I Found the Boogeyman Under My Brother’s Crib by Ben Farthing
I heard my little brother cry in his nursery. A stranger laughed in response.
I leapt out of bed without thinking.
Exhaustion made trusting my senses tricky. But if I’d really heard that vindictive laugh then I needed to get to my brother.
I pulled open my door, aware that I was sacrificing at least a few minutes of precious sleep I was allowed.
Bennet cried again. He was almost two, and I’d spent so much time with him this summer break that I instantly recognized this was a cry of either fear or pain. At least, I thought I did. It was so hard to be sure of assumptions like this that I had to double-check before I acted on them. Otherwise, I’d end up with another lecture from Mom and Dad about Making Good Decisions. The hallway was dark except for a sliver of light from a nightlight in the hall bathroom. Mom and Dad’s door was cracked.
It was even darker in there.
I rushed to Bennet’s room, between mine and my parents’.
Through his cries, I listened to hear that stranger’s laugh again. It had been made, raspy, and unkind. The sound of a bully closing in on prey.
Had I dreamed it?
It was hard to tell, lately.
I flipped Bennet’s light switch, connected to an outlet which powered a floor lamp. The lamp didn’t turn on.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ The Hitchcock Hotel by Stephanie Wrobel
The crow waits until the guilty one disappears; then he flies down the hallway. How he wound up in this part of the hotel, he cannot recall. He has no memory of the tartan wallpaper, the dim flicker of the sconces. He does not know which humans lie behind which doors.
He knows only to obey the scream of his instincts. Leave.
Now.
Go.
Danger hangs over this place like a blackening cloud. The people inside are not to be trusted. The crow rests for a moment on the horse hanging from the sky. He dares not wait long. Soon they will all rise again. Soon there will be much commotion.
He did not catch more than a glimpse, but a glimpse was all he needed. Such an ugly shape the limbs made, the neck contorted. The thing hardly looked human at all.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ Sleep Tight by J.H. Markert
The Boy coloured so hard the black crayon snapped in half in his hand.
This wasn’t uncommon with that color.
He remembered the darkness around those eyes was thick, and only the right amount of pressure could reproduce that deep, dark black.
From his seat on the hardwood floor, he pulled another black crayon from the bucket beside him and resumed coloring, furiously, hurriedly – he could hear that Mother was on her way up.
He’d done something bad, and she was mad.
And when she was mad, she got mean. But he couldn’t remember what he’d done this time.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ Dearest by Jacquie Walters
When Flora wakes, her mouth is so dry that the inside of her cheeks are stuck to her teeth. She carefully opens her jaw – POP!- and the hinge releases with a jolt of apin to her left ear. Her legs and torso are heavy, weighed down.
blankets
these are blankets
Flora is in bed.
She lies still, eyes darting for answers on the ceiling, and wills her brain to catch up to the present moment. When she tries to sit, her left shoulder screams a pulsing protest. She rolls onto her right side and pushes herself up with her palms. The room spins, and she closes her eyes to avoid hurling, though it might be inevitable given the hangover-like headache that pounds at her temples and tugs at her raw throat.
How did she get in this bed? She tries to remember. Needs to remember.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ William by Mason Coile
Every morning felt like Henry’s first. Perhaps it came from working with code so much, the detailed sequence of inconsequential numbers that resulted in something coming to life, something that had never existed before. Perhaps it was because his aversion to leaving the house had grown so severe that he’d long given up trying, so he was left with only one wonder within his reach. Lily. The woman sitting in the chair next to his bed, smiling in the lovely, vaguely haunted way he sometimes sees as a side effect of overwhelming love, and other times as merely pity.
“That was a bad one,” she says.
“Was I snoring?”
“You were nightmaring. You woke up like I fired a gun next to your ear.”
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ Two Sides to Every Murder by Danielle Valentine
Gia North’s lungs ached as she tore through the trees. The woods pushed in around her, hiding the cabins and Camp Lost Lake lodge from view. It felt like she was in the middle of nowhere.
It’s not too late, it can’t be too late, she thought willing her short legs to move faster. The muscles in her calves screamed.
She lept from the grass to the hard, packed earth of the trail–
Her foot slipped out from beneath her. She felt a sharp crack through her chin and tasted dirt in her mouth before she even realized she’d fallen.
It was the worst possible time to trip.
First Chapter First Paragraph Thursday Intros ~ Girls Who Burn by M.K. Pagano
The last time I saw my sister alive, I told her I didn’t love her anymore.
I didn’t say it in those exact words. I didn’t say, “Fiona – I don’t love you anymore.” What I actually said, as she was walking away from me, was “You’re no better than Mom.”
But in our family, that means the same thing.
I’m thinking about that again, the parade a blur in the background, Fiona’s blond hair flying around her shoulders as she spun off and headed towards the woods. To the ravine.
