Opening lines for stories never to be written…

Dave Whatt

Sep 1

But first...
Dulltown, UK: Today's electric eel is the one recklessly driving his scooter down the public footpath.
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The silver moon slowly slipped out of the steeple's cone. Bartholemew, the wise old owl, swirled his head round and looked behind. He saw a human, whose name was Clive, hanging by his finger-ends onto the lead church gutter; his eyes were wide, and he was gasping loudly. Suddenly, there was an internal, rattling, metallic, noise, it was rising up in volume, and the church clock struck 2 am. Clive...

The room was at the far end of a corridor on the third floor. The door was ajar. He went in.
'Ah, Mr Chuffles'?
'Yes.'
'Do sit down, I've been listening to some recordings of your football commentating.'
'Oh yes'?
'But, I'm afraid that, you are much too quiet.'
'Ah...'
'We require much more loud screaming and shouting, people do seem to like all that.'
'Aargh! Aargh! No, no! Aargh! Aargh! Aargh! Marvellous! Aargh! Aargh!'

Ramshackle Brad walked his hot horse, Jubal, off the trail, down a ragged slope, and approached the planked-over entrance to the Jimbo-Nutza Gold Mine. Suddenly, Jubal stood rock still, and refused to proceed any further. Brad looked all around... Jasper Sunkferry stood, behind a large boulder, fingering with sweaty hands, his shotgun. Two vultures flew in circles, in the bright, clear, blue sky, overhead.

The two drivers of the UFO managed to get the limping craft landed just on the dark-light rim of the Earth's moon. They spent some time shovelling element 115 into the gorge-trap of the light-motor; even under the moon's low gravity, their little bodies were soon tired. They crouched down and shared the smoking of an earth cigarette - they had picked up the habit in Roswell, in 1947. Suddenly, the sky was full of...

There is nothing as sad, as a billionaire sitting with his 1956 Fender Telecaster guitar, plugged into a 1960s Marshall amplifier, with two Celestion loudspeakers, suddenly realising that to play blues guitar well, you had to have, at least once in your life, been very poor. He stared down at the strings and sighed. An apparition appeared, in the dark corner of the room. It was a thin young black man, wearing cheap clothes, and...