The first sentence meme becomes the first page meme
There's a meme going around where you list the first sentences of your fictions. This is interesting to do, because it turns out I write ghost stories. I'll bet everyone else knew that about me, but of course I was blind to it. Also, I seem to love simple declaritive sentences, though I would have told you I was I dialog and gesture kind a gal.
I givw myself a little room and offer you a "I read the first page and decided to buy it" test.
My just-finished novel, Plain Kate.
A long time ago, in a market town by a looping river, there lived an orphan girl called Plain Kate.
She was called this because her father had introduced her to the new butcher, saying: “This is my beloved Katerina Svetlana, after her mother who died birthing her and God rest her soul, but I call her just plain Kate.” And the butcher, swinging a cleaver, answered: “That’s right enough, Plain Kate she is, plain as a stick.” A man who treasured humor, especially his own, the butcher repeated this to everyone. After that, she was called Plain Kate. But her father called her Kate My Star.
Plain Kate’s father Poitr was a woodcarver. He gave Kate a carving knife before most children might be given a spoon. She could whittle before she could walk. When she was still a child, she could carve a rose that strangers would stop to smell, a dragonfly that trout would rise to strike.
In that country, people thought that there was magic in a knife, and Plain Kate was very small the first time some one called her a witch.
My current project, still in its infancy, a YA novel entitled: The Teleportation of Gilbert Perez
On October 24, 1593, a young soldier named Gilbert Perez was found wandering dazed in the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City. On being told where he was, he insisted that he had just been on sentry duty in the governor’s palace in Manila - and indeed he was uniform of the Philippine regiment -- and offered the news that the governor had just been murdered.
He was arrested for desertion and on suspicion of witchcraft.
It’s in the history books. Look it up.
***
About all that’s left of me -- of the boy who staggered beneath the pyramids in the late afternoon sun, covered in blood, clutching his head - is the boots. They just don’t make boots like they used to. These days it’s all steel reinforced toes and orthopediac arch support. Give me cross-bound leather any day. And dye it red.
Blue jeans, now, blue jeans I’ll take.
And the name, Gil. I’ve tried to hold onto that.
A completed,unpublished novella, The Living and The Dead
So, right now I'm doing some drywalling for a couple of professor-types in Happy Hollow--where the yuppies settled to become middle-aged urban professionals. She's medicine and he's law, I think. Not the sort that usually hire a shaman, and they're both a bit embarrassed about it. Probably why they hired a sha-woman. At least they can be progressive in their desperation. They've got a hallway full of degrees and framed kiddie art, and a music room with a baby grand topped with photos of big brother and little sister.
Big brother answers the door when I arrive to do the evaluation. He looks me in the eye and shouts to Mom and Pop: "The witch is here." Just daring me to contradict him. Letter jacket, captain-of-the-football-team looks. But his eyes are terrified. I have lots of time to notice that as I look at him. Just look, you know--if they really think you're a witch, that’s all it takes. He doesn't quite shove me aside to make his exit.
Mom meets me at the gaping door. (You have to invite me in.) "Ms. Codrescu," she says, stumbling over it a little, "I'm sorry, Gerard's been--he's very upset."
I smile as graciously as I can. I do not say I understand. She doesn't hire me to understand. Anyway it's not big brother that's the problem--or my part of the problem. It's little sister.
A stranded half-completed novel, Sorrow's Knot: I know lots of people like this book, but I have put it aside for a while because in many ways it's the same story as Plain Kate, and I want to do something different.
On a cold day in April, they put the unbinder in a box.
The box was plain, with no widening for the shoulders as most coffins had. The wood was unknotted pine. The joints were done, not with pegs and bored holes, but with square, iron nails. The foursquare corners, the fine wood, and the costly nails were meant to keep the box straight, to keep the unbinder's magic from finding a twisting path to follow.
The unbinder knew. She'd caught the carpenter's boy, loosed the nine-knotted red thread that bound his silence. This they didn't learn till later, when they found the child at the wood edge, the knots of his hands undone, a prentice carpenter who would never turn an auger again.
So it was that when the people of Three Crows gathered to draw lots to see who would drag the unbinder from her home, they found her waiting. She stood on the boulder beside the creek, looking down at the box on its trestle. The light was the color of watered milk. The box was the color of new cheese. It gleamed.
And finally, a snip from a chapter I couldnt' help writing, from a book I won't name and probalby won't finish. But some of you might be pleased to see it.
“And are you of good family?” said Jacek, who doubted it.
“My father was the fiercest tom for ten leagues round, and my mother was the silken-furred favorite of the mayor’s daughter,” said the young man who lounged long-boned in the rickety chair across from of him. “I am practically nobility.”
“You want the guild of fools. It’s next door.”
“There’s a pastry shop next door. I stopped.”
“…good… family …” Jacek made a note of it, hopelessly.
“I do have the fee.” He made a magician’s pass and there was pile of silver on the table. “Is that not how it works?”