At any rate, I was looking through some old work, and it occurred to me how important first paragraphs are in a short story. Here are some that still work for me.
The Thing at 34-03-15N, 118-15-23W
I CAN HEAR THEM out there. They are, to ignore the language's index of elasticity, dancing. And they are dancing with each other, I am asked to believe, although the fact of the matter is that when I left the patio they were exhibiting their individual spasms of ecstasy over a separation of six to twelve feet. Now I ask you: is that dancing together? I will admit that they are — for lack of a better word — involved. Yes, they are involved. They are so involved that they neglect to admire the new patio, the excuse for this party in the first place. I finished it last Wednesday, designing and building the whole thing myself, setting it into a three-colored form of a navigator's compass, at the center of which a brass plate marks the exact location of the patio: 34 degrees, 3 minutes, 15 seconds north, 118 degrees, 15 minutes, 23 seconds west. Having been a navigator in the Navy during the war, I made that measurement precisely. Myself.
*
Presenting the Annual Interracial Pig Roast
GROOVY, THE WHOLE SCENE, even better than his short-timer's party in Baumholder, Germany, a year ago: the roast pig, which Tee was still carving, his large black hands glistening with fat; the colossal supply of beer and booze, which Phil was serving from behind the portable bar in the back comer of the yard (grass was verboten, Tee being straight); the huge happy crowd, predominantly black, predominantly middle-aged, incredibly friendly; and the sounds, out of sight, of the jazz combo on the patio; and the dancing, which Roy dug most of all, that sensuous and rhythmic elasticity which was theirs alone (man, how they could dance!). In line for seconds, Roy watched and saw the obvious: only a spade could dance like a spade. Witness whitey who was trying now and being made a fool of by the black girl who was his partner. Hours earlier Roy had witnessed whitey's arrival in black turtleneck, bellbottoms and shades, whitey chanting Skin, baby! to every black man within reach. When Roy's turn came, whitey merely had nodded, as one white man to another, and Roy had turned and walked away.
*
The Man Who Shot Elvis
SO HERE HE WAS, in the casino with hundreds of other tourists, waiting in line two hours before showtime, bored, drink in hand, watching his wife shoot craps. Mary was losing and angry but all the more striking for it, her blue eyes intense as she shook the dice in a fist near one ear. She brushed aside a strand of blonde hair that had fallen across her face, still shaking the dice, softly demanding of them five, five — she reminded him of a mad Scandinavian queen who had one roll to win or lose a kingdom. For a moment, he looked away, attracted by the ringing payoff of a slot machine, and when he turned back the blonde queen was coming toward him, dethroned and pouting.
*
Lessons from the Cockroach Graveyard
THE OLDER I GET, the less I understand women. Their sense of cause and effect, for example. I am opening a beer in the kitchen, prior to preparing tonight's stir-fry, and as I do a cockroach appears on the wall over the faucet. I see it, I probably even see it first, but for the moment I do nothing because the critter is still too close to the faucet to ambush — one move by me and it'll be scurrying into the plumbing. I know this because I've tried it before: cause and effect. And Maggie was there when I tried it, too, screaming as if she'd just spotted a ten-pound rat.
*
The Wallowa County Who-Who
No one knows when the first spotted owls alighted in Wallowa County. Normally the endangered species preferred the milder climate of old growth forests in Oregon’s coastal range to rugged mountains more fit for a goat, where winter could last three-fourths of the year. Their arrival was not expected, and by the time the owls were discovered in Joseph, they were already there in great and public numbers.
*
The Teacher
If I were a menial clerk, to whose gloom a Dostoevski or a Melville could give cosmic importance, then readily would I win your understanding. We are in an age the sensibilities of which are riveted to the absurd and what, after all, is more absurd than filling a ledger book with numerals, sorting out dead letters, filing away last year's purchase orders or pulling a lever in a factory? If I made my livelihood in so dreary a fashion, you would accept my gloom as being inevitable, deem it significant, and find in it an occasional metaphor for your own misgivings, whatever your employment; you would offer me understanding, empathy, sympathy, at least something more meaningful than what you now offer me, which is flattering but undue praise, or what usually is called "a good press." Were my life filled with physical danger and pain, were mine the life of a hunter, a mountain climber or a boxer, I then would be judged to be a kind of existential hero, for my temperament is naturally introspective. Would that I were a revolutionary, for Christ's sake! But in fact I am a high school teacher, a teacher of the physical sciences, and though compliments, even admiration, periodically come my way, they are presented not with understanding nor with respect but out of social necessity, in precisely the way one might admire the wife of an alcoholic: what she puts up with -- it's heroic!
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