The challenge: 100 first-page story hooks in sixty days. Just the first page (or less), and it has to hook the reader to want more.
Raise the difficulty: Nah. Not doing that tonight. These are just as they come off the keyboard.
Sixty-five:
The ratty painting in the faux-gold frame caused a stir the moment it was carried in. The couple to Hansen’s right tapped each other on the shoulder and pointed, whispering excitedly. Hansen squinted, took his glasses off, wiped them, put them on again. It still looked like the work of a six-year-old, possibly a blind one.
The auctioneer rapped his gavel. “Who’ll start the bidding at fifty thousand?”
Three hands went up. Hansen gave his head a shake, trying to restore the world to sanity.
“Eighty thousand!” said the man to his right.
What the hell. “Eighty-five!” Hansen said, and got a beatific nod from the auctioneer, which he ignored, because out of the corner of his eye, the couple to his right stiffened and sucked in a breath. Now they were looking at him. Excellent. There was a chance he could save their lives, after all.
Sixty-six:
Two shots rang out. My car slewed sideways at the first, corrected at the second, grinding and scraping. My tires. They hit my rear tires. Bastards!
Whoa, Cheney. Look out the window. No "they" there except a couple stoic saguaro.
Not bullets. Just heat, raw and hablano, on the shimmering pavement, eating away at those tires I'd driven a couple thousand miles too far.
I got Fernando stopped, my old, blue Chevy, and stepped out on the blacktop. Mirage waves fore and aft, and the baking midsummer convected right through my flip-flops and into the soles of my feet, as if I wore tissue slippers. Burnt rubber stench and acrid blue smoke coated the back of the Impala, riding four inches low.
I might have a spare. But not two.
P.S. This series is the brainchild of The New Creatives, which challenged us to create 100 of something as a way of attaining mastery of a particular art form (or beginning the process, more like). This is my attempt. #TNCmy100
This blog series loves the Minnow Support Project and all its lovely denizens.