Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

Famous First Line

It was bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
I blinked. I had the habit since we moved to this little town of counting the chimes in the back of my mind while working in the house. "Thirteen?" I asked aloud to no one. I fished my phone out of my pocket. It blinked 13:00. I looked at the clock on the stove and it, too, was blinking 13:00 yet I had never set either to military time. In fact, it should only be noon. I had just put the kettle on to boil water for my husband's tea.

Shaking my head I looked out the dining room window which faced the street. It was quite, as it always was on my street. A late snow had fallen and except for the recently plowed street not a mark lay on the lawn. My eyes glanced at the bird feeders hanging in the crab apple tree. They were motionless, no birds in sight. Now that was something strange as well.

Confused I threw on a sweater and slipped into my boots without lacing them. I opened the front door and stood on my patio. The normal sounds of everyday life seemed to be holding their breath. I couldn't hear the cars on the main road a block away. I couldn't hear any birds in the trees or the gentle fall of snow off an overladen branch. I closed my front door and left the patio, scanning the area. My neighbor's dog always barked when he saw me leave the patio but there came no sound.

I couldn't see anything around me due to the houses and trees so feeling worried I went back into the house and climbed to the second story attic. There, an old stairway took me to a widow's walk on the flat part of our roof. Coming out I was facing west and saw nothing. I turned toward the north, the east, and finally the south.
And there it hung. I sucked in my breath and furrowed my brow. What in the world was it? It made no sound but it was moving. The silence about me was palatable by now. I could see people moving down the street, looking toward the south in bewilderment. My husband came sliding down the street in a hurry to get home. I called to him.

"Do you see it?" He called up as he came into the house. Momentarily he too was on the roof. "It just went by, silent like, and everything stopped. All the cars stopped."

"But the clocks are still working."

"Not really," he showed me his watch. It was blinking 13:00. "The bank clock is blinking too."

"What are we going to do?"

His mouth was grim. "First we need to find out what it is."

"And then?" I asked quietly as I started to realize we were probably dealing with non-terrestrials.

"And then," he said putting his arm around my shoulder, "we deal with it together. No matter what."

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