The first paragraph

[Cagivagurl]

My gaze could be described as nothing more less than Desire. I looked on enthralled and intensely invested.
The young girl danced sensuously on the footpath, her body swaying seductively. Her hips undulating like rolling waves splashing, lapping upon a golden beach.
The guitar in her hands shone, glistening in the midday sun. She writhed to the sounds of her personal rhythm. her fingers danced, sliding up and down the fret board
Her head back, eyes closed. Her voice echoing like melting caramel on ice cream.
Lost in her song, she drew us into her magical world. My heart beat in time, my foot tapped, and my hips, much like hers, started top sway.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I run a talon through my feathers and nervously pat them down as they anxiously crest. Big date tonight. That hunky utahraptor from the company picnic has been chatting me up for a couple weeks, but I think I've done a good job playing it cool — the blasé archaeopteryx who could stop a charging triceratops at twenty paces with a smouldering grin of the snout. But now that it's almost time, I'm all nervous giggles, hissy awkward squawks, and my damn tail won't stop fidgeting and bumping against every damn thing in the apartment, making me fix the muss and get my plumage under control. Gods, I hope he finds it charming, doesn't realize what a dorky little dino bird I am. Or that he does, and it makes him want to take me in his lanky-ass arms and run his claws through my feathers until I'm a puddle begging him to put a clutch in me. Oh boy, don't bring up laying eggs, don't bring up laying eggs... This can't be Terry all over again.

---

From my upcoming tell-all, Diary of a Clutch Slut

 

[Rob_Royale]

Muriel opened her front curtains and looked across the street. She was surprised to still see four cars parked there. The previous day she had watched a forty-ish woman and three men move in there. The men had ranged from twenty-five to forty and based on their varied sizes and skin tones, the odds that they were related was low. She had assumed it was a mature couple and some friends. When the garage door began opening, she paused and watched her new neighbor and the oldest man of the three walk out and kiss affectionately. The woman was still in a nightie and the man was dressed for work. As he walked towards a car, a second man, a tall mixed-race fellow walked out and the scene repeated itself. As the second man walked towards his car, a third, the stocky ginger, dressed in just a pair of boxers, appeared at the door and pushed the button to close the garage door as the older woman walked back toward him. Oh, I'm gonna have to meet these folks, Muriel thought.

Okay, technically this should have been two paragraphs. Sue me.

 

[StillStunned]

It's hard to say for certain, but I'll try. When it started. When it ended. Why. All those moments that meld together over time. Years of memories, some real and some imagined, born from thoughts, hopes, misunderstandings. Happiness and letdowns. A confusion of feelings that make up the rise and fall of a marriage. The one constant in my life that, looking back, shifts like sand under my probing touch.

 

[BladeSeanchai]

I leaned back from my workstation, every vertebra in my back was protesting my movement or lack thereof. My neck was as stiff as high-tension wire. My phone blinked at me: 23:25, way too late to call my massage therapist. Too late for anything but surrender, a bath, a glass of Duckhorn and the need to start over again.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

This was the best time of the year, when spring turned on the heat and finally let loose the free spirit of summer. The walk back to the office was like watching a fashion runway.
My eyes were treated to the delectable sight of beautiful women sashaying in their short skirts and what my eyes could never get enough of, gorgeous ladies sauntering in their tight jeans and revealing tops, stretching modesty to tan their skin in the warm sun. Summer girls, I dubbed them in my mind and ogled them unabashedly.

 

[Lifestyle66]

There was a time when I was younger, when jealousy or an egotistical need to prove myself would have driven me to rage if my wife even looked at another man, and she knew it. Any suggestion that she found another man attractive would have me quickly taking her to quench her desire with my own. But with age came the wear and tear on my body which I can no longer ignore. It’s tough to maintain an erection with the interruption of a sudden shooting pain in my knee or lower back. Now wary of those pending mood killers my sexual needs are declining, and I wonder what she’s really thinking or hesitating to say out loud. Are any unspoken desires now a kindness out of love for someone who can’t be repaired?

 

[yowser]

"Destiny" is not a word to be considered lightly. Her skirt was the sort you might expect to see in the tropics, maybe Cancun during spring break – long, flowing, pastel blue, and most enchantingly draped on her slender hips. But this was the Polish American Club in Farthing, Minnesota, in the middle of a long dismal winter, snowmobiles parked in the drifts out front. The "destiny" word rumbled around in my suddenly alert brain. The bottom of her pint glass had about an inch left. I wandered over, trying, but not succeeding, in summoning a dark confident voice. Instead my words escaped softly. "What are you drinking?" Her grey eyes met mine. "Pabst Blue Ribbon" was her response, which of course was the only beer on tap anyway.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I can't believe my daughter would be this stupid, Donna thought. What a fucking moron. She watched her daughter packing her bags under the watchful gaze of her former boyfriend. The rich, handsome one that the stupid girl had stolen from. The one that was letting his girlfriend's mother stay in the pool house rent-fucking-free. With a deep sigh, Donna reached up and unbuttoned the top three buttons on her blouse, revealing a country-mile of cleavage. She turned to the younger man. "Surely, you and I can come to some arrangement."

 

[LadyLovelace]

As I clocked in for my shift at the bar, I wondered if anyone interesting was going to stumble into my life today. Unfortunately, it was the height of summer, the off season, so that seemed unlikely. I'd seen only the same three bored grad students for the last two Fridays running. Maybe I'd catch some interesting gossip from them tonight, who was I kidding, they were all too straight laced.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

I envisioned ever more elaborate experimental setups to study the behaviour of people in unusual circumstances. I was so enamoured by conjuring up scenarios to take people to extremes that I hardly noticed that it was only she who remained when it grew dark outside, and the cafeteria wanted to close.

"Your place or mine?” She asked when we stood outside. What she wore, or how she looked? - Please don't ask me, as I can't remember. All that mattered was that she was boldly bridging the chasm of my shyness. On her neck was one of those chokers with a ring in front that looked like a dog's collar. The ring indicated submissiveness - I knew that much, the black leather and the spikes around it looked anything but submissive.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Too much blood. I was a goner. A mile dragging myself over dunes of snow, leaving a serpentine trail of crimson in my wake. I clawed forward another inch. Tried another. Collapsed. I was done. Too weak. Too tired to be scared, anymore. I flopped onto my back and shaded my eyes against the midnight sun to see my pursuer — that majestic demon clad in white. That thrice-damned polar bear.

 

[consistentlyrepudiated]

I woke with a strange feeling. Everything looked sharper and more vivid than usual. Lying on my side, I first saw my wife's face. I'd seen her like that countless times, but the sight never failed to amaze me. Even in her sleep, she looked gorgeous.

She stirred, opened her eyes, and yawned. She turned her head toward me and, after a few blinks, our eyes met. I tried to say, “Good morning,” but no sound came out. She studied me for a moment. Then her expression changed completely, and she let out a bloodcurdling scream.

 

[BellaBestia]

“It was a dark and stormy night” he intoned with all the seriousness of a late-night television host of B-grade creature features. Jesus fucking Christ, Mira thought to herself as she felt her upper lip curl involuntarily into a sneer. She mentally kicked herself for agreeing to meet with this ‘fellow auteur’ and give her opinion on his current work in progress. This reedy, goateed, pork pie-hatted, vintaged William Burroughs wannabe sat across from her, lips moving and forming words she’d be goddammed if she would willingly listen to. She smoothly shifted her sneer into a semblance of a sweet encouraging smile when he looked up from the page. She hoped he fucked better than he wrote.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Just for shits and giggles, I played around with an alternative version of my Mary and Alvin series, as told by one of the supporting characters, their grand daughter Bonita.

My name is Bonita Maria Ortega-Faulkner. Sometimes I say Faulkner-Ortega, just because I feel like it, and I like to see the look on people’s faces when they can’t decide whether they are confused, or I am. My second cousin Mary has been telling me that I am the last link to the family’s past. She says that she wants her kids to know where they came from. I guess she figures that because I am going to turn one hundred years old in a few weeks, I won’t be here much longer. She says, “Nobody lives forever,” and I tell her, “Well, somebody has to be the first.”

I just don't think I'm ever going to get around to a revision of a 350k word novel.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I had to write some first paragraph to something. But what? Maybe I could write a first paragraph about writing a first paragraph. But then, wouldn't that mean that version of me was writing the first paragraph, and that version's version was writing the first paragraph, and that version's version's version... Oh shit. This is 1999 all over again...

 

[StillStunned]

Even after seventeen years, Baz couldn't help but philosophise about the walk home. Going up Hope Street should be a positive experience, he reasoned, while going down Hope Street sounded like disappointment. But up Hope Street was uphill, and a steep climb. Did this signify what hard work it was to remain hopeful? It was a question that always came to him as he toiled past the Indian takeout that marked the halfway point. And it meant, by extension, that losing hope was easy, as if its natural state was to go downhill like water.

 

[joy_of_cooking]

I first met my love in the early days of Christianity. I was a baby succubus,
barely fifty years old. I had spent most of the summer with a band of mountain
trolls in the Fjords of Endless Noon, doing my damnedest (ha) to sell them on a
mutually beneficial relationship with The Prince of Night.

The other team took a more direct approach. They sent an angel.

I was on my hands and knees when she came. I had been building up the fire and
making sure some of the males got a good look at my rear as I bent and reached.

She landed in that fire, with a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder and an
explosion of cinders and coals.

I'm told that if you count how many times your heart beats between the lightning
and the angel, and between the angel and the thunder, you can figure out how fast
the angel was moving. Something about the relative speed of light and sound.

What I can tell you is that your heart does not beat at the same rate before and
after you understand that you are being visited by a member of the heavenly
host. Something about the physiological effects of stark terror.

I fell flat on my face and pissed myself. Perhaps that is how I lived to tell
this tale. Accurately dismissing me as of no concern, she stepped over my
prostrate form and set methodically to slaughtering everything foolish enough to
move.

 

[anthrodisiac]

When someone tells you to run, obviously, you should never listen to them without pause, with all the terror and lack of thought of a common finch. After all, who is this person? Why would they issue such an imperative? To a noble, no less! And if said person is of low birth, why, it is laughable that one would even conceive of paying any heed to such a caste of people, who, as we all know, are barely more intelligent than cattle. One most always remember that servants are a supertitious lot, who believe every little quake and puff of smoke is a sign from the gods of impending doom. There are those of us, learned in our beliefs, who understand the natural world is not always at the whims of gods, but the forces of the world, which can easily be understood should one bother to learn one's letters. It is with this understanding that, certainly, tales of Vulcan and his firey mountains should be considered naught but the most laughable of-

----
Scrap of parchment found clutched in the fist of a Pompeii victim.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

A while ago someone had posted a story idea that led to this paragraph:

I wandered up the cobbled streets of beacon hill to my apartment in a gentrified 19th century mansion where I entertained my clients, which meant I allowed them to entertain my clit while being spat on. The clacks of my daggerlike golden stilettos blocked the sound of his sneakers as he was always one corner behind me, again. I walked on as I if were unaware since I already knew who he was. I had circled him and learned long before the police that he was the one who had raped several high class prostitutes and killed them to cover his tracks. I was to be his next victim. This was going to be an entertaining hunt. He did not know I had the dark triangle tattooed on my back. I embraced that I had no emotions towards other people's suffering, I always came out on top producing it for my own pleasure, and I didn't care about their fate or whether their bodies would ever be found.

Playing with him would be fun. He was brutal, street smart, full of hatred towards women as I was towards men. A worthy foe for a fight until death, which I might even lose, which was the one aspect that made my blood boil.

I unlocked the gates to my place and - accidentally - left them open.

 

[Rollinbones]

She was sex on wheels, but she had no brakes. She was five foot four of jet-black hair, regrets and bad mistakes. But man, she was born to ride.