Nineteen Opening Lines

My teacher at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute swore that the most important writing prompt anyone could do was to sit down and write ten opening sentences to different stories. I’ve probably disappointed her by only doing it twice so far, but I think they’ve turned out well enough to post. One of the twenty is missing because I just kept on going after the first sentence and it ended up a 10,000 word story that I’m not quite sure what to do with.

1. Elizabeth and I used to hang out by the river at the edge of the graveyard and eat the blueberries that grew on the banks and wonder if eating fruit that grew from decaying bodies technically meant we were cannibals.
2. Since Jennifer had been one of the five people who built the church, she figured she was entitled to destroy at least twenty percent of it guilt-free.
3. I won’t say that everything I’m about to write is true, because these painfully bright flashbulb memories never follow reality all that closely. But everything I’m about to write is something I remember, and every memory of the past two weeks deserves to find its way to paper somehow.
4. The unauthorized pioneer must be lost somewhere in the fire at the Office of Defaced Students. (Fun fact: I came up with that one by re-arranging the words on my P-card.)
5. I don’t see anyone blames anyone for anything they did as a kid, it’s like getting arrested for a crime someone who happens to have the same name as you did, someone who died a long time ago. But that’s the way this society works, so okay, I’ll apologize.
6. “Unless you have had very unfortunate childhoods,” said Ooida, “up until now the only gunplay any of you have seen has been in movies, where there is one good person who is very skilled at shooting and about two hundred bad people who are so unskilled at shooting that they won’t remain people long enough to see the credits. And, unless you have had a very fortunate understanding of humility bashed into you, I bet most of you are thinking that you must be that one good person.”
7. Everything Armando needed for survival, food and water and protection and a place to hide, he found in abandoned P-card with the picture just rubbed off enough to resemble him.
8. With nothing but a couple characters, colored blue and underlined, people traveled from the peaceful shallows of big-name social media and email to the abyss of a chatroom where something akin to a cult of prophecy was emerging.
9. It didn’t hurt much, but it wouldn’t heal unless I cut away the unclean flesh, and the only tools I had to use were my teeth. I did what I had to.
10. Over the course of six months, with dozens of interchangeable aliases and through a variety of forums, both electronic and hard-form, I managed to sell all of Mary’s old shit for about six thousand dollars.
11. He was starting to become a part of the land when I found him.
12. Adults had humored him at first, then got annoyed, and finally became disturbed by the increasing number of specific details until they practically begged him to admit that it wasn’t true.
13. At the end of Aunt Karen’s story, the jewel eyes of the statue were cut and sold, the precious metal that made up its body was melted down into coins, and the stone pedestal it sat on crumbled from centuries of wind and rain. “Still, it’s here,” she said, pointing at a patch of knee-high weeds like any other in her backyard. “There’s nothing left of it anymore, but it’s still here.”
14. Whenever Walter got anxious in school, he rubbed the bottom of his desk with his index finger. When the constant erosion made a tunnel through to the other side in mid-October, he wasn’t proud or embarrassed or surprised. He just started rubbing a different spot.
15. Rick Pecka had eighteen independent online personas. Twenty one, if you counted actual people he impersonated. Sometimes they all got together in a chat room and had a conversation. They were never pleasant conversations.
16. The call to work rang out over the speakers and I got out of bed. Same as any other morning starts. Really not even worth mentioning.
17. Of course the hollowed out book had another hollowed-out book inside of it. That was the must Rebekah Cain-like thing Rebekah Cain had ever done (short of continuing to exist as Rebekah Cain, which was an extremely Rebekah Cain-like existence).
18. I wanted to find Darren Amundsen because I’d get paid if I did, whereas Darren Amundsen wanted to stay hidden because the lightest consequence he’d face if found was a life in prison. So, you see, he had a much stronger motivation than I did from the start. You can’t blame me for not doing a very good job of bringing him in. 
19. Five minutes before, the list of things I wanted out of life would’ve been highly specific, overly ambitious, and about twenty pages long. In the time since, it has condensed into a single item: live through the next hour (making it to my sixteenth birthday would be great, but let’s make it through this first and take it day-by-day from there).