First Words Friday: Week 1 – 2019

I just discovered a Twitter hashtag. I don’t know how long #FirstLineFriday has been around, but I think I’ve been missing out. In keeping with my new resolution goal plan to write here on a more regular basis, I’ve decided to add a category to the list of categories I’ve up until now not been keeping up with.

On Fridays I’ll post my own version of #FirstLineFriday–maybe the first line or first paragraph of a chapter from a book. Maybe I’ve read the whole book–or not. It might be fiction or nonfiction, contemporary or antique. Maybe it will be the first line or paragraph from an essay or a blog. Or maybe the first line or verse of a poem.

This shouldn’t be too hard to keep up with, right?

Today I’m sharing from a book on my to-read shelf–the first paragraph of the Prologue to A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett.

We named the houses they put us in. We stayed in some for months at a time; other places, it was a few days or a few hours. There was the Bomb-Making House, then the Electric House. After that came the Escape House, a squat concrete building where we’d sometimes hear gunfire outside our windows and sometimes a mother singing nearby to her child, her voice low and sweet. After we escaped the Escape House, we were moved, somewhat frantically, to the Tacky House, into a bedroom with a flowery bedspread and a wooden dresser that held hair sprays and gels laid out in perfect rows, a place where, it was clear from the sound of the angry, put-upon woman jabbering in the kitchen, we were not supposed to be.

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Have you read this book?

Do you have some “first words” to share?