Opening Lines, Maine Version

by Posted on

Edith/Maddie here, (wistfully) remembering her vacation in Maine a month ago.

Wickeds and readers, add your opening line for this picture I snapped one foggy morning in Owl’s Head.

Jessie: She’d heard tales of the menacing, suffocating fog that slithered up from the sea like a live thing but she’d dismissed it as something the locals dreamt up to scare off people from away. Seeing it undulating towards her lonely cottage reminded her that they also claimed the fog ushered in the weeping ghost of a woman who had become disoriented when no landmarks were to be seen and had died of exposure only yards from her own home.

Edith/Maddie: You can rent the little writer’s cottage, she told me. It’ll be perfect, she said. What she didn’t tell me was about the life-sucking fog, or that the inlet floods and cuts off access to to the road. Worse, that a creepy guy camps in the woods and spies on me day and light. I hope I get out of here alive.

Barb: During low tide, we walked to and from the island. At high tide we took the boat. Walk to town in the morning, the boat’s not there when you need it to cross in the afternoon. Take the boat over in the afternoon, it’s marooned on the sand when you return after dinner. By the time we had been there a month, we were so in sync with the movement of the tides, it was like they were the rhythms of our own bodies.

Sherry: Every night she went and sawed into the beams that held the house up, knowing soon enough it would collapse just like their relationship had.

Readers: We love it when you add your opening lines.

Published by Edith Maxwell

Agatha Award -winning author Edith Maxwell writes the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries (Beyond the Page) and short crime fiction. As Maddie Day she writes the Country Store Mysteries series, the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries, and the Cece Barton Mysteries (all from Kensington Publishing). She lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and cat Martin, where she writes, gardens, cooks, and wastes time on Facebook.

15 Thoughts

  3. Asking for opening lines is my favorite thing on this blog. It’s always interesting and entertaining. I love how different each of your approaches are to the same picture or circumstance.

  4. They say time and tide wait for no man, but standing outside the cabin she had rented watching the tide come in, she realized that the only one with a holding her back were the mysterious events of her past and unanswered questions.
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

  5. Sassy sat on the weathered porch and sipped her coffee. The Italian cypress her grandmother potted gave her as sense of continuity and place. Tomorrow her world would be gone. It’s demise hidden by soft grey swirls of fog.

  6. I was used to the fog. It was a normal part of life in my corner of the world. But something about this one felt different.

  8. Walking out on her deck, she looked out at the fog. She could not see very far in the distance. Suddenly piercing the silence, she hears a woman screaming.

Comments are closed.