Opening paragraph from a short story
Style: prose
Genre: humor/horror
I wrote this opening scene for a short story during a writing exercise.
It was inspired by a photo of a beach at sundown.
Beach
It was almost sundown when they carried Fred off the beach. Marty took his arms, trying (but failing) to also keep Fred’s head from falling back – for obvious reasons it just did not seem appropriate to have Fred looking like a passed out idiot. Stephen had the easy part, Marty thought, while looking at his friend, who was carrying Fred’s legs. Why was it that whenever they were together, Stephen was the one to luck out? Whether it were girls, free drinks or a lottery ticket, Stephen always seemed to be the one to win it all. Was it his looks? Marty looked at Stephen, dressed in black, as usual. No, he wasn’t dashingly handsome. His left eye always seemed to be just out of sync with the rest of his face, his hair was the sort of color you couldn’t really name and he had no earlobes. Marty actually only just realized this last part, as he was scanning his friend’s features. Stephen didn’t notice. He was holding Fred’s legs, left leg with his left arm, right leg with the other, walking upright, his cigarette still casually hanging from the corner of his mouth. That was it, Marty thought. It was Stephen’s entire attitude, his ‘I don’t really care either way’ routine that actually made him such a lucky guy. Even now, even though he was carrying a stiff, he looked like the coolest twentysomething in the world. Marty thought of how he was probably looking himself in contrast, hunched over, watching every step (seeing that he was walking backwards – of course, he was the one walking backwards, not Stephen, never Stephen), face red from the weight. Next to this, he could feel his jeans were hanging dangerously low, most likely exposing at least part of his his buttcrack. Not classy. Not classy at all.
They’d had a great day, today. It was sunny, for the first time in days, and Stephen had called both him and Fred to go for a drink near the beach. Marty had said yes without hesitation – his saturdays were quite ordinary, usually, and this one had not been an exception. Choosing between playing computer games alone while contemplating whether to call for pizza or Mexican food or going out for drinks with his friends was an easy choice, even though he hadn’t been too keen on Fred lately. Fred started out as one of Stephen’s friends but he and Marty had found eachother (so to speak) at a karaokeparty where they sang Paradise by the Dashboardlight together. For lack of any girls, Marty had volunteered to sing the part of the woman (obviously it had been the booze speaking), and Fred, always up for a challenge, welcomed him by singing ‘Will you love me forever’ right to his face, coming awfully close for a guy he’d never even spoken to before. After that they were friends, logically, because singing (or rather shouting) a love duet ties you together forever, whether you want to or not.
They’d gone to the small bar that overlooked the beach. Marty could never remember what it was called, maybe it didn’t even have a name, at least not a visible one. He wasn’t particularly fond of it; it was a bit dirty and the barman never said anything at all. It was without a doubt the most ill suited barman ever to have driven a bar, and Marty contemplated asking him why he was actually running the place, but didn’t dare to, in fear that the rather pumped up guy would hit him with a bottle of beer. The best place to be in that bar was outside of that bar, and that’s where they had been that afternoon, on the porch, Stephen and Fred smoking and Marty squinting, damning himself for not aving brought his sunglasses. But that moment now felt like ages ago, now that they were carrying Fred’s dead body across the sand.