18 First Line Prompts Prompts

The envelope was addressed to me in handwriting I had not used since I was twelve.

At 8:17 every morning, the empty apartment upstairs flushed its toilet.

Nobody objected when the mayor banned umbrellas, which was the first sign that something was wrong.

I knew the bridge was unsafe because I had signed the inspection report saying it wasn’t.

The dog came home wearing a collar engraved with tomorrow’s date.

By the time the library opened, someone had returned every book that was currently checked out.

My sister called to apologize for a conversation we had not had yet.

The new employee knew exactly where we kept the emergency key, and none of us had shown her.

There were seven chairs at the meeting and eight names on the confidentiality form.

I had spent twenty years avoiding the town until it elected me mayor in my absence.

The last train stopped at a platform that did not appear on the route map.

When the rain finally ended, every car on our street was facing the opposite direction.

The museum label said the portrait was anonymous, but the woman in it had my mother’s scar.

My job was to delete abandoned accounts; the first one on Monday belonged to me.

The recipe called for one ingredient my grandmother had spent her life insisting did not exist.

We buried the time capsule in 2004, so the smartphone inside it was difficult to explain.

The voicemail was only three seconds long: my own voice saying, “Do not answer the door.”

Everyone remembered the fire, but nobody could agree on what had burned.