Read the opening sentences of Markley’s dresser drawer of unpublished short stories
From "Things to Do Before I Die"
"Among a sea of New York strangers stuffed into the subway car—all of them shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, groin to groin, yet completely detached from anything outside of their own minds—the man simply stood out."
From “Why Marilyn Monroe Cried”
“The skin surrounding the boil seemed to pulse with a red, inflamed heat; it was hard to the touch, like a disc of bone lay between the skin and muscle of the calf.”
From “The Space Between the Stars”
“The blood stung his eyes.”
From “The Death of Mike Keplan”
“John Butler arrives home from work at the same time every day, and today is no different.”
From “Fiction”
“The man sits in the dark boardroom during the very earliest hours of Independence Day.”
From “Under the Stars of Gxphilacrgl”
“I was born under curious circumstances: my mother, having been shot by her/my father, had me on the floor of a portable toilet while the patrons of the traveling big top showcase, Brighton Brothers Circus waited in line.”
From “91 Things I Hate”
“1) People who talk in movie theaters.”
From “Places We Know”
“In twenty-five years as a police officer, Walter Fields had drawn his weapon from its holster while on duty only once.”
From “The Life of Dawn Deckheart”
“Dawn sat in the folding chair in her bathrobe flipping through the glossy pages of a two-month old copy of People.”
From “Faith”
“It's when you hit three in the morning and your nerves are shot and the last few sips of that final beer, which mostly consisted of saliva anyway, are finally catching up with you even though you stopped drinking well before the bar closed that you realize tomorrow morning you are going to wake up and hate yourself more than you hate the tan toolbag to your left who has his collar flipped and is babbling about how expensive his new car is to the equally tan girl wearing a skirt that just barely covers her most intimate regions—and she's just eating it up.”
From “The Gordon Sussman Blues”
“He lived in a one-room apartment.”
From “Shades of Memory”
“The empty space below the last line of text stared at him from the Macintosh computer, gleaming its white sterile hue.”
From “The Whore, the Man, the Child”
“The whore lit a cigarette, and the smoke drifted up into the dark, reflecting only the meager shafts of light from a sodium-vapor lamp outside in the parking lot of the motel.”
From “A Shot of Air”
“The dusk.”
Unsatisfied? Stay tuned and find out how you can see whole stories with beginnings, middles, and endings.
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