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March 10, 2014

Hobart 15 First Sentences

Hobart 15 First Sentences photo

This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #15: HOTEL CULTURE. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the month to various "bonus materials" -- photo essays, alternate endings, drawings, extra short fictions, interviews, & more!

Today, to kick it all off, we've got the first sentence from every story/poem/essay/comic in the issue...


 

The Down arrow on the elevator panel is already glowing, but you press it again, harder this time.
    — "As Elvis," Katrin Gibb

"Scheduling's going to hear about this," Della says.
    — "Christmas Layover, Days Inn, Little Rock," Lori Jakiela

Every few months a birthday cake waits for me in the parking lot, staring me down.
    — "Swim Swim Swim," Jacob Perkins

The Hotel is uniform and congruent.
    — "Hotel World," JL Bogenschneider

My iPod, recently loaded with all the decent tracks I could pilfer from my brother's CD collection (Surrealistic Pillow, Sgt. Peppers, American Beauty), which I found under his old bed at our parents' house, next to a box of unbranded condoms.
    — "What We Take With Us:," Amy Kurzweil

I was four years old the first time I met my father.
    — "Morrison Hotel Is Released," Michael Hemmingson

The year I was ten, my brother told me about bruxas.
    — "Espera, Volta," Brett Beach

The old dude at the door kept repeating Mr. da Silva, Mr. da Silva, and wouldn’t go away though I told him nobody by that name lived inside.
    — "Fado Final," Janice D. Soderling

You commit suicide near a carnival with a rope.
    — "3 Poems," francine j. harris

—A bad judge of character, it’s been said.
    — "The Teat of Caposaldo," Rachael Armstrong

Wayne's new curfew cut the night short.
    — "An Excerpt from The Parish," Joel Smith and Ryan Winet

His mother said you hurt me with your book.
    — "Hotel," Kyle Minor

The other one, the one also called James Brubaker, is the one things happened to.
    — "Brubaker and I," James Brubaker

My husband and I are eating takeout spaghetti and meatballs in a motel because our house has bedbugs.
    — "Thank You For the _______," Becky Adnot-Haynes

And so Gunderson tendered his resignation from the government agency where he worked—a subterranean department, the name he only knew in acronym—and he packed up his apartment and moved his life, all fourteen boxes of it, into long-term residency at the Chapin Hotel.
    — "Gunderson All in One Place," David Nutt

The director of an organization ascends to the third floor of the Lutétia hotel.
    — "The Director," Stephen Thomas

That was tricky magic in the motel the night
before, in the middle desert.
    — "Sleeping Under Yosemite," Annik Adey-Babinski

The biggest leak of the summer took place on the floor of the ocean.
    — "Summering," Woody Skinner

The biggest leak of the summer took place on the floor of the ocean.
    — "3 Short Fictions," Jefferson Navicky

The spiky gray green too dry Christmas tree stuck crooked and bent in a big blue pot in the corner by the greasy metal stove in the muggy nightmare of a tiny peeling plaster apartment in an old converted motor motel awaiting another Christmas in the un-Christmassy land called Palm Desert.
    — "Bombay Beach Christmas," Elizabeth McGuire

after years in the kitchen the damage is easy to see: burn scars mark your arms, each knuckle’s knife-cut like five hundred times, fingertips callous so thick you feel nothing—this is how you will say it, I feel nothing, when I ask if the hot metal hurts.
    — "We Still Have to Work Together," Chris Pedler

I am running, again, out
of ways to imagine you—as if we
were a corridor of icicles
clattering closed, nipping
at my ankles, the angle of your jaw
thawed into ambiguity.
    — "3 Poems," Annelyse Gelman

A peek-a-boo of pubic hair sticking out of her shorts, she doesn’t shave. I see her bent over the sink in the motel room, brushing her teeth, spitting into the sink, brushing, and keeping on spitting. I hear her gargle and swish and project foam into the sink. I hear the water turn on to rinse the brush.
    — "She Has Funny Cars," Danielle Etienne

Every morning I let Cass out to walk among the silos.
    — "Harvest," Maxim Loskutoff

We still choose the Pacific Ocean over the ghost white sands of Palm Beach.
    — "Hotel California, the Pink District," George Djuric

I must have dreamed about Lane that January night, because when I woke I thought his arm was wrapped around me, palm covering my face.
    — "The Only Boy in Indiana," Doug Paul Case

The night I told my father I’d beaten my best time in the five hundred meter swim, he told me there was a cabinetmaker who would give me summer work.
    — "Foreclosure," Patrick Coleman

 

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image: David Kramer


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