Chrissie Whitley > Recent Status Updates

First lines | “By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation. It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end.”

First lines | “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he was completely spattered with bird shit.”

First lines | "WHAT IS APPALACHIA? Appalachia is, often simultaneously, a political construction, a vast geographical region, and a spot that occupies an unparalleled place in our cultural imagination. We’ll start with the most basic information to get our bearings straight. Appalachia is an approximately 700,000-square-mile region of the eastern United States."

First lines | “TRANSCRIPT NO. 273: MARGARET WEBB // DATE STAMP: 11 AUG 2021 // 11 HOURS, O MINUTES, AND O SECONDS UNTIL DISSOLUTION // You've got eleven hours until reset. You need to tell me exactly what happened. // Where am I?”

First lines | "'We have a problem.' Now, weeks later, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache could not overstate what a huge understatement that had been. Though at the time, while it was clear something was off, it had seemed only that. A slight odor. A scent, a sense of something going bad."

First lines | "It was not the first time it had happened, this waking early in the pale light with a quiet but urgent desire to go to church. Cognitive decline, doubtless. Frontal-lobe damage, religion, fear of death—they were all the same thing. Jude had no illusions."

First lines | "His office seemed to shrink as he paced. The walls drew in, their angles distorted by the elongated shadows cast from the swivel lamp on his desk. The Yard always felt a bit eerie at night, as if the very emptiness of the rooms had a presence. He stopped at the bookcases and ran his finger along the spines of the well-thumbed books on the top shelf."

First lines | "Sometime in the sixties old Mr Tomelty had put up an incongruous lean-to addition to his Victorian castle. It was a granny flat of modest size but with some nice touches befitting a putative relative. The carpentry at least was excellent and one wall was encased in something called ‘beauty board’, its veneer capturing light and mutating it into soft brown darkness."