FICTION | CHAPTER ONE
Lying on the Altar of Self-Sacrifice #1
The matchmaker’s gentle persuasion and her white cashmere sweater
Second only to Chekhov’s famous smoking gun dictum is this: When you kill off one of your main characters in chapter one, the essence, or ghost, of him must appear in the second or succeeding chapters … or you don’t have much of a story —Anonymous, quite possibly Chekhov.
It’s not to late to jump aboard the prologue, where there was a lot of photographic tom-foolery and the death of someone you’d like to know more of.
Chapter One
It’s always nice to think life was simpler back then. As long as we don’t examine things too closely. As long as we reflect back through a kind of mental squint, we might even find we can share the blame for our dysfunctions with something indefinite and vaguely forgiving like “the times” or “society” or even “youth”.
Lena might have argued such a case for herself.
Lena gazed down at the back of Robin’s head from eight semi-circular rows higher, willing him to turn around…
