Your Story #130

Prompt: Write the opening line to a story based on the photo prompt below. (One sentence only.) You can be poignant, funny, witty, etc.; it is, after all, your story.

Email your submission to yourstorycontest@aimmedia.com with the subject line "Your Story 130."

No attachments, please. Include your name and mailing address. Entries without a name or mailing address will be disqualified.

Unfortunately, we cannot respond to every entry we receive due to volume. No confirmation emails will be sent out to confirm receipt of submission. But be assured all submissions received before the entry deadline are considered carefully. 

Entry Deadline: Closed

Out of over 150 entries, WD editors chose the following 12 finalists. Vote for your favorite using the poll at the bottom of the page.

1. "Crew, the center of Earth is straight ahead; be sure your atmospheric suit is set to zero grav—you don't want to fall all the way up to China."

2. They would have us believe that we had a choice, but we never had a clear view of the horizon—every image was a lie.

3. In the mind's eye are dreams, and paths to follow, divergent, circuitous, connate, and neverending.

4. As she looked through her telescope for the last time, it occured to her that perhaps the galaxy she sought was a great deal closer than she had ever imagined.

5. It was a remarkably peaceful journey reaching the white light at the end of the tunnel—it’s just no one told me I’d have to pass through a security checkpoint where a tall guard instructed me to remove my shoes, belt, empty my pockets as well as any electronics from my bag.

6. This second cataract surgery was nothing like the first.

7. “Oh my God,” her Reiki practitioner exclaimed, “your third eye just opened!”

8. Tunnel vision isn't what it used to be.

9. When he developed the photographs, Derwin realized that the kaleidoscopic lens he had invented was about as practical as the diesel-powered wristwatch he had developed a year earlier.

10. The travel agent said it was the perfect spot, but she neglected to mention that it was under the world's biggest hole in the Ozone layer.

11. The last thing that Blake remembered seeing as he woke sprawled at the bottom of a dry well, was staring skyward through a narrowing tunnel vision view of the rock walls that oddly looked like blue-gray New York skyscrapers and green trees of Central Park.

12. "I think, Congressman," said Professor Xerxes delicately, as though each word was made of glass, "that I may have fundamentally misunderstood your request for me to help blend the city with nature, and," he paused, rolling his tongue in search of the right words to play down his blunder, "I now can't turn the vortex off."