the Hook

Intriguing First Lines

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“Do you understand everything I’ve just told you?” asked the man in the white coat.

“Yeah,” I said.

In fact, I had no idea what he’d been talking about. I remembered the droning of his voice, but not the words. I hadn’t been listening, and my hearing hasn’t been so good recently. Or maybe I had been listening, but somehow, what he said hadn’t stuck. My mind had been wandering, but what had I been thinking about? I couldn’t remember. Also, I couldn’t remember who the man in the white coat was, where I was, or what I was doing there.

—Buck Schatz in Running Out of Road, Daniel Friedman, Minotaur Books, March 2020, $26.99