Religion and Ethics Forum

General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Steve H on April 20, 2020, 11:29:50 AM

Title: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Steve H on April 20, 2020, 11:29:50 AM
Give us the opening sentence of your Covid-19 novel. Here are two to start things off:

Two weeks after burying my wife and children in the garden, I finally met another survivor, and realised that this was a bit more serious than seasonal flu.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in posession of a good fortune, must be in want of a giant economy pack of luxury, aloe vera-impregnated bog-rolls.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Nearly Sane on April 20, 2020, 12:12:53 PM
I had survived the first 18 Covids, but this one seemed worse.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Owlswing on April 20, 2020, 02:10:06 PM


It was a dark and stormy night in the wilds of Communist China . . .
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Roses on April 20, 2020, 02:17:56 PM
The United States of America are infested by two terrible plagues, Covid-19 and Donald Trump.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: ekim on April 20, 2020, 03:14:34 PM
... and on the eighth day God said 'Let there be the Corona virus'.  And it came to be so.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 03:26:24 PM
It was  the worst of times. It was the worst of times.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 03:28:58 PM
'In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like coughing, fuck off".
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 03:32:21 PM
Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the ICU. He lunged for the nearest ventilator he could see, a Dyson.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Nearly Sane on April 20, 2020, 03:42:21 PM
Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere staggered through the vaulted archway of the ICU. He lunged for the nearest ventilator he could see, a Dyson.
Nice Dan Brown parody
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 03:44:04 PM
Nice Dan Brown parody
I feel my Tale of Two Cities one is better.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 03:49:05 PM
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, the police visited him and had a severe word about social distancing.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 03:52:40 PM
A Trumpian theme to this one:

All children, except one, grow up

I didn't even have to change it.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 03:55:57 PM
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Corona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
With social distancing and checking if hands unclean.'
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 04:03:25 PM
Another one that doesn't need changing.

Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 20, 2020, 04:10:56 PM
From my unfilmed movie script:

Did you hear that? They've relaxed social distancing. We'll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Nearly Sane on April 20, 2020, 04:40:28 PM
I feel my Tale of Two Cities one is better.
But Dan Brown didn't write A Tale of Two Cities   ;)
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 05:19:02 PM
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the riverbank, and of having nothing to do.
Alice looked at her sister and asked her if she knew when the fuck the lockdown was going to end!
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 05:21:29 PM
Another which needs no enhancement.

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 05:23:48 PM
....also


Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 05:29:05 PM


There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Not after Boris had tightened the lockdown order the previous day.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Nearly Sane on April 20, 2020, 05:31:05 PM
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with Covid-19  when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 06:18:48 PM
Someone must have sneezed near Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was infected.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Nearly Sane on April 20, 2020, 06:36:15 PM
riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a corona virus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 07:09:54 PM
Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a stash of toilet roll and ancient face mask on a shelf and kept an old Winnebago and a Land Rover to escape. 
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Sebastian Toe on April 20, 2020, 07:13:04 PM
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a shit.
This, he found out later, was one of the rarer side effects of Covid 19.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Robbie on April 20, 2020, 07:28:40 PM
Old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends. A newspaper blown through the grass falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.

A cop wandered up and fined them for sitting on the bench.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: jeremyp on April 21, 2020, 08:47:31 AM
Here is the last line of one of my novels (spoiler alert).

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say who was asymptomatic.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Steve H on April 21, 2020, 09:12:20 AM
It was a bright, cold day in April, and the telescreens were talking about quarantine.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Outrider on April 21, 2020, 09:22:54 AM
The Wheel of Time turns, and ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, Covid rose in the Mountains of Mist. Covid was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of time. But it was a beginning.

O.
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Owlswing on April 21, 2020, 02:36:48 PM

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a shit.
This, he found out later, was one of the rarer side effects of Covid 19.


Thanks to Social Distancing his neighbour sat in his skiff two miles away, but he just didn't give a shit!
Title: Re: Covid-19 novel opening sentences - game.
Post by: Robbie on April 24, 2020, 09:52:00 PM
Pam Ayres who is currently in Australia, posted on Twitter:-
I think that I may take a stroll,
And buy myself a toilet roll.
At home it will be safely stowed,
With the other pallet-load.