Vote for Your Favorite Story Opening

The polls are open!

We received a lot of great story openings for our contest and have narrowed them down to seven finalists. Now it’s up to our readers: Using the form below, please vote for your favorite entry out of the seven.

We’ll keep the polls open until October 30th, and then on October 31st the entry that has received the greatest number of votes will be declared the winner of a $20 online giftcard for Powell’s bookstore and a copy of Dead Girl in Love by our own Linda Joy Singleton.

So… re-read the seven entries and then vote using the form below. Only one vote per person, please.

Shannon:

Her breath and heartbeat competed to fill the close, black silence around her. She’d been in tight spaces before, and dark ones, and quiet ones. But never on her back, and never under six feet of earth.

Mandy:

The first boy I ever loved, Steven Goode, was really into cars. He received a junky Chevelle for his sixteenth birthday, and he’d drive it up and down the streets near school, that adorable lopsided grin never leaving his face.

Then I killed him.

Brodie:

It was official: I had gone insane. Creepy-looking men wearing white coats were surely going to drag me off to a padded cell any minute now. It was scary enough that my brother was standing before me stark naked, but the fact that he had died four years ago left me rooted to the porch steps, looking more than a little freaked out.

LaWanica:

It started as a dare.

Steal one Voodoo Doll from Madam Erzulie’s shop without getting caught…or cursed.

“Should I be concerned that the one doll I snatched blindly from the wall, looks exactly like me?”

Amanda:

Once a year, at exactly noon in the tired little town of Ashwood, Tennessee, the sky goes black.  The street lights stay off and all of the houses draw their curtains.

Today is that day.

Larissa:

Alison jumped as the water stung the open sores on her back.  *Stupid bacne – so much for Proactiv’s guarantee.*  She reached back to rub the sting away and froze as her fingers touched a slick rubbery substance that was not her skin.

Gef:

Jane and Nora walked into town side by side, Jane clutching a bag containing a modest collection of silver jewelry belonging to their mother, while Norah carried a satchel with the smith’s payment to forge the silver into a pair of bullets. With their mother locked in the root cellar and their father in a shallow grave, the girls silently prayed they’d be back home before sundown. What few townsfolk were out so early gave the woebegone children a wide berth, as the carnage of whatever rampageous demon had possessed a once peaceable mother still roiled through the morning air.

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