You should obviously be using your quarantine time to get a story published in the New Yorker, so I’m going to get you started with some first lines for free.

Okay, here goes.

‘Laurie was saying it again, about how she always hated the word cicadas.’

‘The fairy lights had been strung out all the way along the shitty boardwalk, so we knew as soon as we got there that Cade wasn’t home.’

‘With some cities it’s the taste of the air, like a secret sauce that just imprints on you the minute you get in line for a cab, but in Santa Fe it’s the blank ozone, the absence.’

‘This isn’t a confession or anything tasteless like that.’

‘They asked me if I wanted anything, after the accident, anything at all, so I said I wanted cherryade.’

‘You think you remember your childhood, but it’s all just scraps of fabric and records playing and lying there with a fever, not seeing or understanding anything.’

‘I shared a room with Juneau, who had a saggy vest with a pink dragon and kept a list of all the saints who technically belonged in hell.’

‘“Should I do it?” he said, meaning not that he himself might grate the Parmesan but—merely, colossally—that Lilith had neglected to do so.’

‘I built the machine right after the fire, to find out what the angels were saying in the noise.’

Look, you get the idea here. I’m not doing the whole fucking thing.