Kick-Ass Ledes

Your daily fix of damn good opening lines.

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I'm pretty much fucked. That's my considered opinion. Fucked.

Andy Weir, The Martian: A Novel

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The Pigeon King delivered his closing statement to the jury dressed in his only suit.

Jon Mooallem, “Birdman,” New York Times Magazine

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“The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut.”

William Giraldi, Hold the Dark

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Michael Utley does not remember much about his death.

Ferris Jabr, "The Body Electric," Outside

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On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

William Langewiesche, "The Human Factor," Vanity Fair

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Until his little brother, George, shot and killed an unarmed black teenager on the sidewalk of a Florida gated community more than two years ago, Robert Zimmerman Jr. was "the family fuckup."

Amanda Robb, "Zimmerman Family Values," GQ

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At the outset, Verna had not intended to kill anyone.

Margaret Atwood, "Stone Mattress," The New Yorker

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Enclosed in the broken glass and crushed steel of a crumpled 1969 Plymouth Fury, Margaret Nordhagen sits next to the love of her life.

Jacob Jones, "Destination Unknown," Inlander

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He'd already burned his prison jumpsuit and secured a new driver's license. He’d put back on his finger the wedding ring he wasn’t allowed to wear in prison, the ring his wife gave him before they said he murdered her and their children.

Katie Mettler, "Suspended Justice," Indiana Daily Student

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Gordy Gronkowski, the patriarch of those very same Gronkowskis, America’s First Family of Smashmouth Football, the man who somehow parlayed five orgasms into 1,258 pounds of relentless physical force \-- a first baseman, two tight ends, and two fullbacks \-- the first father in twenty years to see three of his sons play during a single NFL season, and the first father in nearly thirty years with an even-money chance to see a fourth, might have gone after it a little hard last night.

Chris Jones, "One Thousand Two Hundred and Fifty-Eight Pounds of Sons," Esquire

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The future is way behind schedule.

Wade Roush, "In Google's Moon Race, Teams Face a Reckoning," Xconomy

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As soon as the 2003 World Taxidermy Championships opened, the heads came rolling in the door.

Susan Orlean, "Lifelike," New Yorker

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The thing about being murdered, it usually comes as a surprise.

William Langewiesche, "The Camorra Never Sleeps," Vanity Fair

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He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic.

Nicholas Kristof, "Unmasking Horror," New York Times

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I'm sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for a call from a man who doesn't trust me, hoping he'll have answers about a man I don't trust, which may clear the name of a man no one gives a damn about.

J.R. Moehringer, "Resurrecting the Champ," Los Angeles Times

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\"How does it feel to be America's premier blow-job queen?\"

Monica Lewinsky, "Shame and Survival," Vanity Fair

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In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, or maybe he didn’t, but either way vast ribbons of peat came to rest under what became the foothills of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, and in time the peat became coal, and later the railroads arrived, along with mines and coke ovens, and near one lazy arc of the Tennessee River workers built homes to return to after their long days of burrowing and burning, and the homes became a town, and the town was called Dayton.

Rachel Maddux, "Hail Dayton," Oxford American