First Line Friday
Where to Carry the Sound by Nina Sudhakar
Where to Carry the Sound by Nina Sudhakar was the winner of the Katharine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction in 2024. Here are the first lines to the stories in this collection. Enjoy!
“Come Tomorrow”
Every house in the village looked identical, which made it difficult for Diya to decide where to knock for help.
“Empires Have Been Destroyed”
If the right street in Bandra had whispered to you, it is said, a street named after a canonized Catholic whose very name you could hold in your mouth like a prayer to a patron saint, you could take a rickshaw to the area and have it drop you a safe distance away, perhaps outside one of the civil servant’s squat two-story bungalows, because people who lived in those houses had no need to go wandering the quarter on foot after work, pretending not to be lost and refusing to ask for directions, having instead the luxury of the right connections and moreover the benefit of the Gothic-crowned windows and porched second-story balconies on which they could safely imbibe.
“A Working Theory of Optical Illusions”
I learned today that my mother’s room had a view.
“The Peak of Eternal Light”
I didn’t miss the moon, not at first.
“Bloom”
The face of the mountain slid off while we were en route to the yearly miracle.
“In the Forest of the Night”
The hunt has been going on for weeks when she arrives; by then it has already produced a supreme court case and a quasi-military operation.
“Pillow Book of the Dead Prince’s Intended”
Yesterday marked eleven years within these walls, which are still bare except for an extended series of patiently scrawled tally clusters.
“Marigolds”
You live on a bluff just before the edge of the world, facing the sea.
“A Body More Than Flesh and Bone”
The dogs know first, their high-pitched keening echoing off the stone walls marking the outskirts of the nearby town.
Buy Where to Carry the Sound here.
Buy River of Dolls and Other Stories by Suzanne Kamata here.
Buy The Beautiful One Has Come by Suzanne Kamata here.
Buy Owls in the Ginza (and other stories from a life in Japan) here.