Fragments

I started a file on my laptop recently simply entitled "Fragments". I intend to fill it with story starters: First paragraphs and odd bits of dialogue that suddenly come to me, look good structurally, and just basically sound cool but have no story to be a part of. Below is the first one I came up with, after reading Harlan Ellison's introduction to his collection An Edge in My Voice:

As he hung there, David Atherton remembered the words of the American playwright
Irwin Shaw: “He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: ‘This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.’

So Atherton began subvocalizing to his LifeJournal, “This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today: Cold, pus-white things hold my feet in place over a round, gunmetal-colored emptiness, while unseen gibbering things surge in the gloom below, a moist chittering that is starting to drive me insane.”