Professor walks into his classroom, shoots a student in the head, then has a conversation about why he did it.
The echo of the gunshot lingered in the air, as if asking why it existed in the first place. The professor, still holding the smoking gun, listened to it bounce around the corners of the room. Trying to hide? he thought with a smile. There's nowhere to go.
Slumped backwards in his chair was the student he had fired upon, mouth as open as his eyes. A third eye gleamed in the center of his forehead, and as the silence in the room continued, a thick red tear squeezed out.
"Welcome to Philosophy 101." the professor said, laying down the gun. No one said anything. No papers rustled. No one even breathed. "Today we're going to be discussing the moral and ethical dilemma I have just posed to you. Some of you may not believe that there is anything to discuss; killing is wrong and that's all there is to it. Others may see that there are two sides to every coin, even one as violent and abrupt as this."
He surveyed the students quickly before moving on. There were only seven of them left, a typical size for a private school. Four boys and three girls. Only one of the girls was crying, he noted. All of the boys were pale, paler than the desks their fists were clenched upon. Would they be next, they wondered, and would they have to prove their masculinity, virility, and strength in order to survive?
"No one else will die today, of that I can assure you. What I would like is for you to give me your thoughts, reactions, and impressions about why I might have killed your fellow classmate."
"You're a psychopath?" one of the boys piped up. Harry, his name was. A freshman psychology major, if memory served.
"That's certainly a possibility." The professor turned and wrote "psychopath" on the whiteboard in stark block letters. "Anyone else?"
"He knew something about you," a girl named Valerie said, almost too softly to be heard.
"Be more specific," the professor said. "There are lots of things about me that none of you, including our victim here, know about me, and less than one percent of those are in any way incriminating. There's a wealth of possibilities as to what your 'something' means. So, if you would, elaborate."
Valerie looked utterly mystified that her simple statement created such a complex problem. "He could… He could have known you were in trouble with a bookie for gambling away more than you had."
"You think I'm a gambler?"
"I think you like risk, so it's not too far off to venture the guess that you like to press your luck with money as well."
"Well put." He wrote "gambling debts" on the whiteboard. "Anyone else?"
"He was your wife's lover." the boy next to Harry said. "That's always what it is in books and stuff, right?"
"You're right, but," He held up his left hand. "I'm not married. You have to be observant to a fault with stuff like this, people. Scrutinize me. Read my body language. Do I seem unhinged, high, nervous, angry, or what? Are my hands twitching? Am I sweating? Do I make eye contact when we speak? Read between the lines."
"There are no lines," Harry said. "You look totally normal."
"Exactly!" the professor whooped, throwing the whiteboard marker onto the ground, spiking it like a football. "And what does that tell you?"
"How many bullets are left in that revolver?" Valerie asked, her voice tremulous.
"Trick question, my dear. There are only six."
"So one of us gets out alive? Is that what you're saying?"
"Your first assignment is to figure out who that will be. I expect a page, at least, by the end of class."
The absolute worst opening line to a novel you can think of.
There's a few I thought were quite good and funny.
- "Did you know that Martha bought two dozen eggs today? Scandals are common in this town."
- Bill was murdered by somebody you totally will be surprised by.
- "Teh hole world was teh zombie, but I was not teh zombie. My friends turned into teh zombie, and they tried to turn me into teh zombie. But when they finally got close, they told me, "no John, we are not teh zombie, you are teh zombie."
- "You don't understand me at all, I'm not just a campfire."
- ''Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.''
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