“Just the Opening Line”: a terribleminds flash fiction challenge

The terribleminds flash challenge this week is short and sweet: not 1000 words, not even 100. Just the opening sentence of an as-yet-unwritten story, but as Chuck says, that one sentence “will drag me kicking and screaming and shove my face into wanting more.... You’ve got a single sentence to promise a killer story.” So, one sentence it is. By the end of this week I’ll probably have the rest of the story to go with it; if so (and it’s worth looking at) I’ll post it here too.

He was nine when he watched his father die, brawling with the other men of Llangennith for beach salvage like dogs over a carcass, and he grinned madly as the man he knew as “Da” fell in the surf and failed to rise.