Opening paragraphs..................

"In shirt-sleeves, the way I generally worked, I sat sketching a bar of soap taped to an upper corner of my drawing board.  The gold-foil wrapper was carefully peeled back so that you could still read most of the brand name printed on it; I'd spoiled the wrappers of half a dozen bars before getting that effect.  This was a new idea, the product to be shown ready for what the accompanying copy called 'fragrant, lathery, lovelier you' use, and I had the job of sketching it into half a dozen layouts, the bar of soap at a slightly different angle in each.
     "It was just exactly as boring as it sounds, and I stopped to look out the window beside me, down twelve stories at Fifty-fourth Street and the little heads moving along the sidewalk.  It was a sunny, sharply clear day in mid-November, and I'd have liked to be out in it, the whole afternoon ahead and nothing to do; nothing I had to do, that is."
-Jack Finney, Time and Again