They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

This line is widely recognized as the famous opening sentence of James M. Cain’s novella *The Postman Always Rings Twice* (1934). It is spoken by the unnamed drifter-narrator as he begins recounting how he ended up on the road and, by chance, at a roadside diner where the central relationship and crime plot unfold. Cain’s hard-boiled, first-person voice drops the reader into the narrator’s precarious, itinerant life with no preamble, establishing a tone of blunt immediacy and fatalistic momentum that characterizes the story’s descent into passion, violence, and consequence.

The sentence compresses a whole social world into a few words: the narrator is disposable labor, literally tossed aside, and his life is governed by other people’s decisions and by chance. Cain’s diction is matter-of-fact rather than self-pitying, signaling a tough, emotionally guarded voice typical of noir narration. The specificity of “about noon” adds documentary realism while also implying a hinge moment—midday as a turning point—after which events accelerate. As an opening, it announces themes of transience, powerlessness, and the way small contingencies can propel someone into a chain of irreversible choices.