Joseph Nassise

The first time it happened, Memphis Stone was standing over the rapidly cooling body of a young girl.

It was just after 9:00 pm, mid-summer, the streets of Boston still reflecting the heat they had soaked up during the day under the combination of the 90 degree temperature and the even higher percentage humidity. It had been a long, grueling month with heat-frayed tempers and the corresponding hike in violent crime that always accompanied such a stretch.

Stone had been fostering a mild headache for most of the afternoon. The pain made him tense, irritable, and the fact that he was still standing there two hours after he was supposed to have gone off shift did nothing to assuage that. Just the opposite, in fact, as it sent his headache rocketing up several levels higher on the pain scale.

He stared down at the body, wondering. Who was she? Why did she have to come along right when she did? Couldn’t she have taken a different way home?

She was the fourth victim this month. All of them young, all of them seemingly innocent, at least to this world-weary detective. Apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so, for the press had taken to calling it the work of the Saintkiller.

He rubbed at his forehead, his hand over his eyes as he tried to ease the rapidly tightening band of tension churning there. When he took his hand away, the scene before him wavered and then changed…
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Photo by Hryckowian

I’m in the midst of teaching an online workshop called Jump Start Your Novel, which focuses on the methods I use to organize a project so that I can write the most powerful novel possible in a reasonable time frame. In the workshop we’ve been talking a bit about characters, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on that subject today.

Characters are the heart of any story. A reader wants to be transported out of their daily existence to another place entirely, to be someone else, even if only for a little while. Think about the books you’ve enjoyed and ask yourself why you liked them. You’ll quickly see that it is the way that you identified with the main character and how you reacted to the ups and downs that character experienced that had an impact on you. As a writer, you need to be able to produce the same effect and give the reader the emotional experience they desire.

So how do we do that?

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With my first Rogue Angel novel, THE LOST TOMB, due in just a few days, I haven’t had time to put together a column for this month. Instead, I’m going to share one of the few short fiction pieces I’ve done during my career. (It takes my longer to write a short story than it does a novel, so I don’t do all that many of them.)

“Roadside Memorials” was written for the Roc anthology, LOST ON THE DARKSIDE, which came out back in 2005. The editor absconded with the money due to the contributors and to this day I don’t believe any of us have been paid, but that shouldn’t prevent others from enjoying the work.

As this is a longer tale, I’m going to put the majority of it after the cut. Read on, if you like…

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“Roadside Memorials” by Joe Nassise

A DRUNK DRIVER KILLED MY FRIENDS!

So read the sign now standing at the corner of Thunderbird and Main. It stood in almost the exact spot where Martin had pulled the bodies of two teenagers from the smashed wreckage of their yellow Nissan Xterra just two days before, shouting its message out to any and all who passed by. Around it was a haphazard collection of candles, flowers and photographs, laid out in commemoration of the lives that had ended so abruptly there.

“Freakin’ morbid, that,” his partner Giles said, but Martin barely noticed. He couldn’t take his eyes off the memorial, stunned by the size of it. It had to be six feet square and the accident wasn’t even 48 hours old yet. Where the hell had all this stuff come from? It was disturbing, uncanny even, how swiftly such memorials could appear. Back home in Philadelphia, he’d never heard of the practice, had never laid eyes on even one such marker, but here in the southwest they were practically guaranteed to show up whenever there was a fatal accident. They sprang up overnight like ravenous weeds. He wasn’t certain where the tradition had come from or what those who created them hoped to achieve, he just knew that being around them made him uncomfortable. It didn’t matter where the accident had taken place – back roads, city streets or the long stretches of road bisecting the desert – time and time again he would see them there, like soldiers standing solitary vigil in the darkness.

“…don’t see what good it does.”

“What?” he asked, as the marker swept behind them in the distance and he belatedly realized his partner was still speaking.

Giles waved a hand toward the rear of the ambulance. “Those stupid memorials. Those folks are dead, right? What good do those things do them?” He snorted in disgust. “Besides, I’d rather have folks visiting me in the cemetery than in the middle of nowhere. Who wants to be reminded they’d died in the middle of a freakin’ car wreck?”

Martin nodded, turning away from the window as the memorial slipped away behind them in the distance, but he wasn’t really listening. It had been a long night; three car accidents, a knife fight, and two heart attacks, the most activity they’d had in one night in weeks. And we aren’t even halfway through our shift. All he wanted to do was get back to the hospital and crash out for awhile before the next call came in.

At 36, Martin Jones was already tired of his so-called life. He spent his days sleeping, his nights cleaning up the messes left behind by other people’s mistakes. Gone was the idealism that had gotten him into the EMT business in the first place, washed away by too many stupid accidents, too many senseless beatings, and more than his fair share of horrible car wrecks. It didn’t help that his days were other people’s nights.

Tonight was worse than usual, however. He’d felt an odd sense of unease all evening and the weirdness surrounding that roadside shrine didn’t help. It was almost as if he could sense something, something looming just beyond the horizon; at any moment he knew it was going to come charging in to swallow everything whole.

It wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

As Giles droned on, Martin leaned back in his seat and wearily closed his eyes. Tonight’s shift couldn’t end fast enough as far as he was concerned.

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