I’m posting, here, a short story I wrote earlier on this summer. The first line was snagged (with permission) from The First Line, which is an excellent magazine. Every few months they provide a first sentence, and the objective is to write a short story using that first sentence. It’s a really great way to overcome writer’s block, and I had a lot of fun trying my hand at it. I wrote this while I was wrapping up my latest manuscript, because I needed a bit of a breather. I suppose it really says something about how addicted to writing I am that I write one thing to take a break from writing another thing.

Roy owned the only drive-thru funeral business in Maine. Nobody ever said thank you.

As a child, Roy had been very quiet. Soft, his father would say through the yellow-brown film of his cigar in the evening. The boy is soft. It was a word Roy couldn’t hear without the memory of a hacking cough and Perry Como on a scratchy record.

And now, as a man, Roy was still soft. Still quiet. This was something his wife admired. She knitted him scarves, hats with little flaps to keep his ears warm; she filled his thermos with soup and kissed him at the door and told him to be careful out there.

For this, the thick Maine snow was no bother. The occasional blown tire was no bother. When Roy left the warmth of his car he could smell the cold air sneaking into the wool of his scarf and he remembered to be careful. It was all a man could want to have someone in the threshold every evening telling him to be careful.

Sometimes they weren’t dead, not really. Someone would see a lump on the side of the road and make a call to the police, and the police would call him to clean up the mess. Squirrels, mostly, or raccoons that had misjudged the distance of approaching cars. There goes that strange man, that soft man, that quiet man—that’s what the drivers might have said if they slowed down to see Roy with his shovel lifting the hapless animal from the gravel. Instead they sped on, always, and he was only a blur to them. He was as substantial as snow, as passing trees, as a small animal wandering to its death.

Each death was twenty dollars. Each near-death was still twenty dollars—to the state of Maine there was no difference between living and dead on the side of the road. But Roy always knelt to look. A squirrel, a raccoon, someone’s cat, its stomach rising and dropping, its eyes closed like it didn’t know it was still alive at all. A living animal would always rather scramble away, even if only to die in peace.

If they weren’t dead, they died in Roy’s truck, a white ford pickup that lost itself in the snow. Best to stay invisible, Roy knew. People expected roadside animals to disappear, or to have never existed at all. They didn’t care that his wife poured his soup into a thermos, that the sweaters she knit for him smelled like crisp, cold wool, or that she told him to be careful. They paid their taxes and all they asked was for the road to be clear, to be able to go for a walk without having to explain this lifelessness to their child, without having to pull on their dog’s leash to keep it from devouring something with a disease.

And they didn’t care where these animals went. At night, the headlights of Roy’s truck filled their curtains and then retracted, anonymous as any other car. It was a funeral procession as ceremonious as the garbage truck that emptied the metal cans magically by dawn, or the newspapers that appeared in plastic bags on doorsteps.

It was a quiet life, a soft life, to be so simple as a blur in the windows of passing cars. Nobody ever said thank you.