Dime Novels From Oblivion

It had been three days since the nine-year-old James had fallen with fever. By the end of the first day, the boy's family was resigning themselves to the inevitable but oft-repeated tragedy of losing a child.
The sick child was being tended to by his mother and two older sisters. His mother's care was comforting if detached. She soothed the boy's fever, baked flesh with cold water and the soothing touch of her hand, and did so without a word. Even when Jame's would call for her. His glazed-over eyes now too distant to see her there. She didn't answer. Her sole responsibility to James at this point was to try and mitigate the physical agony of death.
James was too weak to stand, and he couldn't move much. Still, his burning body was frequently ravaged by tremors that resembled grand-mal seizures often accompanied by vague and mystifying rambles. For some of Jame's, more lived family members recognized the terrified disordered speech of the dying.
It is prob…

Cheering crowds lined the street, and confetti rained from the windows
Medals gleamed on the broad chests of strapping straight-backed lads in uniforms creaseless and pressed.
In a smoked filled room just above the parade route, were the invalids.
No one on the street had any idea about the convent of mangled men were watching the procession from a dingy smoked filled room, looking out at the world from between closed blinds. Their ears were torn between the crashing cymbals and blaring horns of the marching band and the screams of men whose minds were permanently trapped in a waking nightmare; only death could end. The crowd below couldn’t hear their cries.
For the invalids, the parade was a morbid curiosity, maybe even a torment for some. Victory was a hollow word to an 18-year-old kid with a face melted by napalm.
The invalids were casualties of the war that had been too unfortunate to die. They were not to be commemorated with a field of ivory wite crosses, they were to be forgott…

Palden was born only eleven years ago was but his body a vessel for something infinite.  He was the sacred force that powered the quantum machinery of the cosmos in living form. It was proclaimed that behind the child's squinty eyes were the mind of the universe. That's why he was Emperor, a god wearing a man's flesh. The child's wiry body was adorned in imperial dress woven from fibers worth many times the lives of the subjects who crafted it. It was a flowing tapestry of gold and jade that incorporated designs to intricate they were almost hypnotic to the human eye.

 The godchild lived in a palace built on the eastern side of the highest summit that loomed over his imperial capital. The monument that would stand long after the demise of this latest mortal incarnation of the emperor was a reminder to the people who lived in its shadow he was always watching. Albeit it with vision blurred by a permanent stigmatism.

His official shrine was at the peak of his fortress. I…

An icy autumn rain turned the barbed wire covered enclave of dirt into a muddy gash. The ground oozed as if the earth itself was bleeding beneath the boots of the soldiers living in the sprawling mass grave. On the edge of winter, the days were short, and the sun had already fallen over the front. A shroud of dust and smoke smothered the light of the stars. There were only the glowing red ends of the cigarettes the soldiers clutched in their trembling hands.
Victoria or "Vicky" was a short-haired terrier with pointed ears and rings of brown fur around her eyes she wore like a mask. Vicky was walking along the sodden trench with her nose to the mud. Her flopping ears stiffed, and she suddenly stopped.
"I think Vicky sees something," said a young soldier in tattered khakis, his quivering hand struggling to bring a cigarette to his lips.
The sensory overcharge of war quickly rattled the minds of men, but Vicky stayed sharp. Nothing, not the distant thundering of artil…

Lingering awareness of our own mortality is probably the most punishing consequence of self-awareness. Death is a downer; it’s in the background of our entire lives. It stirs in us melancholy thoughts during our fleeting moments of joy, and it causes sleepless nights, it renders any action or accomplishment pointless.
Human consciousness has risen to the level of neurotic, but it seems natural humans have an obsession with the end of ourselves and all things. No matter what we tell ourselves, no matter what our endeavors and their outcomes, it was all a foregone conclusion.
This collection of short stories confronts the finality of death, the undoing of all that is. What do you do when the only thing you know every breath, every beat of your heart, and every thought could be your very last?
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In a small wood-paneled study, cramped between heavy bookcases ladened with dusty moth-eaten volumes, lit by the pale grey light from a solitary window was Alexander Golitsyn, the third considered by a dwindling number of people to be an Emporer. Alexander was sitting at a desk barely big enough to accommodate both his diary and porcelain teapot.
"All my efforts to hold onto anything in life has been like trying to clutch water in my hands. Life is over, yet I go on living. There is no reason left for me to be here. I'm just waiting for my last heartbeat and my last breath."
A knock a the study's door brought Alexander's hand to a halt. He didn't know it when he put the pen down, but this melancholy paragraph was to be the last attempt at poetry he'd ever make.
"Yes? What is it!" Alexander huffed with tobacco chared vocal cords.
"I have an urgent message for the sovereign!" an earnest young man answered through the door.
"Fine, you…