Dime Novels From Oblivion

Many ghosts watch me. They are specters from a life I lost. They were loved ones but now they are tormenting aberrations, painful memories given form. My husband, his ghost leans over me when I'm on my back with the sergeant from Kansas.
I feel his shadow cast itself against my bare flesh, and I know that's his specter looms in the doorway. Witnessing his wife giving herself to the conquers of the land he died for at the price of bread and cigarettes. The pain my betrayal causes me is compounded by knowing the misery it inflicts on the soul such a dutiful man. I am the demon that tortures my loved one in death.
Desperation has banished pride, and life is only survival. I have not the luxury of being Gretta, the wife, a mother, and the German. I am just a rat scurrying through twisted blood-soaked ruins. My only solace comes from the thought that maybe when he sees my flesh wither around my bones, and he sees the whiskeys twinkle in my glazed over eyes his love for me instantl…

Staff Sargent Grimes had just accepted his commission into a very exclusive class, that of a martyr. He had singled handed disabled the enemies chemical tipped warheads. The tide of battle had been turned all at the cost of a simple staff sergeant. Grimes actions saved countless numbers of his fellow soldiers. Under other circumstances, the young sergeant would have been an instant hero amongst the ranks of enlisted men as well as those on the home front.
Grimes saw to it that would not be the case. Before committing himself to an act of unparalleled valor, he took to the radio and to every social media outlet available to him even in the remote battlefield and confessed to having molested his daughter. He seemed genuinely remorseful in his instantly viral confession broadcasted live from the theater of war via his smart phone.
The shaking camera came on Grimes huddled in his sandy foxhole. The background was awash with flames and the thunder of artillery flashing through the eb…