Dime Novels From Oblivion

It was a typical Midwestern late fall evening. The dower grey sky had dimmed into a cloudy starless night illuminated only by the swelling stream of headlights from rush hour traffic. Ryan was standing on a street corner watching the oncoming cars hoping the next pair of lights might be his ride.
A low and gentle breeze stirred the dry leaves and styrofoam cups covering the sidewalk. Ryan clenched his cold fists in the pockets of his coat and lowered his head presaging the icy gust of air that followed.
“C’mon, C'mon,” he muttered.
He saw a black Prius break away from the current of commuters and slowly approached the curb.
“Finally.”
He acknowledged the driver with a wave and the car came to a stop. Ryan slid in the back seat and greeted the driver.
“Hey, how are ya?” He asked.
“Good,” she replied. “And you?”
“Fine fine,” Ryan said.
The driver looked at the GPS receiver mounted on the windshield.
“So let’s see we’re going to 4453 south whatever,” her voice trailed as she finished…

The twenty-four day old Olivia Bennet made her family debut at her grandmother’s funeral. Nothing unites people like a common enemy and death certainly is the one thing we all have in common.  There were three generations of people milling around the cold corpse of a woman many of them never met more than once or in Olivia’s case not at all.

Olivia’s mother, the bereaved and beloved daughter of the deceased, Charlotte Bennet stood by her mother’s casket, cradling her newborn while accepting condolences. Her husband stood stiffly by her side, his eyes cast down, and his hands folded in front of him but still looking a bit unsure of how sad he should appear to me.

“That’s just the proper amount of mourning,” she assured her confused husband.

“She’ll always live on in our memories,” was a recurring sentiment. Charlotte wanted to ask them “Her own granddaughter will never even meet her, whose memories is she going to live on in?”

Charlotte decided against having that outburst as cathartic…

Karnot propped up his tired old body with his cane and quietly watched as a group of parents showed their children how to dig a small irrigation ditch. On most days a sight such as that would be enough to move the otherwise stalwart man to tears.  The 66-year-old Karnot had lost his only child, and now it was far too late for him to have another. For a man in his twilight years, it was a very lonely apocalypse. It would all die with him. But this time watching the process of one generation passing on knowledge to the next quelled his sadness. The old pioneer may not have carried his genes into the cosmos, but he could be sure he was leaving a hard fought for legacy. The survival of any species is never more than a numbers game. Life, especially in it’s more complex forms is exceedingly fragile. Matter will only take on consciousness for the briefest of periods before entropy tears the physical form apart and scatters the pieces into oblivion. Make as many copies as you can as quickly a…