Dime Novels From Oblivion

Like an animal, the adolescent boy was destined to be slaughtered, and like an animal, his blood and flesh sacrifice was a gesture to please the eternal forces that sustained his people. The hungry gods that accepted the gift of young carved flesh would be satiated for the time being, and in turn, would protect the kingdom until it again came time to offer up more sustenance. To make their gift special, the boy whose blood was to pay for prosperity was anointed king for a day. Ceremonies, feasts, and gifts made for a spectacular climax to a relatively short life. The dizzying experience and sense of duty were opiates that dulled the boy’s suppressed dread of the main event. By nightfall, the boy was laying on an altar, stripped of the kingly robes and ceremonial ornaments of power. The real king had returned to take it all back. The boy’s tear filed eyes were staring up at the point of a dagger clutched in the hands of a high priest. This last moment was the longest of his life.  T

As we advance in years, we find time has made some people superfluous to us or has made us unnecessary to other people. To us, as to them, we become the living dead. There is a particular frustration to grieving a living breathing loss. They are present but forever absent. It is a state that is not so final but just as hopeless. In the past, we took for granted these souls' destiny to accompany us through life, but then gradually or somehow without warning, they’re lost forever. Their memory becomes an abstract figment of dreams. The living dead. They are friends, family, lovers; physically, they still exist but are always separated by the unbridgeable and yawning gape of time.

"What's inside the black hole?" The seven-year-old Grace asked the rest of the breakfast table before taking a sip of orange juice. The adults at the table were caught off guard by the question. Eric, Grace's father, froze up as he was about to take a bite of his avocado toast. The slice of bread hovered in front of his gaping mouth. His eyes shifted to the big casement windows that peered out over the sky above lake Michigan. It was as if he'd forgotten, but there it was, the roaming portal to oblivion hanging in the sky just beside the sun. The irresistible force of this fissure in the fabric of existence was devouring earth's life-giving star, slowly draining it from the sky into its eternal gullet. "Well, no one knows for sure," Grace's mother Meridith interjected. "My teacher says it's going to suck up the whole world," Grace said with a dramatic gesture of her hands. "I was an engineer at a start-up that was trying to