Dime Novels From Oblivion

 On the side of a lonely pot marked ridden road, a nameless child, ten years old at most, is using the very last of her energies, physical and spiritual, to take the final few shambling steps she'd ever take before falling on her hands and knees into the mud streak slush. Headlights appear in the colorless winter haze, but they quickly over her and disappear. The touch of rushing air being their only acknowledgment. Torn inside out by hunger and breaking apart in the cold, she falls face-first into the gravel and takes a final few long and shallow breaths. Silently hovering in the heavy grey sky, there was a spectator to witness these last gasps. It measured and recorded the rapidly fading heartbeat down to its last few pumps. Through a thermal vision lens, it watched her already diminished heat signature fade from a mass of weakening greens and yellows into a cold blue. When this process was over, the witness gently descended from the sky and swallowed the body whole before smooth

  The modern rational mind has several terms meant to extinguish any notion of the mystical. Coincidental was the word Ethan's mind kept coming up with to keep his thought process in the confines of empirical, secular orthodoxy, but the more he had to use it, the more it rang hollow. At first, the similarities between the six-year-old Henry and his deceased uncle Rowan were negligible and superficial. It seemed quirky a first-grader would love gorgonzola so much, and it was strange he had a penchant for reenacting moments from "Ghost Busters 2," a movie he never saw but was his late uncle's favorite. It was downright disturbing, though, when the child was caught with a small cocktail glass containing the long-departed Rowan's favorite cocktail, a drink mixed with the portions that perfectly fit the long departed's taste preferences. Veronica, Ethan's wife, and Henry's mother recreationally dabbled in leftover esoteric traditions that now only existed a

 On a sunless pale winter morning, the bulging gray clouds amassed over Chicago broke and unleashed snow that was fluttering down to earth by nearly two inches an hour. Plows rushed through the streets, packing the snow into steep white banks that blocked the roads from the walkways.  Carla was on the clock as a DoorDasher.  Since there was no school and nowhere to go, her 3 children had to ride along with her.  Carla couldn't help but feel a twinge of resentment for having to work on Christmas eve. She wasn't religious, but this was one of the few nights of the year her older and more tradition-oriented family members expected her to attend a version of a mass that they, their parents and, their parent's parents heard their entire lives.  Now that most of those family members were gone, Carla had no inclination to actually attend a 3-hour service. Still, it upset her that she couldn't just the same. Carla was a gig worker, and technically she didn't have to clock i