Mark Paren
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You’re living in your boyhood town. How wonderful! I live about 25 miles north of my boyhood home. I sometimes visit and walk the old neighborhood and remember the joys and tribulations of earlier days. Much of the city, particularly my neighborhood, is the same as it was in the 60s.
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“That was when I noticed that Randy read more slowly and more carefully than most of us. Later, I learned he may have had a mild form of dyslexia.” Seems Randy and I had some things in common. Small towns in the 60s and 70s were much different than the suburbs I grew up in. I found the kids in my mom‘s small hometown to be more open, less defensive and open to “stuff” at least until we were into full adolescence. Great story!
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Chapter 8. What Was Freely Given
Mark Paren posted new chapter in Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale
I did not know, in that first instant after he had said it, what shape a choosing so entire might properly take, nor by what mechanism a dead man and a living boy were meant to close the whole vast distance a pane of ordinary glass had held between them the better part of two months. I had spent a great many years learning the theory of such things, in the half-remembered fashion the old tales kept it, a night of thin veils, a door left unbarred, but theory is a poor guide to a threshold a man h -
Chapter 7 The Last Trick
Mark Paren commented on Mark Paren's story chapter in Chapter 7 The Last Trick
Good comment. That’s the moral of the story. -
Chapter 7 The Last Trick
Mark Paren posted new chapter in Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale
I had known, from the first hour I rose from whatever bed a soul rises from who has been refused both gate and pit, that some nights carry a different weight than others, though I could not always have told you, in the moment of their arriving, from what quarter the weight came. I knew it that morning, the last morning of October, before ever I came to the glass. I knew it in the manner a man knows weather is turning before the sky has troubled itself to confirm the knowledge, an ache low in wha -
Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
Mark Paren commented on Mark Paren's story chapter in Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
Halloween is a chapter away. -
Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
Mark Paren commented on Mark Paren's story chapter in Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
This story is full of tropes, but that’s the fun of it. -
Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
Mark Paren commented on Mark Paren's story chapter in Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
That would be the cruelest trick of all. -
Chapter 6. What the Storm Carried
Mark Paren posted new chapter in Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale
I had marked, in the days since I learned his name, that a change had come over my own watching that I had not thought a dead man still capable of undergoing. It is one labor to love a stranger through glass, to ache after a face that owns, so far as the watcher knows, no name at all, and quite another to love a face that answers, in the watcher's own private thought, to Julian, for a name is a door, however small, and once a door has been opened even a crack, a man finds he cannot shut it again -
I appreciate and value your input. Thank you.
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Libenter victi sumus, nam dulcis est haec captivitas. Thanks for sticking with it and taking me back to my high school Latin days
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Thanks, I was aiming for a happy ending from the start.
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I am delighted you enjoyed my story. Thanks for sticking with it to the end.
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Speaking of Titus. I picked up our new family companion (a dog) and by chance his name is Titus. It was meant to be. Thanks for commenting.
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The net had a bad tear along its lower edge, and Ingomar had been meaning to mend it for three days. He sat in the thin morning sun outside his mother's house with the whole ruined length of it across his knees, working the bone needle through wet cord with more attention than the task strictly required, because attention was, these days, a thing he had learned to spend deliberately rather than let wander where it wanted to go. Smoke rose from a dozen hearths around him in the thin, unhurri
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Chapter 5. The Whole Clean Shape of It
Mark Paren commented on Mark Paren's story chapter in Chapter 5. The Whole Clean Shape of It
We’ll learn much more about Julian in the next chapter. Thanks for commenting. -
Chapter 5. The Whole Clean Shape of It
Mark Paren commented on Mark Paren's story chapter in Chapter 5. The Whole Clean Shape of It
Thank you I appreciate it. -
Chapter 5. The Whole Clean Shape of It
Mark Paren posted new chapter in Stingy Jack’s Last Trick — A Halloween Tale
I had ceased, by that middle stretch of October, to pretend to myself that I came to that window by chance. I had told myself so, the first evening, and told myself so still, weakly, for some nights after, that a man might wander to any window at all and find himself there merely by the accident of an aimless spirit's aimless drift. I could no longer, by the middle of that month, sustain so poor a fiction against my own better knowledge. I came to that window now as a man comes to a labor h -
Not all families had the financial means to protect a child. In time, some of the sons of noble families regained their status, but I suspect the hint of shame was always with them.
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Good point. I was careful with the Vesuvius eruption timeline.
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The villa gates stood open before Marcus's horse had fully stopped, and then his mother was crossing the courtyard faster than he had ever seen her move, faster than dignity strictly allowed, and none of that mattered at all once her arms were around him. "You're thin," she said into his shoulder, which was not what he had expected her to say first, after everything, and it undid him more than any grander words could have. "You're thin, and you're home, and I don't care in what order those
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Jack is making his own decisions … or is he.
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A gothic romance. Thanks for commenting.
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I did not see the hand that set it in my grip. I have turned the question over these many years and more, in every dark hour that a spirit without flesh to tire may yet call an hour, and can tell you only this: that when I rose from whatever bed a soul rises from who has been refused both gate and pit, unbodied now, unbreathing, cast out alike from the house that would not own me and the house that could not keep me, I found the thing already mine. A turnip, hollowed rough, as a boy might h
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A poignant line by Horace. From what I’ve read, that was the attitude in much of Rome. A little Latin is always fun!
