“I remember Mom’s face when I told them,” she continued, a certain heaviness in her voice, her eyes grown, dark, deep. She bit her lip slightly. “I don’t know how Dad looked… That’s funny, isn’t it? I didn’t even notice. … Read More
V. The Scenes of His Childhood. Eden upon the mount; the world above and the world below; old woman Templeton; what was there and what was not. In his very early days, when he was but a toddler and had … Read More
But even then she seemed unready, somehow, to tell him what her parents had said. Perhaps it was the oath she had made him take that was yet in the back of her mind, that thought that he would not … Read More
IIII. The Stage of his Childhood. Silverspur and the Blackmores; the history that intercedes; a soil too shallow; a soil too dark. The city of Silverspur where Samuel spent the better part of his youth and the majority of his … Read More
Several weeks before her funeral, Victoria Tucker had begun to notice the telltale changes in her body. She had somehow known from the very first, though she had continued for a time in a kind of quietly willful denial of … Read More
They call it the Castle of Cold Water.There Ugolino on a pinnaclebuilt his lonely citadelin signal of his reign,as if mere height and commanding visionwould grant a man whole dominionover the very earth itself. And there from the Castle of … Read More
III. Infancy Secrecy; a ring; laughter of the cradle and laughter of solitude; the imp and the angel. We are begun strangely — are we not? One writes of a human being, precisely as he differs from his fellows, and therefore is … Read More
When he thought back on it, he remembered above all the impossible scene, the emergence of the girl from her tomb, how she had sat up there in the coffin askance in the grave, gasping amidst the splintered boards that … Read More
II. Origins. The soil; the seed; the sprout. The persons responsible for Samuel Thornfield’s conception, birth, and upbringing would perhaps best be described as normal, decent, upstanding, law-abiding, well-meaning folk, the sort of parents that both bless a child and … Read More
