Corcoran Story - Chapter 15 - Macklin

So here's the problem:  I'm graduating and I have no clue what I want to do with my life.

Everyone rants on and on about this amazing potential I have and how I could do anything I wanted if I'd just apply myself.  This begs the question.

Everyone else in my family follows their bliss but my bliss doesn't lead beyond the next party.

My kid brother, the firebug, wants to be fire chief. 

He's already off to a good start by saving the family, the guests and the house after a prank with Devin's birthday cake went terribly wrong.

Devin's found a sweet little house and is happily churning out books.

Being an international super spy like Mom might not be so bad

If it weren't for getting called in to work at all hours of the day and night until she's too tired to get home.

So, when Ayesha Ansari, the local crime boss, asked me to do a few little favours for her, (for which she was willing to pay handsomely), I jumped at the chance.

When the old bat asked for another kind of favour

I bailed!

But as long as the relationship stays strictly professional, it's all good.

Although I was on my way to jail

When they buried the old man.

He was at the police station, looking for a new case, when blam, it was curtains for him.

Mom had a few choice words for me about missing the the burial

But there wasn't too much she could say, since she got called into work before it was over.

Corcoran Story - Chapter 14 - Ingrid

The offal of our community keep me busy.  Calls to examine evidence come in at all hours.

I finish the overtime too exhausted to climb the stairs and collapse anywhere to grab a few precious z's before my regular shift. 

In my free time, there are sources to interview...

Research to conduct...

And reports to write.

The twins are nearly ready for high school.  Macklin wants to grow up to be king.

Devin is unimpressed.

He wants to grow up to be an illustrious author.

And now Byron is in school as well.

With the boys in school, I could be anywhere at any hour:

From looking into money laundering at a charity ball,

To researching arms smuggling in Shang Simla,

To investigating ticket forgeries in Al Simhara.

Fortunately, Blaine has taken on the lion's share of the cooking.

And cleaning.

When he discovered that I'd kept seeds from my parents' garden, there was no peace until I permitted him to plant them.

Marlowe helps me out with research when he doesn't have a case of his own.

Giving me some time to learn the piano.

And paint, mostly in the same honeycomb style that Daddo used.  I call this one "Grey Matter".

Macklin turned thirteen without incident, at a small family party.

As did Devin.

Unlike Byron.

It isn't fair of me to blame Byron.  It was Macklin who decided to raid the bar.

Unaware that his father was watching out the window.

Which put an end to an otherwise lovely party.

Marlowe's trying boot camp tactics.

While Devin favours an appeal to logic and self-preservation instinct.

Which leaves Macklin obdurate.

Meanwhile, Byron is wont to play with fire whenever he's left to his own devices.

I was able to nail Macklin down for a prom portrait.

Devin, as usual, was too quick for me.

Corcoran Story - Chapter 13 - Blaine

The night I became an elder, on my return home from Roscoe's, I nibbled a slice of leftover birthday cake

and mixed a Fine Fruit Triple Epic Blast with a Quirk, a thing I did not ordinarily take.
 

I was about to toss it when, for some unknown reason, I changed my mind.

Unthinkingly, burnt out after a dull evening

With the spectre of an equally lacklustre morrow, I raised to my lips a sip of the Triple Epic Blast in which I had soaked a morsel of birthday cake.
 

No sooner had the fiery liquid mingled with the birthday cake crumbs touched my palate than a tingle ran through me and I stopped, concentrating on the incredible thing that was happening to me.  An ineffable joy had invaded my consciousness, something unique, outside of my experience, with no hint from whence it came.

And at once the vagaries of daily life had become irrelevant,

its disasters insignificant,

its brevity illusory --

this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling me with a precious spirit, or rather, this spirit was not in me, it *was* me.  I had ceased now to feel ordinary, mortal.  Whence could it have come to me, this omnipotent elation?

I feel that there is much to be said for the belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some edifice, and thus effectively lost to us

Until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison.

Then they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken.  Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.

At the hour when I usually went downstairs to tend the garden, I would inspect the platoons of grapes, drawn up in ranks and numbered, like little purple marbles, ready for a game; but what most enraptured me were the lifefruit, golden tinged, through a series of imperceptible gradations to their haloes -- still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed -- with an iridescence that was not of this world.  I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form and who, through the disguise of their firm, comestible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, this hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality I should recognise again.

The moment came when I saw Marlowe, dressed, as the populace imagine kings to be dressed, in luxurious athletic wear such as no other man wore, occasionally looking up at the pulse monitor, and paying scant attention to the passers-by, as though his sole object was to take exercise, without thinking that he was being observed and that every head was turned towards him.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, Little Boy.  You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist's nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.

The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.  Even those women who claim to judge a man by his looks alone, see in those looks the emanation of a special way of life.  That is why they fall in love with soldiers or with firemen; the uniform makes them less particular about the face; they feel they are embracing beneath the gleaming breastplate a heart different from the rest, more gallant, more adventurous, more tender; and so it is that a young king or crown prince may make the most gratifying conquests in the countries that he visits, and yet lack entirely that regular and classic profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, for a stockbroker.