Read The Short Stories

The Marionette King

Prince Marion entered this world as his mother exited it. An ordinary fact of life that applies to royals as much as to commoners.

The king was a loving father and as such felt great sorrow and guilt to not be able to give his son the ordinary gift of having a mother.

Prince Marion cried for the first year of his life, not a cry of attention that demands but a cry of true loss that sobs and cannot be soothed by a loving father.

On Marion's first birthday the people of the kingdom brought many gifts to honor the motherless prince. One of those gifts was marionette dolls crafted in the likeness of the prince's dead mother and living father. For the first time in his life the young prince stopped crying and smiled.

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