“Sure,if you’re going grocery shopping anyway we’re almost out of…

“Not that kind of store,” she said.

“What kind, then?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” she said. “I just have the urge to go out there and, you know… get something. Don’t you ever get that urge?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I try to find some way to indulge in it that doesn’t take me beyond my means. Besides, haven’t you ever heard that the best things in life are free?”

“Of course,” she said. “That’s why I always ask you for money instead of working for it. It’s so much more satisfying when you just give it to me.”

Once at the top, he hefted the brush and considered where to begin, where to make the first precise and masterful stroke. It was an important decision, he knew, but time was also precious. Natural lighting was crucial to the success of his work.

The light was perfect at the moment, and it would only remain usable during the morning hours. If he hadn’t finished by then, he’d have no choice but to take the ladder around and start on the west side of the house anyway.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I’m feeling nauseous.”

“You mean nauseated,” I said. “‘Nauseous’ refers to something that invokes feelings of nausea, not the state of…”

“How would you feel if I threw up all over you, right now?” she asked.

“Nauseated,” I said.

“Then shut the fuck up, I’m feeling nauseous.”

He didn’t know or care who had hired him to kill so many young men. He didn’t know what they had done to deserve death at his hands… he didn’t know if they even did deserve it. That was not a matter for him to decide. He was neither a philosopher nor a judge.

But there was one question that plagued him, that dogged him nightly. Many of his targets seemed to be insomniacs, being awake at their computers or reading in their beds when he came upon them. And when they saw their doom was upon them, more than one of them had chosen to say as their last words, “You can’t kill me! I’m a virgin!”

And so Ichiro, though he did not like to ask questions, wondered still: why did so many teenage males confuse ninjas and unicorns?

“Do you ever worry,” the larger man said to the smaller, “about posterity?”

“About what?”

“You know, your legacy.”

“Oh,” the smaller man said. He held up a gaudily jeweled ring. “I think I’ll leave a fine one, if any bastard of mine ever tracks me down to claim it.”

“What I mean is, we are outlaws, criminals. We rob and plunder, and sometimes kill.”

“When it is needful to kill, only,” his companion said.

“When it is needful,” the big man agreed. “But needful or not, how do you think history will look back on you?”

“Kindly, I should think,” the man said. He shrugged. “I’m not particularly bothered about it.”

“Kindly?” the big man echoed. “Kindly?”

“Yes, kindly,” the thief said. “They think kindly enough of their absent king, whose wasteful wars necessitate the taxes that turned folks like you and I out of our homes. They lay the blame for that at the feet of his poor, duty-bound brother, who does his best to keep the realm running and feed the starving beast abroad. If my meager depredations are remembered at all, they will no doubt also be blamed upon John.”

“Or you’ll be cursed alongside him.”

“I think not. Who will curse us? The many and common poor folk who form the meat and blood of this lands? We have done nothing to them,” the man said. “It is the gentry they revile… the taxmen even more. They are vilified for the same reason that we rob them: because they have money that others do not. And if they’re villains to the multitudes,and we direct our evil against them, does that not make us good?”

“Does it?”

“Of course not,” the smaller thief said. “But posterity is a tidy custodian… it likes to keep things neat.”

“So you do not worry about posterity because you think you will be regarded as a hero?”

“No, no, not a whit,” the smaller man said. “I do not worry about posterity because I do not expect to be around to greet it… save in passing, as it were. I am an honest thief and would not misrepresent my intentions to anyone, for anything. That would make me no more than a common swindler.”

“Do you mean to say that if you could set down how you would be remembered throughout all of history, you wouldn’t do so?”

“Of course I would, but I can’t, so it’s no use worrying about it. Although, since the subject is up…”

“Yes?”

“It would be very kind if some considerate scribe were to write for me a lady-friend.”

“Perhaps to a layperson,” his companion said. “I’m not convinced that ‘tool use’ is as simple as all that. The rock is something in their environment that they make use of… but then, so are the shellfish. We may as well label eating as ‘tool use’ since it involves making use of an object. If otters could be observed shaping the rocks, fashioning something from them…”

“So, then, when a bird strips the bark off a twig before using it to dig insects out of…”

“Well, now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“How am I being ridiculous?” the first man asked. “It fits the definition you just gave.”

“Birds and twigs… instinctive behavior!”

“Who says tool use can’t be instinctive?”

“If we’re talking about tool use as a meaningful signifier of intelligence…”

“That’s such a slippery term.”

The floating otters watched the boat drifting slowly out of sight, listening to the babel of increasingly agitated sound coming from the cute, clownish creatures who stood on the floating hulk. They almost sounded intelligent.

The whole long scene replayed itself in his head for the rest of the day, and for much of the week beyond that… the awful crushing inevitability of it all losing none of its grip on him to the power of either time or distance. It would continue to well up within him from time to time, throughout that week and the next month and all the long years after that. Even much later, when he was happily married and comfortably established in his career and in all other regards far removed from the boy he’d been in high school, it still came back to him at odd moments, threatening to overwhelm him with disappointment or frustration or embarrassment.

There are those who say that we always regret most the things that we do not do, the risks that we do not take. These are people who have never been haunted by the ghost of a chance.

“You know I told you I don’t feel right charging you,” she said.

“I don’t feel right taking your time for nothing,” he said. “It’s my own money. It doesn’t come from the church.”

“Okay, then,” she said, taking the bill from him. “You want the same thing as last time?”

“Yes,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “Yes, please.”

“Okay,” she said. She looked down and cleared her throat. “Forgive me, Father,” she said, in a loud, clear voice.

“I don’t want to,” he said. “I’d really rather not. In fact… I think I won’t.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is that what you wanted?”

“Yes,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “Yes. Bless you. Yes.”

Sing not to me, oh Muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus. Sing not of the rage of the one who brought so much misfortune upon the Achaeans, hastening so many souls down to Hades, offering up so much prey to dogs and vultures. Sing not a word of how the dire wrath within Achilles grew. Sing not one note about the anger of the god-born killer, doomed to die.

Mention nothing of the murderous, drunken and poison-borne rages of Heracles. Bother me not with the pride-driven rage of Aristodemus. Forget the deadly warp-spasms of Cú Chulainn. Leave unsung paeans to any great berserkers of old.

The hottest burning rage in antiquity is but the trembling flame of a draught-plagued candle to me, oh Muse, for I have seen a web stretched across the width of the world with many untrue things woven into its face, and each and every one of them kindles within me a bonfire of wrath to rival Hephaestus’s forge.

RAEG.

“No, honey,” her mother had said in a very tired voice. “Those are just lights. Street lights, cars, lights in buildings. Nothing special.”

“Oh,” the girl had said, disappointed, and she’d turned her attention away from the window for the rest of the flight.

On this flight, though, she had been able to see the green and brown of fields and the gray strips that were roads and the tiny-looking buildings, at least for the beginning of it… but as the plane had climbed higher and higher, eventually it had broken through the ceiling of clouds hanging over the city and now when she looked out, clouds were all she could see… a vast and snowy expanse of them.

At least, she thought they were clouds. She was enjoying looking at them, and wasn’t about to ask her mother, just in case they weren’t.