Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

A rickety piece of shit the blind bard is reported to have sat on during a visit to Syracuse a few hundred years back. It’s stuck in the corner, a bronze inscription above that reads Homer’s chair. Is it Homer’s chair? Well, there are many Homer’s chairs scattered across Syracuse and can they all be Homer’s chair? Why not? The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.

“You don’t rob a man of his suffering,” says Gelon quietly. “That’s his.”

Hunger, what an odd thing it is. Is the source of all love a lacking? Is that what creates emotion? Not a presence but an absence. Do you need to be emptied to be filled?

“Yes, it does. It truly does. But this happened in another world entirely. Not the dusty plains of Ilium nor Syracuse. No, it was in a land of rain and woods, a green-growing world, but yet it happened in almost exactly the same way. The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.

Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.