Maybe I should have sent flowers, thought Tony. But flowers wouldn’t have been enough, for Zenia. She would have sneered at flowers. What was needed was a bowl of blood. A bowl of blood, a bowl of pain, some death. Then maybe she would stay buried.

Tony didn’t tell West about the memorial service. He might have gone to it, and fallen to pieces. Or else he might not have gone and then felt guilty, or been upset that she’d attended without him. He knew Zenia was dead though, he’d seen it in the paper: a small oblong, hidden in the middle. Canadian Killed in Terrorist Blast. When they’d been young, blast had been a name for a party He hadn’t said anything to Tony, but she’d found that page with the piece cut out of it. They had a tacit agreement never to mention Zenia.

Tony presents the eggs in two ceramic eggcups shaped like chickens that she picked up in France a few years ago. The French liked to make dishes in the shapes of the things that were going to be served in them; when it came to eating they rarely beat about the bush. Their menus read like a vegetarian’s nightmare—hearts of these, brains of that. Tony appreciates this directness. She has a French fish platter too, in the shape of a fish.

Shopping in general is not her thing, but she has a weakness for souvenirs. She bought these eggcups near the site of the battlefield where General Marius of Rome wiped out a hundred thousand Teutones—or two hundred thousand, depending on who was doing the chronicling—a century before the birth of Christ. By dangling a small advance contingent of his forces in front of the enemy like bait, he’d decoyed them to his chosen slaughtering-ground. After the battle, three hundred thousand Teutones were sold into slavery, and ninety thousand others may or may not have been thrown into a pit on Mont Sainte Victoire at the urging of a possibly Syrian prophetess, whose name may or may not have been Martha. She was said to have worn purple robes.