“Kill.”

“Kill who?”

“Kill him.”

He touched his skin, where the neck met the shoulder. Cold cement. Like so many times before, he told himself that death was not the end. He knew better, but anything to cope. It didn't work.

The last words Yuri ever said were “Watch out for yourself. No one else will.” It seemed appropriate when his body hit the floor.

“Kill.”

Sitting on the roof of an old apartment building overlooking the city, he winced as the wind stung what parts of his face he could still feel. Adequately dramatic, he thought.

“Have you ever thought about jumping?” asked the shadows.

“I have,” he admitted, “but what's the point, when I can't any longer feel anyway? What's the point, if when my body meets concrete I won't even experience the sweet sting of release, momentary though it may be? How will I know it's over then?”

“Besides,” he said, “some kid might see me – what's left of me – lying in a pool of my blood. I don't want to scare anyone.”

The shadows laughed. “As if you even had a heart – you're fooling nobody.”

He lit a cigarette and said nothing. Sometimes, in our rush to conquer and degrade, we confuse details.

After all, the heart and the soul are two separate creatures.

“Kill who?”

“Kill him.”

“Watch out for yourself.”

When he exited the lobby, the man in the coat was already waiting for him across the street.

“Your face is pale.” One hell of a greeting, he thought.

“Come,” the man said, “let's take a walk.”

As they passed by a playground, he saw a little boy with a scraped knee, crying in his mother's lap.

May you never know suffering worse than that, he thought.

“The theft of innocence is the greatest sin of all,” he said, turning to the man in the coat. “Murder pales in comparison when death is an inevitability. But to be forever blind to our own capacity for evil – for that, I would kill and kill again.”

It started to rain, so they ducked into a parking garage for shelter.

“But you're forgetting,” said the man, “to be innocent is to have not yet learned life's most important lesson.”

“Which is what?” he asked, reaching into his pocket.

“Watch out for yourself.”

“No one else will.”