Introduction

For Leonidas, the morning was dormant.  The spiraling mist disappeared behind the last of the school boys and the fuming vapors of the sun.  His was a synthetic apartment facing the ocean with a calm sand-bathed northern window.  In the horizon, the mast clock announced the morning just as well as his weary open eyes and blasted hair.  The result of the quasi sinking of a pirate ship, the mast offered a good-enough estimation of the time by marking the levels of the tides during the day.  Leonidas was bored.  He could not remember when the switch was flipped, when he had stopped being a decent man.  Maybe it had been a year ago when he started his work or maybe he had been one all along and it had taken time and disappointment to bring the shadows to the surface.  It didn’t matter anymore.  Sitting on the balcony, outstretched as he believed he should always be, he reflected upon what had been a notorious life.  He had everything he needed and more and yet at any time someone could come and take it all away from him.  In fact he had many times imagined his own demise but never quite been able to imagine the ultimate end perhaps because he was too much of a coward to see himself dead.  He had fought all his life to become who he was but it all seemed empty to him.  The money, the women, the praise; they all had taken more than they had given.  In the light of that balcony where he spent his afternoons along with that faithful glass of gin, he painted a scene of unfulfilled every-things.  His essence was complaining in the mirror and looking out to that blue horizon of all the hope he had already lost.  Several years before this afternoon, Leonidas had been influenced by what is commonly known as ambition.  He had looked around him and he had decided to make a change.