The painter had never seen the town, but he knew it from the dispatches. Monday's market had filled the central square — every stall occupied, the grid of vendors dense in the middle while the residential blocks at the edges held their usual quiet pattern. The planes came at half past four. They did not bomb the bridge or the munitions factory on the outskirts. They bombed the market. The center of the grid — the three-by-three heart of it — was erased, while the perimeter blocks, the ones the pilots apparently had no interest in, stood untouched. He painted what he could not unsee.