May 31, 1860 - Walter Richard Sickert, the son of Danish artist Oswald Adalbert Sickert and English-Irish beauty Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry, is born in Munich, Germany.

1865 - Walter undergoes the third of three horrific surgeries for a fistula-a hole-in his penis that may have left him partially mutilated. Although an exact diagnosis of his congenital deformity and any other health problems associated with it may always remain nebulous, in 1899 he makes reference to his "organs of generation," to his having "suffered all his life," and to his "physical misery." The letters and art reviews he will write in later life will be full of medical and violent metaphors.

1868 - The Sickert family moves to England. By this time, Walter has firmly established himself as the leader of his siblings. He usually gets his way through manipulation, deception, or charm. Sickert scholars agree that he was a "handful." He was "brilliant" with a "volatile temperament." His mother once described him to a family friend as "perverse and wayward"-a physically strong boy whose "tenderness" easily turns to "temper."

From an early age, Walter cannot resist drawing, painting, and making models out of wax. The drawings are clearly the efforts of a tentative but gifted hand that is learning to sketch street scenes, buildings, and figures. But the creative mind guiding the hand is disturbed, violent, and morbid. Some of Sickert's sketches depict women being abducted, and in one, a woman is clearly being tied up and stabbed to death.

1870 - At age ten, Sickert is removed from a boarding school in Reading, where he would later say he found the "horrible old schoolmistress" intolerable. He is then expelled from University College School for reasons unknown and goes on to attend Bayswater Collegiate School.

1878 - After two years at King's College School, Sickert makes first class honors on his London Matriculation exam, but he does not attend university.

1879 -Sickert pursues his love of acting. In one of his earliest existing letters, written in 1880 to a historical biographer, he describes playing an "old man" in Henry V while on tour in Birmingham. Despite recycled stories that he gave up the theater because his true ambition was to be a painter, his letters would eventually indicate a different story. In his early twenties, he continued to act and tour with Henry Irving's company, including a stint as the ghost in Irving's Hamlet at the Lyceum Theater.

1880 - Sickert meets Ellen Cobden, the daughter of powerful Liberal politician Richard Cobden. They will marry five years later.

1883 - Sickert continues to expand his painting and etching skills as a student apprentice to James McNeill Whistler and a disciple of Edgar Degas. He travels to Paris to deliver Whistler's portrait of his mother to the annual Salon exhibition.

February 4 - August 4, 1888 - A spate of music-hall sketches (many of them from a violent imagination depicting female torsos and severed heads and limbs) and the notes he scribbled on them indicate Sickert spent several nights a week at Gatti's Hungerford Palace, one of the most vulgar music halls in London. The music halls Sickert visited were by law supposed to end their performances and sales of liquor no later than half past midnight. Assuming Sickert stayed until the entertainment ended, he would have been on London's streets on many early mornings. Artist Marjorie Lilly recalled in her memoir that he often wandered after the music-hall performances. This peripatetic behavior, she added, continued throughout his life. Whenever "an idea tormented him" he would "thresh round the streets until dawn, lost in meditation."

During this period, Sickert would obsessively rent secret rooms and studios and then abandon them after a short while. It was well known among his acquaintances that these hidden "rat holes" were located on mean streets. One friend and fellow artist noted Sickert's "genius" for ferreting out the gloomiest and most off-putting rooms to work in-a predilection that was a source of bafflement to others-and described him as an "aristocrat by nature" who "had cultivated a strange taste for life below the stairs."

August 7, 1888 - At 3:30 A.M., the body of Martha Tabran, a London prostitute, is discovered on the dark first-floor landing at 37 George Yard Buildings in Whitechapel. Tabran, whose identity will remain unknown for days, has been stabbed thirty-nine times. Her clothes are in disarray, as if she has been in a struggle. Stabbing and cutting wounds to her genitals indicate a sexual component to the crime. A police constable called to the scene sends for a doctor who deduces the victim has been dead approximately three hours. The doctor gauges her age as "36 years old" and describes her as "very well nourished," meaning she is overweight. This detail is significant, because virtually all of the Ripper's victims, including other murdered women the police will discount as having been slain by him, will be either very thin or fat. With rare exceptions they will all be in their late thirties or early forties.

By modern standards, Tabran's murder is investigated so poorly, it can hardly be called an investigation at all. The crime does not excite the police or the press. There is no public mention of her brutal slaying until the first inquest hearing on August 10, and there is little follow-up as time passes.

August 31, 1888 - At approximately 3:45 A.M., the body of Mary Ann Nichols is discovered on Buck's Row, a street bordering the Jews' Cemetery in Whitechapel. Nichols's clothes are in disarray and her skirt has been raised above her hips. Her throat has been severely cut. A doctor called to the scene determines that she has been dead less than half an hour. The body is moved to the nearby Whitechapel Workhouse mortuary, a private "dead house" for workhouse inmates, where it is discovered that Nichols's abdomen had been slashed open, exposing the intestines.

Mary Ann Nichols's wounds seem to indicate that the Ripper did not want her to struggle or scream, and he was ready for the next step of taking his knife below her throat and destroying her naked body. But he wasn't a master of this move yet and could go only so far. He did not remove her bowels or organs. His cuts were only so deep. He took no body part with him as a trophy or a talisman that might bring him sexual fantasy and wonder when he was alone. For the first time, the Ripper had ripped, and perhaps he needed to think about that for a while and feel what it was like and if he wanted more.

Every major English newspaper obsessively covers Nichols's murder and the hearings that follow. The police come under increasing public criticism, belittlement, and blame.

September 1, 1888 - The Daily Telegraph and the Weekly Dispatch run stories about the peculiar experiences a dairyman claimed to have had at 11:00 P.M-within hours of Mary Ann's murder. The dairyman reported to police that a stranger carrying a shiny black bag came to the door of his shop and asked to buy a penny's worth of milk, which he drank in one gulp. He then asked to borrow the dairyman's shed for a moment, and while the stranger was inside it, the dairyman noticed a flash of white. He went to investigate and caught the stranger covering his trousers with a "pair of white coveralls, such as engineers wear." The stranger next snatched out a white jacket and quickly pulled it over his black cutaway as he said, "It's a dreadful murder, isn't it?" He grabbed his black bag and rushed into the street, exclaiming, "I think I have a clue!"

Sickert often used a similar coverall and jacket to cover his clothing when he painted in his studios.

September 9, 1888 - The body of Annie Chapman is discovered at 4:45 A.M. in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street, a rooming house for the poor in London's East End. Chapman is found on her back, spread-eagled. Her disarrayed clothing have been pulled up to her knees, and her throat cut so deeply that her head is barely attached to her body. Chapman's killer has slashed open her abdomen and removed her bowels and a flap of her belly, which are found in a puddle of blood on the ground above her left shoulder. Apparently, the Ripper was after organs, including her uterus, but he also might have intended to shock people.

Police transport Chapman's body to the Whitechapel mortuary. With the coming of daylight, word of another Whitechapel murder spreads, and hundreds of people hurry to the enclosed yard at 29 Hanbury. Neighbors on either side of the rooming house begin charging admission to step inside for a better view of the bloodstained area where Annie had been slain. During the week following Chapman's death, businessmen in the East End form a vigilance committee and offer a reward for information that will bring "the murder or murderers to justice."

September 14, 1888 -At approximately 10:00 P.M., a man enters the Tower Subway and approaches the caretaker. "Have you caught the Whitechapel murderers yet?" the man asks as he pulls out a foot-long knife with a curved blade. He then flees, yanking off "false whiskers," as the caretaker, who soon loses sight of him, sets off in pursuit. This is just one of a number of strange events that occur in various parts of the country. It is quite possible that the Ripper is going through dry runs and other rituals before killing again. In a letter several months later, the Ripper will refer to his "jolly lot of false whiskers & mustaches."

September 17, 1888 - The Metropolitan Police receive the first letter that is signed "Jack the Ripper."

September 21, 1888 - In a letter to her brother-in-law, Sickert's wife says that he has left England for Normandy to visit "his people," and will be gone for weeks. In retrospect, it becomes clear there is no indication in any correspondence written at the time by his friends in France that they were expecting to see him, or had seen him. And letters written by Sickert in September appear to have been written in London because they are written on his 54 Broadhurst Gardens stationery, which apparently he did not use except when he was actually there.

Even if Sickert had left, it might not necessarily have been for France. On September 22, a woman is murdered in Birtley, Durham, in the coal-mining country of northeast England, near Newcastle-on-Tyne. The victim, Jane Boatmoor, a twenty-six-year-old mother rumored to be leading a something-less-than-respectable life, is found in a gutter near a railway track the following day. The left side of her neck has been cut through to her vertebra. A gash on the right side of her face has laid her lower jaw open to the bone, and her bowels protrude from her mutilated abdomen. The similarities between Boatmoor's murder and those in London's East End inspire Scotland Yard to send a doctor and an inspector to meet with Durham officials.

In an anonymous letter to the City, dated November 20, 1888, the writer offers to the City of London Police: "Look at the case in County Durham É twas made to appear as if it was Jack the Ripper." The police choose not to link the murder of Boatmoor to the Ripper. Investigators have no clue that he likes to manipulate the machinery behind the scenes.

Sunday, September 30, 1888 - The body of Elizabeth Stride is discovered at about 1:00 A.M. in the courtyard of a school-board building at Berner Street, a narrow London thoroughfare of small, crowded dwellings occupied by immigrant laborers working out of their homes. Stride's windpipe and the major blood vessels of her neck have been severed. In all likelihood, the worker who discovered the body had interrupted the Ripper. Shortly after the commotion began, a woman living several doors down from where Stride's body was found noticed a young man walking quickly away from the crime scene.

At 1:45 A.M., the mutilated body of prostitute Catherine Eddows is discovered in Mitre Square, a small, open area surrounded by large warehouses, empty homes, and a few shops that are closed after hours, and just a fifteen-minute walk from where Elizabeth Stride has been murdered. Eddows is found lying on her back, her face to the left, her arms by her side with the palms turned up. The cause of her death is a six- or seven-inch cut across the neck that begins at her left earlobe-severing it-and terminates about three inches below her right ear. The incision has severed the larynx, vocal cords, and all deep structures of her neck, nicking the intervertebral cartilage. Her left leg is straight, the other bent, and her clothes are bunched up above her chest, exposing her abdomen, which has been cut open from just below the sternum to her genitals. Her intestines have been pulled out and tossed on the ground above her right shoulder.

The disfigurement to Eddows's face is shocking. Quick and forceful cuts have sliced through her lips, completely dividing them and cutting into the underlying gums. A cut to the bridge of her nose extends down to the angle of her left jaw and has opened her cheek to the bone. The tip of her nose has been completely severed, and two other cuts to the cheeks have peeled up the skin into triangular flaps. The damage to her abdomen, genitalia, and internal organs is just as brutal. The incisions that laid her open are jagged and mixed with stabbing injuries. Her left kidney has been removed and taken, and half of her uterus has been sloppily cut off and taken, as well. Eddows has cuts to her pancreas and spleen, and has one cut in her vagina that extends through her rectum. Hacks to the right thigh are so deep that they have severed ligaments. There is nothing careful or even purposeful in the damage. The intention is mutilation, and the Ripper was clearly in frenzy.

Public outcry about the Ripper approaches on hysteria. Two women have been slaughtered within an hour of each other, and the police still have no clue.

September 30, 1888 - At 3:00 A.M., a police constable on patrol in Whitechapel discovers scrawled on a wall in white chalk the words: "The Juwes are The men That Will not be Blamed for nothing." This bit of graffiti will surface again in an October 1896 Ripper letter.

October 1, 1888 - A tavern owner in Kentish Town discovers a newspaper-wrapped package behind the door of an outbuilding behind the tavern. He realizes it fits the description of the one carried by a man who was seen talking to Elizabeth Stride less than half an hour before her death. The police are called in. Inside the package is a pair of blood-soaked dark trousers. Hair is found adhering to coagulated bloodstains on the newspaper wrapping. The tavern is located about two miles east of where Sickert lives in South Hampstead.

Tuesday, October 2, 1888 - Two days after the murders of Stride and Eddows, a decomposing female torso is discovered in the foundations of Scotland Yard's new headquarters, which is under construction on the Embankment near Whitehall. A severed arm from the victim had turned up several weeks earlier on September 11. The grisly find, which generated little press attention, was discovered near a railway bridge over the Thames barely a mile east from James Whistler's studio in Chelsea, an area quite familiar to Sickert.

October 10, 1888 -Jack the Ripper sends a postcard to police, asking, "Have you seen the devil? If not, pay one penny & walk inside," a possible allusion to East End residents charging money for peeks at the Ripper's crime scenes. On the same postcard, the Ripper adds, "I am waiting every evening for the coppers at Hampstead Heath." The Heath is an eight-hundred-acre parkland famous for its healing springs, its bathing ponds, and its longtime appeal to writers, poets, and painters, including Dickens, Shelley, Pope, Keats, and Constable. Sickert's home in South Hampstead is no more than a short walk away.

Alleged Ripper letters (including approximately eighty of them written in October that still survive) not only drop hints but also reveal an emerging geographical profile. Many of the locations mentioned-some of them repeatedly-are places and areas well known to Sickert.

October 29, 1888 - Dr. Thomas Openshaw, curator of the pathology museum of the London Hospital, receives a taunting letter from Jack the Ripper. In 2001, this note, written on the same brand of stationery often used by Sickert, will provide a DNA link between him and the Ripper.

Friday, November 9, 1888 - At approximately 11:00 A.M., the body of twenty-four-year-old prostitute Mary Kelly is discovered in her bedroom at 26 Dorset Street. Kelly's body is found lying two-thirds of the way across her bed, almost against the door of the room. Crime-scene photographs reveal remains so mutilated that she may as well have been run over by a train. The Ripper has hacked off her ears and nose and slashed and defleshed her face down to the skull. She has no features left, only her dark hair, still neatly styled, probably because she never struggled. There wasn't room to attack her from behind the bed, so he attacked her from the front. Unlike the later Camden Town murder, Kelly was face up when a strong, sharp blade severed her right carotid artery. Blood soaked through the bed and pooled on the floor. Kelly's killer had ripped and cut and hacked into her body, laying it wide open, mutilating her genitalia to a pulp. He amputated her breasts and arranged them next to her liver on the side of the bed. He heaped her entrails on top of the bedside table. Every organ except her brain was removed, and her right leg was flayed open to the knee. Plainly visible on the left arm are curved hacking injuries, and a dark line encircling her right leg just below the knee suggests that the Ripper may have been in the process of dismemberment when, for some reason, he stopped.

Most Ripper letters mailed October 20 through November 10 are postmarked London, and it is a certainty from Sickert's correspondence that he was in London during this period.

November 11, 1888 - The inquest into Mary Kelly's death begins and ends on the same day. Immediately, the press falls silent. It is as if the Ripper case is closed. Newspapers in the days and weeks and months following Kelly's inquest and burial contain little mention of the Ripper. His letters continue to arrive and are filed by the authorities. But they are not printed in respectable newspapers. And all subsequent crimes that might bring up the question of the Ripper are eventually dismissed as not being the work of the Whitechapel fiend.

November 22, 1888 - The Ripper writes a letter saying that he is in Liverpool and "met a young woman in Scotland RoadÉI smiled at her and she calls out Jack the Ripper. She didn't know how right she was." About this time, an article appears in the Sunday Dispatch reporting that in an elderly woman Liverpool, was sitting in a park when a "respectable looking man, dressed in a black coat, light trousers, and a soft felt hat," pulled out a long, thin knife. He said he planned to kill as many women in Liverpool as he could and send the ears of the first victim to the editor of the Liverpool newspaper.

December 19, 1888 - The body of Rose Mylett, a Whitechapel prostitute, is discovered in the East End of London.

December 29, 1888 - The body of a seven-year-old boy named John Gill, who had disappeared in his hometown of Bradford, Yorkshire, is discovered in a stable near his home. Gill's coat has been tied around him with his suspenders. Several men unwrap him and find what is left of the boy's body leaning to the right, his severed legs propped on either side of his body and secured with cord. His ears have been sliced off. A piece of shirting has been tied around his neck, and another piece tied around the stumps left of his legs. Gill has been stabbed multiple times in his chest, his abdomen slashed open, the organs removed and placed on the ground. His heart has been "torn" out of his chest and wedged under his chin.

In a letter written a little more than a month earlier, the Ripper had claimed he planned to do another murder "on some young youth." The Ripper wrote, "I shall do them worse than the women. I shall take their heartsÉand rip them up the same way." One of the wrappings found with the body, according to press reports, bore the name and address of an individual in Liverpool, which was less than four hours away by train. Five weeks before Gill's murder, and again ten days earlier, the Ripper had written letters claiming to be in Liverpool.

January 16, 1889 - A Ripper letter refers to "my trip to Bradford."

June 1889 - Dismembered female remains are found in London. They are never identified.

July 16, 1889 - The body of a prostitute named Alice McKenzie is found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. Her throat has been cut, and her clothing pushed up to display severe mutilation to her abdomen. The doctor who performs her autopsy writes, "I am of the opinion that the murder was performed by the same person who committed the former series of Whitechapel murders." The case is never solved. Little public mention is made of the Ripper.

July 22, 1889 - The Ripper mails yet another brazenly taunting letter to the police, telling them where to look if they want to find him and suggesting he intends to add four more lives to his body count. The letter contains a postscript that trails off in the very clear letters "R. St.w." The letter includes a drawing of a short truncated blade.

On a number of Sickert's paintings, etchings, and sketches, he abbreviates his name as St. In later years, he will puzzle the art world by deciding he is no longer Walter but Richard Sickert, and sign his works: R.S. or R. St. One of the most distinctive features of the approximately 250 surviving Ripper letters, which began coming in 1888 and continued through 1896, is that scores of them are on art paper and are painted in ink and watercolor with a brush or sketched with a drawing pen and show the skilled hand of a highly trained or professional artist. More than a dozen of these letters include phallic drawings of knives.

March 1889 - mid-July 1889 - During this period, Sickert writes twenty-one articles for the London edition of the New York Herald. He is very likely in London on September 8 because The Sun had just interviewed him days earlier at 54 Broadhurst Gardens, and published the article on that day.

September 8, 1889 - At midnight, a man dressed as a soldier approaches a newspaper carrier outside the offices of the New York Herald, and exclaims there has been another terrible murder and mutilation. He gives the location as the area off Pinchin Street in the East End. The paper's night editors rush to the scene to find the body. There isn't one.

September 10, 1889 - The torso alluded to by the "soldier" two days earlier is found under a Pinchin Street railway arch. The modus operandi is all too familiar. A constable's routine beat had taken him past the very spot, and he hadn't noticed anything unusual. Less than thirty minutes later, he passed by again and discovered a bundle just off the pavement. Drying of the victim's tissue indicates that she was probably already dead at midnight on September 8.

September 22, 1889 - The Weekly Dispatch reprints a story from the London edition of the New York Herald, reporting that a landlord claims to know the "identification" of Jack the Ripper. The story focuses on a lodger and his extremely suspicious behavior. Shortly after the torso was discovered near Pinchin Street, the lodger told the landlord he was going abroad and left abruptly. When the landlord went inside the rooms, he discovered that the lodger had left various articles belonging to the "lower class of women" as well as several pairs of boots and "galoshes" that were "bespattered with blood."

Another Dispatch story running right below the "lodger" tale involved a letter written to the police about a strong woman who worked in various slaughterhouses attired as a man. This story gave rise to the theory that a woman may have slaughtered the East End victims.

The vast majority of Ripper letters written from July 18 through October 30 indicate the Ripper-or Sickert-was in London during the time of the "lodger" and slaughterhouse woman news reports.

November 8, 1889 -Letters received by the authorities suggest that the Ripper has been keeping up with the news and is aware of the lodger story of late September. Among the letters recently received is one containing a truncated knife blade similar to that of the July letter and what appears to be a scalpel or straight razor with the initials R (possibly W) S faintly scratched in the blade, and a communication on an eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet of art paper, the lettering first drawn in pencil, then beautifully painted over in brilliant red.

September 1896 - Sickert and his wife, Ellen, separate. She sues for divorce on the grounds of "adultery coupled with desertion for the space of 2 years & upwards without reasonable excuse."

October 1896 - In a letter sent to the police in Whitechapel, the Ripper mocks the police by quoting, "The Jewes are people that are blamed for nothing. Ha Ha have you heard this before." Even though the Ripper was supposed to be dead by 1896-according to the police-the letter concerns authorities enough to result in a flurry of official memorandums.

1897 - Sickert experiences a particularly stressful year. An article he had written for the Saturday Review the previous year had precipitated artist Joseph Pennell's suing him for libel. Sickert lost the lawsuit but perhaps the greater sting had already come-when Whistler testified from the witness stand that his former pupil was an unimportant and irresponsible man. Sickert's relationship with Whistler comes to an end.

1899 - Sickert moves to Europe.

Early 1900s - Sickert paints a picture of two women gazing out a window and inexplicably titles the work A Passing Funeral. Several Ripper letters had made taunting references to his watching the police at the scene or being present for the victim's burial. "I see them and they can't see me," the Ripper had written.

1903 - Sickert draws a sketch of a woman whose eyes are wide open and staring. She looks dead and has an inexplicable dark line around her throat. The sketch is rather innocuously titled Venetian Studies. Three years later, he follows it with a painting of a nude grotesquely sprawled on an iron bed titled Summer Night. The woman in the sketch and the woman in the painting look alike. Their faces resemble the face of Mary Ann Nichols, who was murdered on a summer night, and are based on a photograph taken of her at the mortuary during her postmortem. The only way a person could know what Mary Ann Nichols's dead body looked like was to have viewed it at the mortuary or at the scene.

1906 - Around this time Sickert returns to London from France, takes up residence at 6 Mornington Crescent in Camden Town, and resumes painting music halls. He goes out almost every night and is always in his theatre stall at 8:00 pm sharp. Presumably, he stays until the performances end at half past midnight.

September 12, 1907 - Emily Dimmock, a young prostitute, is found murdered in her bed in Camden Town just blocks from Sickert's rooming house and a twenty-minute walk from one of his studios. Her throat has been slashed down to the spine. Dimmock was a regular customer of the Rising Sun public house on Euston Road. In 1932, Sickert will create an oil painting titled Grover's Island from Richmond Hill, which will include an uncharacteristic Van Gogh-like rising sun so large and bright on the horizon as to dominate the picture. The rising sun is almost identical to the one etched in glass over the front door of the Rising Sun.

With several art exhibitions coming up in London, it is very likely Sickert is in the city during this period.

1908 - Sickert paints a very dark, gloomy painting titled Jack the Ripper's Bedroom. Decades later a museum curator and Sickert expert will verify that the bedroom in the painting is indeed the bedroom in the Camden Town residence Sickert rented when he moved back to London from France in 1906. The curator would further observe that this Camden Town residence was where "Sickert believed Jack the Ripper had lodged" in the 1880s.

1911 - Sickert marries one of his art students.

1913 - Ellen severs her relationship with Sickert for good.

October 13, 1920 - Sickert's second wife becomes suddenly ill and dies.

1921 - Sickert paints Patrol-a painting of a policewoman with bulging eyes and an open-neck tunic that reveals a solid, black line around her throat. Many of Sickert's nudes and other female subjects have bare necks with black lines around them, as if to suggest a throat that had been cut or decapitation. Some dark areas around the throats of these figures are intended to be shadows and shading, but in many cases the lines are dark, solid, and black. They are not jewelry.

November 29, 1937 - A short article about Sickert in the Evening Standard seems to link him directly to the Camden Town murder of Emily Dimmock thirty years earlier. The article states, "Sickert, who was living in Camden Town, was permitted to enter the house where the murder was committed and did several sketches of the murdered woman's body." Suppose this is true, was it another Sickert coincidence that he just happened to be wandering around St. Paul's Road when he noticed a swarm of police and wanted to see what all the excitement was about? Emily's body was discovered about 11:30 A.M., examined by a doctor at the crime scene at 1:00 P.M., and then removed to the St. Pancras mortuary. There was a relatively short time period of maybe two to three hours for Sickert to have happened by while Emily's body was still inside the house. If he had no idea when her body would be found, he would have had to case the area for many hours-and risk being noticed-to make sure he didn't miss the show.

1968 -In a letter from Paris, November 16, 1968, a man named André Dunoyer de Segonzac, a well-known artist with connections to the Bloomsbury group, writes Sickert biographer Denys Sutton that he had known Walter Sickert around 1930 and had very clear memories of Sickert claiming to have "lived" in Whitechapel in the same house where Jack the Ripper had lived, and that Sickert had told him "spiritedly about the discreet and edifying life of this monstrous assassin."

• Portrait of a Killer
• Evidence as Detailed in the Book
• Walter Richard Sickert, Cornwell's suspected Jack the Ripper
• Chapter One

Food to Die For | Life's Little Fable