Circe: Chapters 21–27

There were no tears, no recriminations, and Telemachus did not lunge across the table.

Penelope would have been scrupulous in his rearing.

When Odysseus had not come home after the war, he said, suitors had begun to arrive seeking Penelope’s hand. Scions of Ithaca’s most prosperous families and ambitious sons from the neighboring islands, looking for a wife, and a throne if they could get it.

He said: Our sons were guests in your home, and you killed them. We seek reparation.

He wanted sentries posted all around the palace, day and night. He talked of training dogs and digging trenches to catch villains in the dark. He drew up plans for a great palisade to be built. As if we were some war camp.

The only thing he talked of by then was conspiracy, how the men of the island were gathering arms against him, how the servants were colluding in treacheries.

His eyes were Odysseus’. The shape and color, even the intensity. But the expression: Odysseus’ gaze was always reaching out, cajoling. Telemachus’ held fast to itself.

I turned it, catching the light on the infinitesimal beads of venom that crowned each feathered tooth.

All day he had hung back, avoiding my gaze, diffident and nearly invisible.

“No.” His vehemence startled me. “I do not mean a bad life for him. I mean that he made life for others a misery. Why did his men go to that cave in the first place? Because he wanted more treasure..."

She was seated at my loom. Her lap was full of raw, black wool. On the floor beside her lay a spindle and an ivory distaff, tipped with silver.

There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless.

This new feeling crept over me like a sort of distant sleepiness, almost a languor.

I felt a flare of embarrassment. How baleful and outlandish and cruel we must have seemed.

Her heads squealed and bucked, as if trying to haul it back up again. But it only sank further, as inexorably as if it were weighted with stones.