The door snicked shut.

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.

What's amazing to me is how many of the issues facing women in the ancient world still linger today. Take Odysseus' wife, Penelope, a brilliant, resourceful woman who ends up in a terrible situation: in her husband's absence, she is being held hostage in her own home by men who claim to be courting her. She tries to make them leave, but because she's a woman they refuse, blaming their bad behavior on her desirability.

He is more worth to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else's friend and brother. So which life is more important?

I shift, an infinitesimal movement, towards him. It is like the leap from a waterfall. I do not know, until then, what I am going to do.

and when he moved it was like watching oil spread across a lake, smooth and fluid, almost vicious

I feel like I could eat the world raw.