“I am sure he will be back soon,” she said. Her words were like new leather, still stiff and precise, not yet run together with use.

Older, larger, and unpleasantly fleshy.

Mercy was one. Yes and please and what do you want? A father, teaching his daughter how to be a slave.

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”

IN THE STORIES, the gods have the power to delay the moon’s course if they wish, to spin a single night the length of many. Such was this night, a bounty of hours that never ran dry. We drank deeply, thirsty for all that we had missed in the weeks we were separated.

He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight. I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.

I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

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