CIRCE

It seemed in those few moments as if time had been suspended, that the wave curling over us might never break. Pure delusion, of course. The future was hurtling towards us, Achilles’s life measured now in days not weeks.

Nausicaä is the name of a Phaeacian princess who appears in the Odyssey. I first learned of her from Bernard Evslin’s book Gods, Demigods & Demons: An Encyclopedia of Greek Mythology (published as part of Shakai Shisōsha’s Modern Educational Pocketbooks series and translated by Minoru Kobayashi), and I was instantly attracted to her. After that

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.

isle. I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only