The Silence of the Girls

“Don’t think about your previous life,” he said. “That’s all over now—you’ll only make yourself miserable if you start brooding about it. Forget! This is your life now.”

Forget. So there was my duty laid out in front of me, as simple and clear as a bowl of water: Remember.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the butcher.”

died with both hands gripping Achilles’s spear, as if he thought it belonged to him and Achilles was trying to take it away.

My youngest brother—fourteen years old, barely able to lift my father’s sword—I saw him die. I saw the flash of the upraised spear, I saw my brother lying on the ground wriggling like a stuck pig.

His mother was sitting only a few feet away, struggling with a fretful baby who wanted to suckle but was fighting the breast.

I had no reason to love her, but what made me angry at that moment was that in allowing herself to dwindle until she was nothing more than a heap of creased flesh and jutting bone, she’d left me with so very little to hate.

the sound seemed merely to intensify the silence.

but then in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women.

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

For once, women with sons envied those with daughters, because girls would be allowed to live. Boys, if anywhere near fighting age, were routinely slaughtered. Even pregnant women were sometimes killed, speared through the belly on the off chance their child would be a boy. I noticed Ismene, who was four months pregnant with my husband’s child, pressing her hands hard into her stomach, trying to convince herself the pregnancy didn’t show.