A snippet
I wanted to share this bit I wrote, just because I like it...
Nisaa sprung to her feet and resumed browsing the bookshelves.
“What about you? What’s you story?” she asked.
“I’m from Sussex,” was all Penelope could think to say about herself.
“Faithful Penelope.”
“What?”
Nisaa pulled a book from the shelf: Homer’s Odyssey. She flipped through the thick, leather-bound volume.
“Penelope, she was Odysseus’s wife. He left to fight in the Trojan war, you know the one with the horse, and she waited for him to come back for twenty years.”
“Twenty?”
“Yeah, imagine that! She weaves this shawl or something like that. I didn’t actually read it, but my brother told me so I could complete the assignment.”
She hoped Elliot wouldn’t be gone for so long. If she was supposed to wait and knit until he returned from the war, she was off to a bad start.
“She was Icarius’s daughter, I remember that,” Nisaa added.
“The bloke who flew too close to the sun?”
She liked that better than Odysseus's wife. Icarus's daughter too may fly. Perhaps her eyes were not the colour of the sea after all, but of the sky.
"No, that’s Icarus,” Nisaa corrected. “Penelope is the daughter of King Icar-i-us. Of Sparta."
"Oh."
Well, she wasn't a Spartan princess any more than a Greek heroine, so what did it matter?
She didn’t know why her parents had called her Penelope. Maybe another one of her mother’s eccentricities. They’d certainly never used her full name, only Nellie. Whoa, Nellie. Nervous Nellie.
