The Palace of Odysseus

A working palace, not a fairytale one. White stone catching afternoon light, courtyards, storerooms, kitchens, a great hall that can seat a hundred men, the upper chambers where the queen weaves and the lower rooms where the bow has hung in the dark for twenty years. It was built by Laertes and finished by his son. The marriage bed is rooted into the floor of one of its rooms, an olive tree planed and polished into bedpost and frame. The dog Argos was raised inside its courtyards. Telemachus was born under its roof. And for twenty years it has been rotting from the inside, suitors at the tables, servants moving like ghosts, stores bleeding out, the air thick with the smell of old grease and sweat and something underneath, something rotten. [SPOILER: When Odysseus finally crosses his own threshold he does it as a beggar, eyes averted, kicked and laughed at in the corner of the room he built. The reckoning happens here. The doors lock. The bow sings. The bodies pile against the walls and in the doorways. By the end the hall has been scrubbed and burned with sulfur, but the death has soaked into the air and the very shape of the rooms. Then the avenging fathers come, and the courtyard nearly catches fire one more time. The palace survives. Just barely. And it is the palace, not the throne, that is what Odysseus has been crawling home to.]