[SPOILER: After the slaughter, Telemachus pulls the disloyal handmaidens up to the storeroom and runs a rope from a beam. Twelve women — the ones who had been sleeping with the suitors, who had betrayed the loom secret, who had laughed at Penelope when she could not see them. They die together, by his hand, in the place where the bow had hung in the dark for twenty years. Teilo holds the scene at the level of objects: a rope, a beam, the thinness of necks. He doesn’t moralize and he doesn’t soften it. The rope is the part of the homecoming that does not cleanse.]
The Rope
Strung from a beam in the storeroom. Twelve handmaidens who slept with the suitors and laughed about it. The hardest scene to read.