A back room of the palace where the things that matter are kept. Wine in jars. Bronze. Tools. The great bow that Odysseus left behind when he sailed for Troy, hanging in darkness for twenty years because no other man on the island can string it. Eurycleia keeps the key. The room smells of oil and old wood and the dry cool air of stones that have not been opened in months. [SPOILER: The bow comes out for Penelope’s contest, and the contest cracks the world open. After the slaughter, the storeroom becomes something else. There is a single beam that runs the width of it. Telemachus carries rope. The twelve handmaidens who slept with the suitors are brought in. Their voices rise in pleas, in curses, in sounds that were neither and both. When it is done there is only the creak of rope and the movement of bodies settling into stillness. Telemachus comes out with rope-burned hands. The same room that held a king’s bow for twenty years also held what came after. Both belong to it now.]
The Storeroom
The locked room where Odysseus's bow has hung for twenty years. Where the disloyal maids will be hanged from a single beam.