At my birth, an aunt—I will spare you her name because my tale is full of aunts—washed and wrapped me. Another tended to my mother, painting the red back on her lips, brushing her hair with ivory combs. A third went to the door to admit my father. “A girl,” my mother said to him, wrinkling her nose. But my father did not mind his daughters, who were sweet-tempered and golden as the first press of olives. Men and gods paid dearly for the chance to breed from their blood, and my father’s treasury was said to rival that of the king of the gods himself. He placed his hand on my head in blessing. “She will make a fair match,” he said. “How fair?” my mother wanted to know. This might be consolation, if I could be traded for something better. My father considered, fingering the wisps of my hair, examining my eyes and the cut of my cheeks. “A prince, I think.” “A prince?” my mother said. “You do not mean a mortal?” The revulsion was plain on her face. Once when I was young I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, “You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.” My mother had been simpler: like savage bags of rotten flesh. “Surely she will marry a son of Zeus,” my mother insisted. She had already begun imagining herself at feasts upon Olympus, sitting at Queen Hera’s right hand. “No. Her hair is streaked like a lynx. And her chin. There is a sharpness to it that is less than pleasing.” My mother did not argue further. Like everyone, she knew the stories of Helios’ temper when he was crossed. However gold he shines, do not forget his fire. She stood. Her belly was gone, her waist reknitted, her cheeks fresh and virgin-rosy. All our kind recover quickly, but she was faster still, one of the daughters of Oceanos, who shoot their babes like roe. “Come,” she said. “Let us make a better one.”