My wooden doll. I wove her scarlet dress myself when I first learned to spin wool and thread it on the loom. I was new to the shuttle's dance, so the fabric is rough.

   My red clay foxes, small enough to fit in my hand.

   My old spinning top.

   I gather them all in a basket, carry it to my mother, and say, "I'm ready."

   "Ready?" She pauses in her weaving, the shuttle frozen in midair.

   "I'm ready to sacrifice my toys."

   To take them to the temple, like mortal girls do. To lay them before Artemis and tell her I want to let them go. I can weave. I'm as tall as my mother. I'm ready to enter the world of women.

   My mother's eyebrows look like they're yanked up by a rope. "I don't think that's necessary just yet." She pauses, then says in a soft voice, "Why, I remember when I brought those foxes home and how happy you were when you opened the box."

   I think of all the mortal girls who have ever gone to that temple. I imagine them in one long line. Their hair is woven with ribbons and flowers. They're wearing bright chitons and unscuffed new sandals. Their baskets are heavy with clay dolls and wooden dolls and fabric dolls, with carved animals and old rattles. Their mothers walk proudly beside them. The parade heads up a hill toward towering columns.

   My mother turns back to the loom and her hand resumes its rhythmic work, back and forth, back and forth. "Don't be in such a rush," she says. "Give yourself a little longer to enjoy being a child."

   The other girls file past olive trees and lavender. I hear their breath, short and heavy, on the steep path.

   "Mortals have to make their little sacrifices. You're the daughter of a goddess. You can keep your dolls." She smiles, as if this were a gift.

   They pass through gleaming marble pillars into cool, dark shade. Now they're laying their armloads in front of the statue. The air hangs heavy with incense. Their mothers stand straighter.

"But, Mother—"

   "Go ahead; put them back in your trunk. I don't think we need to talk about this again."

   She's not looking at me anymore. I whirl around and rush back to my room.

I slam the door and hurl the basket. Everything goes flying. The doll lands on the bed, burying her face in the covers, and the top goes skittering across the floor. One of my red foxes crashes against the trunk and breaks into a million pieces.

   I slump down and start to pick up the fragments one by one.

   She's never going to let me grow up. Another thousand years will go by and I'll still be sitting here with my doll and my spinning top.

   "Mortals have to make their little sacrifices," she says.

   Well, if someone came to me with mortality in a box, I'd open it. Childhood and Adulthood would be sitting there, next to gray-haired Age, his beard trailing behind him. Grief would be shrouded in black, and Death would hold a knife by his side, ready to cut off each and every life at the stem. I'd see them all there and I'd still grab that box, because then I'd get to change.

   She got to change, didn't she? Ripening into her godnature, becoming the all-powerful goddess of the harvest. Having me. Then, and only then, did she stop, as if her essence was set in stone. That's how it is for most of the gods: they grow into their full power and then stay that way for eternity, never aging, never lessening.

   But what if this is as far as I get? Look at Eros, the boygod of love: he's a child and always will be. What if that's my lot? Frozen on the cusp of life. Demeter's daughter and nothing more. For eternity.

   I put the shards on top of the trunk and stare at the plants outside my window. I can almost see them stretching their roots into the soil and their stems up to the sun, getting ready to blossom and seed. I'm the only living thing in this whole damn vale that doesn't get to grow.

   Gods! I can't believe how stupid I was. I had one chance to meet a man, and I ran away. Who was he? Why was he here?

   I can't even ask my friends. They'd talk. My mother would find out and twine herself around me like ivy, so tight I couldn't move. I'd be trapped in this room forever.