Do you want to know why men are fools? They all want the same things. They have all grown up listening to the same stories, and he each thinks that he is the hero. Give him war, and starving peasants, and he will think that you have given him something he can fix. That’s not it, though. It’s just war, and starving peasants.

All men are like this. I know. I have married them. Confident, and full of conviction, and certain that something needs repair, and dead, both of them, before their times. I went to the funerals, and I cried at them, not because I was sad, but because it was expected of me. One of them might have been a good man, and I was sorry for him, but that is not why I wept. Show me my husband’s funeral pyre, and I will not think of the future I have lost, or the heirs I will not have. It’s just a funeral pyre. I know that, because I am a woman, and the stories I grew up with taught me that the things waiting for me were not worth waiting for.

They say that love is a game. I wouldn’t know; I have never been in love. There is only one game that matters, anyway, and the rules of that are simple. Winning is stepping over thousands of bodies— maybe some I could have been in love with, were there not so much more that I wanted —and in and out of a thousand different lives, until I find one that’s more than what the stories promised.