The Penelope Review

(1)

We would like to go into town, today being Sunday, a worthy day among the others to do so, and we only go into town when Uncle Henry takes his medication. There is a problem. Uncle Henry won’t take his medication again. 

We have tried. 

After we returned from service this morning, Cousin Emmanuel greeted him at the kitchen table, where Uncle Henry hunches over with his head against the table-top, and said, “Peace upon you, brother,” and reached out one hand to present it for Uncle Henry’s shaking and the other to present a sticky bun for Uncle Henry’s taking. Uncle Henry looked up and accepted the yield from both of Cousin Emmanuel’s hands: shaking of the right and taking from the left. Uncle Henry inspected the sticky bun on the table with the eye of the diamond merchant he once had been, raised it to his nose for a whiff like the vintner he would never be, and picked out with forensic accuracy the medication purposefully placed deep in the treat, tossing the capsules under the table and lifting the sticky bun to his mouth with glee. He turned to Cousin Emmanuel, dipped his smiling face in thanks and returned his head to the table-top, where it rested and continued to rest. Cousin Emmanuel, frowning, left the kitchen to give us a report, muttering in Uncle Henry’s earshot as he left the kitchen, “That loon wouldn’t know peace upon him if a holy phoenix landed on his heavy chest and squawked, ‘I am PEACE!’” 

Things have not always been this way with Uncle Henry. 

It’s only been a few years since Mathilda died. She was a kind creature, as creatures of her size are often assumed to be; she was always looking after him, picking up after him the crumbs of sugar and flecks of kidney pie that fell from him when he ate at the table, taking care of him when he needed it, and repeating back to him what he wanted to hear: his solace. “Happenstance,” she would say so much, “happenstance!” That’s all. 

One twilight we were fixing for family supper, but Uncle Henry did not appear. Worried, we concluded that his absence was owing to something having to do with Mathilda. We went to Uncle Henry’s house in the dimming light; we couldn’t find him anywhere, could not find Mathilda anywhere either, and as we hollered louder and louder, we thought of calling the police: missing person. 

In the woods behind his home: we saw green leaves, some movement in the deep shadows of the woods, and heard a noise that was shortly recognizable for what it was: shoveling. We walked towards the woods and those sharp, inconstant sounds. 

In a small clearing where the ground was soft beneath our feet and our footsteps were silent, Uncle Henry was quietly crying, all wetness and snot and mayflies streaming about his head in the twilight, as he moved to a pile of loam, filled his shovel with dirt, and moved to a hole in the ground where he had started covering a box with soil. 

Each of us went to get a shovel and returned, and we moved from the pile of dirt to the hole, putting dirt on the box while Uncle Henry took a break to sit and weep. It was a woeful sight, him leaning over his lap, his face hidden, his back convulsing. We knew losing Mathilda would be a cataclysm, but we had no idea how much he would be changed from losing her; and we stood there silent as he turned the last shovelful of dirt down onto the box, caressed the dirt with the flat side of the shovel so that it was smooth, and put a small cross in the loam to mark the spot. On it was written: 

MATHILDA/REQUIESCAT IN PACE/THERE NEVER WAS A BETTER BIRD.

(2)

Yet Uncle Henry is exuberantly stubborn, still. His hair pulled back, the black band of mourning around his head, he dips pebbles of sugar into his coffee and laughs when they dissolve between his pointer finger and thumb. No one can make him change his mind, no one can talk reason to him. There’s no getting in there, where one would need to go, and so Uncle Henry persists in refusing to take his medication, even though he enjoys lucidity enough to know that he needs it. He needs his medication, more of it, yes: we are not sure how much longer he will continue this trend of refusal, and whether he will live beyond it. 

Uncle Henry’s black band of mourning is somewhat maroon from the stain applied to the wood of the tabletop by Cousin Emmanuel, done sometime last week, a rare moment when Uncle Henry was not hunched at the table, being elsewhere and doing other things, rites of the dead. We are most of us sympathetic, greatly so, to the suffering of our Uncle Henry, intransigent as he may be; Cousin Emmanuel has no time for such truculence, and Uncle Henry’s blessed recalcitrance, unstinting as it is, persists. Uncle Henry will not take his medication, and so going into town is postponed indefinitely. 

Cousin Emmanuel himself has become hungry, and he urges Uncle Henry to go, first making comely supplications and then stern perorations concerning the importance of showing oneself to be a member of society, a task Cousin Emmanuel believes achievable by going into town on Sunday, today, a worthy enough day of the week, to eat among others. Uncle Henry is at the table, still, and he nods and smiles when Cousin Emmanuel speaks, and he giggles as more pebbles of sugar dissolve in his coffee. 

If Uncle Henry would take his medication, all would be solved. Our family could go into town today, Uncle Henry would be normalized, and Cousin Emmanuel vindicated.

This is not what will happen. Cousin Emmanuel implores, and he tugs softly at Uncle Henry’s arm and then he tugs harder and harder until Uncle Henry makes a sound that is unseemly to hear. Cousin Emmanuel desists and, mumbling, walks away, which does not appear to concern Uncle Henry, who sits at the table, mourning, gleeful at the dissolution of sugar in his coffee. 

(3)

Now it is time that Uncle Henry takes his medication, which means it is also time that Uncle Henry will not take his medication, again. 

Another week passes, and Uncle Henry is at the table. Saturday evening, shortly after the sun started quickening toward Sunday, Cousin Emmanuel comes into the kitchen, and he comes smiling. He walks in and swings something onto the table in front of Uncle Henry that is draped in a scarlet cover. He lifted the cover from the object, and we look: Uncle Henry gasps: it is a cage. Cousin Emmanuel smiles and holds out a morsel of sugar to the cage: and from inside the cage comes a squawk: “Happenstance!” a birdy voice says, “happenstance!” Uncle Henry is satisfied. Uncle Henry is solaced. We will go into town. Everything will change.

Jordan Silversmith: My novel REDSHIFT, BLUESHIFT (Gival Press, 2021) won the Gival Press Novel Prize, and my poem “Praxis” was selected by Philip Metres for the 2020 Slippery Elm Prize in Poetry. I review literature in translation for ANMLY and Asymptote, and my writing has appeared in SurVision Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, The Vanderbilt Review, and The Literary Times.