Jefferson Navicky
Uncle Hole
The boy had an uncle who was a hole. His father’s brother, the hole felt familiar the way family does. Or could. As a boy, he instinctively knew to move around the hole carefully and with awareness as one might learn to avoid the abandoned well in the side yard. Mostly the hole existed in a space and time all its own, and like the abandoned well where weeds grew around it that turned into wild flowers, the hole became if not pretty, then at least almost a picturesque part of the middle distance. It is scientifically proven that if a hole exists long enough in a family, gravity accumulates in its pouches like stones in pockets so that eventually the hole becomes a black hole. Are you prepared for the questioning, are you prepared to be tempted by ingeniously effervescent light particles like a million tiny Europes can fit into the canal of your ear, are you prepared to be filled with stupid longing – the black hole seemed to ask the boy. Of course he was not prepared. How could one ever prepare for the inverse of oblivion? As he grew older, the black hole of his uncle seemed to grow larger, sucking in more and more of the life (or the myriad tangents of a life, i.e. cousins & nieces & aunts & dogs & streets & cars & chess sets & rosaries & baseball hats & garages & bleachers & dirty magazines & tennis shoes…) that the boy would never know, and just because he didn’t know these lives didn’t mean that they did not continue to grow in experience and size and importance in his imagination. And in fact, even after the boy’s uncle died, the hole still existed. As an adult, he took to approaching the hole and gazing into it, not so much with a longing to enter it, but with thoughts of what might’ve been different if, when he was a young boy, his father hadn’t turned his uncle into a hole. The imagining of the lives inside the hole was a source of infinite entertainment and fascination, but mainly, it was a source of incredible sadness that lived in its own hole in one of the chambers of his heart, as does anything that one wishes to exist, but in fact does not.
Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, a Finalist for the Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, winner of the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. He lives in midcoast Maine.
jeffersonnavicky.com
Banner Art:
Photo by Quasi Misha, Unsplash, 2019
