Read "Necrology," new writing from Jason Schwartz

By Biblioklept on July 1, 2024

Read "Necrology," new writing from Jason Schwartz, in the latest issue of Evergreen Review:

A calendar is a necrology, in the parlance, though the ornament of the seventeenth century—as here: various monstrosities arrayed in the bottom margin—may suggest otherwise. Stated more plainly: earlier versions perform the slaughter in a courtly manner, in red letters, these resembling a pattern of stains on the skin—or so one annotation explains it, alert to the keenest features of certain medieval diseases. The feasts appear on the left side, and the saints on the right. The Egyptian days are thought unlucky. In the statute book: a month is twenty-eight days, but sometimes fewer, each week shortened in accordance with the mourning period, for which the days are renamed—and later replaced with daggers. The renderings of the death scenes, centuries hence—a drowning chair, its legs splendidly embellished; a gallows imagined as a velvet hat—must await a less cursory interpretation. The gentleman, in any event, survives ninety days in his sickbed, trembling at the center of the room. But the insects are quite tranquil in disposition, while—elsewhere in the house—a blade attends to an untoward portion of mutton. In the child's calendar: some pages display only four days—the four corners, as it were, of a boy's disappointment—each square fashioned as a polite little room, within which the villain has hidden your possessions: hats, garments, shoes. And now the child's device, a red X, blots out the line—just as the stock collar, his father's, obscures the most prominent lesions and scars. No doubt the comparison is too extravagant—and yet the postscript explains the afternoon as a pane of glass, or as ashes in the hands of the family. They stand on the front lawn—not long ago the scene of a strangling—and then repair to the gallery, where the celebration begins, per tradition, at three o'clock: a choice of soups—brown or white—followed by cod's head and buttered turnips, and then a cake of some considerable distinction.