by Jennafer D’Alvia
Penelope didn’t know there was one she preferred until the contest. It all happened quickly and slowly. Ten years passed waiting for the war to end, for Odysseus to return. Another ten went by with Penelope in a jar, salt water, pickles, glowing in her loneliness and there were so many suitors, but they all seemed the same to her. The ones who had charm were like waves that crested and receded, as they were replaced by others with charm and the years went by. They proposed and proposed but none of it felt real. Her long-lost husband didn’t feel real anymore and neither did these men who flirted with her constantly. It felt like a god-sent dream filled with transformations and strange stipulations, or like a ball on a roulette wheel, bouncing and bouncing, a wheel that would never stop. This was her life now, and the jokes and flattery of 104 men filled the lonely hall with voices and drunken laughter.
She wearied of this and the axes were set up. Penelope brought the bow herself. The whole thing felt like a show, a dangerous show, perhaps, like fire juggling, but theatrical, a contained performance that would finish with Penelope going back to her bedroom unchanged. It didn’t feel like any of this could touch her life or her heart. Not until the weapon was laid out and the men’s talk was done, not until Leodes, the gentle son of Oenops, stepped forward. When the young man picked up the bow, Penelope saw it all in an instant, a future with him marked by respect and kindness, a life with that sleepy soul to explore slowly and with pleasure for all the years to come.
She felt a soft part of herself wake up in response to his kind spirit, but the young man didn’t give the stringing of the bow much effort at all. He held the weapon loosely, moving it about in his hands, pretending to exert himself, grunting falsely, just as her son Telemachus used to do as a little child when he showed off his tiny muscles for her. Leodes panted from his last fake effort and Penelope looked down at the paving tiles. He was a one. Maybe not the one, but a good one who she might have been able even to love, but he didn’t want her, and the bow was passed around and around until the cleverest and the harshest man won her.
Jennafer D’Alvia is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Ohio University. She is the 2023-25 Truman Capote Scholar in Fiction at The University of Montana. Her stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, and other journals. Her fiction has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two AWP Intro Journals Projects. She is currently working on a novel.
Emerge Literary Journal 