Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome Welsh-Irish writer and poet Sukie Shinn from London with “Mr. Kobold’s Magic Cockerel.” This sparkling tale is set during the Covid-19 pandemic and uses magic realism to explore the mixture of grief, gratitude and wonder at the death of a beloved and highly unusual parent. Mr. Kobold, or “Old Pop,” as our narrator affectionately calls him, ended his life by jumping out the tiny bathroom window on the second floor of his nursing facility. Heartbroken and shattered by this shocking death, the narrator returns to Belfast from a posting in Germany to put his father’s affairs in order.
“So I couldn’t blame them. Not really. Pop had always been a small man anyway. And so now that age and his refusal to eat had shrunk his frame even more, how could they have known that the wily old devil would be able to squeeze himself through such a tiny aperture? In my rational head, I understood all of this. And I answered their platitudes with equally banal comments about him ‘having a good innings’ and how I appreciated that it would have been ‘almost immediate.’ But it was that ‘almost’ that was so excruciatingly painful to bear. Because he was my ‘Pop’—that delightful, twinkly-eyed auld fella from the auld country, that should, by rights, have lived forever.”
Maybe Old Pop was in the throes of dementia, or maybe something quite different was happening. Looking back over his colorful, dear, yet far from perfect life, the narrator pieces together an alternate reality intersecting with our own. Sukie’s delivery is mesmerizing, focusing not on the sad and terrible particulars of Old Pop’s demise, but on his otherworldly nature and his love for his children. Her Irish dialect is enchanting and adds color and tone to this modern fairy tale. She deftly weaves alternate reality into contemporary experience, already made surreal by Covid, creating a hopeful interpretation of death and suffering. So many of us lost elderly parents or friends and were unable to say goodbye, and Sukie gives that feeling healing expression.
You can read “Mr. Kobold’s Magic Cockerel” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Sukie Shinn writes and performs poetry, spoken word and comedy characters in and around London. With a love of dark humour and a taste for the ‘odd,’ her work has appeared in Memento Mori, Made in Shoreditch, Booksie, and Paragraph Planet, amongst others.