Content warning: this work contains heavy themes of mental health, violence, and death.
It’s blisteringly hot outside; Donovan sits on the edge of the bathtub, fingers drumming on the lip. He eyes a spider making its way gracefully up the metal tap.
Someone knocks. Aunt Patricia’s voice is sad, concerned, and unwelcome: “Donovan, are you in there?"
He opens the door to her frown. Her voice is thick with sympathy when she asks, “Are you okay?”
He doesn’t answer, just follows her out into the garden silently. Someone is sobbing loudly, a high-pitched weeping playing in the background, but he doesn’t bother to look for who it is. Jamie is—was—is—loved.
The sheer number of people in the garden makes his knees buckle. It is today, solemn under the merciless sun, that Donovan realises with a cold, heartbreaking finality—feels it in his bones like a heavy weight, like the hollow, emotionless clang of a church bell, a death knell—Jamie is dead.
The preacher drones on, not that Donovan registers any of his words. When his mother speaks, she works her way around a speech that’s valiantly coherent until it dissolves into a mismatch of helpless gasps and sobs: oh Jamie, oh, my darling Jamie…
And then it’s Donovan’s turn. As he numbly approaches the podium he vaguely registers the sobbing in the background. It still hasn’t stopped, and it plays like a vinyl stubbornly spinning itself dizzy on a turntable. He stutters through his eulogy, murmurs something about Jamie’s sunny laughter and how his bright smile was extinguished too early. How he was a large part of his heart, of everyone’s hearts, and now it feels like his own chest has been ripped open. It is all painfully, honestly true. His mother watches him with a pained expression, her fist clenched against her mouth and her body wracked with silent sobs. When he stumbles down the steps to her, she clings to him like a lifeline while he stares blankly out into the shade.
The afternoon stretches on with an apathetic yawn; the sun grows even more careless. People leave the pews gradually to escape into the house as refuge from the burning heat; his mother, shaking, goes back inside. Donovan remains, sitting in the depths of the rows of empty benches. He stares at his clasped hands, at his thumbs, pressed into the soft skin beneath his knuckles.
The tuxedo he's wearing—Jamie's old one—is stifling. It pulls too tight across his chest and dips too low at the ankles.
(Six months ago, Jamie had helped him try it on, his hands gentle as he adjusted the collar. You’ll grow into it, Donnie.)
Donovan stares hollowly at the cuffs before tugging it securely over his palms. The weeping in the background hasn’t stopped. A spider makes its meandering way over his fingers. He makes no move to brush it off.
“Donnie.” It’s Aunt Pat, and her hand on his shoulder.
Donovan winces involuntarily, resisting the urge to turn away—no one should call him that, no one but Jamie (except Jamie hadn’t called him that, not at the end). A hollow ache echoes in his chest.
Aunt Patricia likely feels him twitch, but doesn’t move her hand away. “I know you miss him, but Don, you have to eat something. At least get in the shade, you’ll get heatstroke.”
(The memory rises unbidden: Jamie, golden in the summer light. They were outside, in that patch of shade right beside the house, bracketed by the yard. He could hear the neighbour’s dog barking somewhere in the distance, and behind him, his mother on the phone, launching into an angry rhetoric.
Jamie’s hand had fallen onto his shoulder firmly, reassuringly. Donovan squinted at his smile against the sun before miserably dropping his head into his arms again.
Donnie, you’ll go hungry like that. Come on, I made your favourite pudding. We can bring out the DVDs. Didn’t you want to watch Lion King?
Donovan shook his head, but the movement was restricted against his shoulders. He mumbled, Mom will yell at me again. Because she can’t see the spiders.
Jamie—seventeen then—had gently taken his hands and pulled him up, looking firmly into his eyes. If she yells at you, I’ll yell at her, he’d said, his smile sunny and bright and determined, It’s not your fault. I’m always on your side.)
Donovan tears his gaze from his hands, looks instead at where his shoe scuffs the pavement, wearing it down. “No thanks.”
(He sat perched on the kitchen counter. The spiders were back, spindly and grotesque and black, crawling across his vision. Donovan cradled the cylinder in his palms: unfamiliar new medicine, compacted white powder that crumbled under his thumbs.
Am I okay?
The question slipped out of him quietly, barely a whisper, and he immediately wished he could take it back, swallow it, keep it down in his stomach.
But Jamie had hugged him, his warmth reassuring and solid. I’m always on your side, Donnie, there’s nothing wrong with you.
When Donovan closed his eyes against Jamie’s shoulder, the spiders disappeared into the darkness. For a moment he could pretend he was normal.)
The weeping gets louder. Donovan wants to turn off his ears or tear them out. He settles instead for glaring at the distant house, where someone has to be sobbing their lungs out. “I know you miss him,” Aunt Pat says, going on nonplussed, “but darling, you have to take care of yourself. Have you been doing okay lately? I’m aware that this could possibly…worsen your…” She rolls the word like sticky honey around her tongue, and when she hesitantly vocalises it, Donovan only hears repulsion: “...condition. What did Mr Thompson say? Jamie wouldn’t want you to get worse over him. He wants you to take care of yourself.”
Donovan tears his gaze away from her face and stares back at his hands, which clench over and over. The spiders are back, making their way into the gaps of his vision, large black knots which blur as his eyes water. Because he remembers Jamie, and he knows she’s lying. “I have a new doctor now,” he settles for saying instead, his voice quiet, “Jamie yelled at Mr Thompson. He didn’t think he was any good.”
(You can’t tell him he’s getting worse, Jamie had said angrily, His anxiety peaked after that. Do you know how even the slightest comments affect him? You’re his doctor. You should know.
There was a low murmur in response, incoherent. Donovan pressed himself closer to the wooden door.
I’m not hearing it, Jamie had responded furiously, you wouldn’t know anything. No, of course you wouldn’t, you don’t live with him, you don’t hear him crying through the walls. We won’t be seeing you anymore.
And then when Jamie opened the door, Donovan had been too slow to jump away in time. His brother had looked at his guilty expression, sighed, and smiled—but his grin looked forced, strained with something like exhaustion. Shame pricked at Donovan’s heart.
Come on Donnie. Let’s go home.)
Donovan doesn’t bother looking at Aunt Pat to watch her concerned expression morph into blame. He knows on that face there will be pity, which he loathes. When he was younger he took pity as a sign that someone cared; now, it seems careless and condescending and makes his chest burn. Donovan has learnt not to look, has learnt to realize that no one has ever been on his side.
Even when Aunt Patricia leaves after several minutes—or hours, he can’t tell a difference—he doesn’t feel better. He buries his head in his arms and thinks of his brother.
(Oh Donnie, don’t do this, not tonight, Jamie had said tiredly, sometime after their parents had screamed at each other over the phone. It was a typical correspondence, regular like a Friday night talk show, except most of it was their mom shouting in the living room. Arguing over bills, over medical fees, over Donovan—never Jamie.
I don’t have…I can’t keep up with you right now.
But…the spiders, Donovan had said miserably, they’re not going away. They’re getting worse. It’s—
Have you taken your pills yet? Jamie had looked at him strangely then, with some sort of intensity and…was that anger? Take your pills, Donovan.
That evening, the spiders had crawled into Donovan’s eyes and he had writhed under too-thick covers, unable to sleep. You never know a good thing until it’s gone, and in the dark of night, Donovan was aware, with a cold ringing clarity, that he had lost Jamie.)
When the sun falls, the visitors slowly pick away till there are none left. Aunt Patricia tugs him into a loose hug which he doesn’t reciprocate. The casket has long been brought away.
Donovan finds his way to the toilet again, thumbs dragging over the fraying ends of his unraveled cufflinks. Somewhere in the house his mother is sleeping. His mother has never been on his side and Jamie is gone.
He rests his hands heavily onto the marble countertop, which is cold and hard under his palms. Just three days ago it had been cluttered with scattered pills and a broken plastic bottle crushed into shards. Now it is pristine. He carefully takes off Jamie’s tuxedo and stares at his reflection in the clean mirror: his eyes are bloodshot, wet from mourning the loss of someone he loves, and his mouth is pressed into a thin line, his complexion ghostly pale. His gaze travels down to his collar, to his wrinkled dress shirt, to his forearms, which haven’t healed. Long, messy lines of red claw up his shoulders and down his wrists.
He digs his fingers into the scratches just to feel something and hisses at the pain.
When he seats himself on the edge of the bathtub, there’s a smudge of brown on the porcelain, which he absently rubs off with his thumb. His chest is churning with some mixture of emotions he can’t name. It threatens to crawl up his oesophagus and onto his tongue, but he’s already spent his last few nights crumpled over the toilet bowl, and only feels empty now.
(You’ve never been on my side, have you, Jamie? You’ve never loved me. You think I’m crazy. Just like mom does.
Jamie is standing at the counter, clutching Donovan’s medicine bottle in his hand. Donovan can’t see Jamie’s face anymore—large black spiders writhe at the corner of Jamie’s nervous smile, climb down his callused hands and over his shoulders and into his eyes. They crawl out of his mouth when he asks, Donovan, what are you talking about?
Have you taken your pills?)
The sobbing hasn’t stopped.
Instead, it’s grown unbearably loud, ricocheting in his skull and racing through his veins and pounding in his bones. In the empty bathroom the sound seems to echo, to shriek and splay its cold invisible hands against Donovan’s face. While Donovan sits, his face pressed onto the clean bathroom wall, the wailing twists grotesquely into murky consonants and vowels, muffled words that slowly gain a panicked clarity: No, Donnie, stop, Donovan, stop, what are you—
—and then morphing into a garbled choking, a sickly wheezing that fades out in Donovan’s ears. He remembers watching spiders crawl over his knuckles and into a gasping mouth, remembers the way his thumbs pressed into a dying pulse.
He’d been mourning Jamie long before he’d even stopped breathing. His brother had died the day he stopped calling him Donnie, died the day he’d stared Donovan in the eye and lied, I’m always on your side.
Tomorrow, Donovan thinks, climbing into the bathtub. He stares at the ceiling, waiting for the spiders to take over.
And, as if sensing his surrender, they do.
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1 comment
This story is really powerful. You do an amazing job showing Donovan’s grief and the heaviness of his emotions. The recurring spider imagery is a great way to show his anxiety and feeling of being overwhelmed. The flashbacks with Jamie add so much depth to their relationship, making his loss feel even more painful. It’s intense throughout, though, and maybe the pacing could be a little more varied to give the reader a breather. Some of the dialogue could be tightened up too, but overall, it’s a really moving and unsettling exploration of gri...
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