Jeb wriggles and weeps as he sinks into our sofa. The sofa is broken and stained, like Jeb’s eyes have been all day. Bambi, Jeb’s beloved aunt, has passed away, and we recently got back from the funeral.

Jeb is distraught because Bambi raised him like a son when his birth mother all but abandoned him. He has started to play a video game. His character is spiralling to the bottom of an eerie mass of water. The water rages with a soundless oscillation, and it seems to go down deeper than an ocean. 

He’s taken off his too-tight new black shoes, and his not-right-for-the-summer blazer, but he is still wearing his stiff smart shirt and his uncomfortable black trousers. His real life is drowning in grief, as he frantically smashes buttons, trying to figure out how his character can swim back up to the surface. 

“She bought this for me―a few birthdays back―it was so bloody sweet of her,” he manages to sob out, in spasmodic bursts. “Didn’t know a damn thing about these things, but she went right out and bought it anyway. This is the first time I’ve played it in all this time. I’ve got no idea what I’m doing―but it looks pretty cool.” He sniffles. 

Not too soppy, idiot, you might make things worse. Not too blasé either, idiot, he might think you don’t care. I take a slow breath. 

“It’s kinda beautiful,” I say, “weird, but kinda beautiful. The silence below the water, I mean.”

“Yeah…I think I know what you mean,” he says, wiping another tear away. 

In the kitchen, I fill up a wide, tall glass of water, collapse down onto one of our rickety kitchen chairs, and try to emotionally and physically recharge before I make a start on dinner. 

Out of nowhere, three moths appear, and flap up a storm of terror in my mind, my right leg shaking up and down, uncontrollably, like the drills they use to dig up the ground. I think about hiring out a beekeeping suit for the summer, covering myself from head to toe in its comforting protection, so none of the scary bugs in the world can touch my skin, because I foolishly decided not to purposely murder any insects this year.

I wonder if the moths see me as:

A) A gentle giant

B) A monster

C) They have no idea what I am. They only know that I am not a moth 

I guess it doesn’t matter what I look like to them, I conclude, when to me, they are frightening little monsters to run away from, some unreal danger to fear. 

I leave my water on the kitchen table, lunge towards the kitchen door, and slam it shut behind me, cantering back into the living room, sweaty and slightly traumatised.

“I’m too tired to cook tonight, babe, let’s order that fluffy tofu that you like, instead,” I say, too ashamed to reveal why the kitchen is now a no-go zone. 

“Sounds good,” Jeb mutters, not looking away from the screen. But he doesn’t touch the food when it arrives; he just keeps on playing his game, until he eventually falls asleep on the sofa. I cover him with the mustard and lavender blanket that Bambi knitted for him when he was seven, when she first started to become his mother, as his birth mother retreated further and further away from him, until she became little more than a stranger. I crawl into bed, exhausted. “Night night, Bambi,” I whisper, and I cry myself to sleep. 

The next morning, when I go back inside the kitchen, I see three tiny dead bodies floating in my abandoned, tepid water, like when I used to turn on my back in the warm summer creek with my two sisters, our faces towards the sky and the light. Except my sisters are still alive, I am alive, and the family of moths are dead. Bambi is dead. I decide to switch to a cup with a lid, the candyfloss pink one, covered in a million shimmering hearts. I decide not to tell Jeb about the distressing crime scene, because telling him about three extra deaths would only add to his grief. 

Like a divinely-orchestrated shot at redemption, I notice a daddy longlegs beside the taps on the top of the bath later that morning. At first, I think it is dead. It is stiller than a stone and one of its legs is bent, as though it is broken. I wonder if daddy longlegs legs can break, trying to remember if they shed their damaged limbs.

I mournfully grab a jug. I’m about to fill it with water and flush the critter down the plughole, when suddenly, I see a flicker of life, like the spark of a nearly-empty lighter. That’s when I realise that there might be a chance. Are you hurt, little one? I ask. Or are you only stuck? 

My heart left hooks on the wall of my chest, as I carefully liberate a waterlogged leg with the corner of an envelope. But all is still and the thought of more death twists my stomach like a vine. Then I notice that another leg has been glued down by a pinprick of water, and as I ease the outer point of the delicate limb away from the enamel, the critter instantly lifts upwards and floats towards the high, white ceiling, like a gangly angel, and I feel lighter than I had before. It almost felt like when the daddy longlegs flew, I was also flying. 

I think of how Bambi must have floated up to heaven and how she had always been an angel, and how I miss her so heartbreakingly, even though she wasn’t my aunt, or my mother, and how all the pain that Jeb is going through must feel so much more enormous. 

Jeb tells me that he needs to leave the house because the inside is starting to suffocate him. “Literally, it feels like the oxygen in the air has been replaced with death,” he tells me, “it’s so, so heavy.” He tears off his funeral shirt, tugging on the part of his vest that is covering his chest. 

We put on some fresh clothes and I protectively squeeze Jeb’s hand and lead him to my childhood creek on the outskirts of the next town, far enough from home for us to temporarily forget our woes. I watch as he semi-strips his pain away. He dives in the water and his skin is soaking, but his eyes are dry, and I kiss his mouth as a form of resuscitation. A healing breath. A momentary joy. A fleeting distraction of summer flesh, and we lie on our backs, and we feel the balmy sun on our faces, and we splash about like children, and he even laughs at a joke I tell him about a sunflower and a monk, laughing like the old Jeb used to laugh, before Bambi got sick, and I don’t think about the dead moths I’ve accidentally murdered. Not even once. 

As the day begins to dim, we reluctantly redress and return to our adult lives, and the walls that surround us, and our guilt and our sorrow, and all the other things that grownups are forced to deal with, but would rather swim away from. 

I splash my sunburnt cheeks with some water in the bathroom. The daddy longlegs has gone. I look at the partially open window, you flew free, little one, I smile, glowing. 

I reach the end of the hallway and my heart is electrocuted with a tormented shock, when I spot the daddy longlegs dead on the floor, upside down, like the family of moths. I wrap it in tissue paper and leave the soft coffin on the kitchen table, and promise that I will place the critter back in the arms of nature, the next time I step outside onto the grass. 

Jeb is now quietly sobbing in the bedroom like he is embarrassed for me to hear him, because the funeral was yesterday and not today, and today has ended up being a fun day in the end. He is wearing his lemon yellow t-shirt and his breezy summer shorts, and he still smells of creek. He thinks he shouldn’t smell of grief. 

I can’t help but think of some distant summer and how bright it might shine when death’s new curtain isn’t drawn across the sun. I bring Jeb in a cup of water, his lidded one, covered in rabbits and rainbows, and pull him towards my body, hoping he will cry as loudly as he needs to, knowing the grief will one day start to heal over, even if the scar it leaves will linger for a lifetime. 

About the Author:

Amy Akiko is an educator and writer from South London. Her writing predominately gravitates towards the themes of love and nature, and has appeared in East of the Web, The Tiger Moth Review, Cosmic Daffodil, and elsewhere. 

*Feature image by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash