Still Turning — A Short Story About Grief
The power had been out for six minutes when Jamie finally noticed the fan had stopped.
The power had been out for six minutes when Jamie finally noticed the fan had stopped.
That is the thing about fans, when it’s moving you stop seeing it. It becomes background. But when it is still, it is three blades and a chain hanging in the dark, and Jamie was not happy when he looked at it.
He looked away.
He was sixteen and had not cried at the funeral and had not cried at school when Mrs. Nelson pulled him aside and used her sad voice and had not cried when his dad sat across from him at the kitchen table with takeout, which neither of them ate and thought we’re going to be okay.
He had not cried.
He sat on the edge of his bed now with his phone face-down and his body aching from how hard he’d been holding it and felt the whole massive crushing weight of the last five months sitting on his head. He was so tired he couldn’t sleep.
He looked back at the fan.
The chain hung perfectly still in the powerless room. The same chain. The same thick ceiling hook his dad had installed the summer Jamie was four. He remembered sitting on his mother’s lap watching his dad up the ladder, and his mother’s arms around him, and the smell of her and how safe that had felt.
She used this room, it said. She used this fan.
Jamie’s hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against his thighs and stared at the ceiling.
She stood where you’re sitting.
He thought about that. He let himself think about it fully, which he hadn’t allowed before, which his psychologist said he should approach gradually, which he had been not doing for five months.
His mother had sat in this room. She had looked at this ceiling. She had made a decision that she thought Jamie would understand someday, the psychologist said he has to slowly process it, his dad said she was sick, the relatives said God’s plan, and every single one of them was handing him a different perspective on explaining why she had taken the rope in her hands.
The power came back on.
The fan got into motion. One rotation. Two.
The same sound it had always made, the same sound that had been white noise his whole life, the same sound that was playing, he realised, the night she died.
Jamie stood up.
He didn’t know he was going to do it until he was already in the hallway, and then at the top of the stairs, and then at his father’s bedroom door. He knocked twice. He hadn’t knocked on this door since he was small.
His father looked at him.
Jamie looked at his father.
“I keep thinking about it, Dad” Jamie said. “I keep thinking about — I can’t stop — “ and then the thing that had been locked in his chest for five months moved, and he stopped trying to hold it, and he cried in the hallway outside his father’s door with his forehead against the doorframe, ugly and loud and completely without dignity, while his father stood there and let him and didn’t say a single word.
In the morning, they would take the fan down together.
They would not talk about why.
They wouldn’t need to.
Love,
Dona
