WASTE OF SPACE 

By

D.D. BRENNAN

V1

Began 3-4-25

Post: Thursday 3rd April 2025

C1

If there’s one thing about my pet spider Jimmy that we have in common, it’s laziness. When a fly lands in his web, he’s out like a mad thing. Instead of walking all the way back to the corner of the window frame, he lets go, dangles on a single piece of web—like a bungee jumper—and climbs back up that way. It’s kind of impressive. 

He got fairly fat there, once the good weather came in in April—a lot of fruit flies to gobble up. He’s smart like me too cos he set his web up right next to the air vent. It’s like Four-Star-Fruit-Fly—straight to the doorstep delivery. 

He, I realised, is a she. And she had a load of babies there in the summer. But then she ate them. Some she shooed out, maybe because she felt guilty. I liked her better when she was a he. Women are all bitches. I’m sure of that now. Even the good ones are just shy bitches, or broken bitches, or pretending to be nice bitches because the word ‘bitch’ has something of a negative connotation. I decided there last year that I was done with trying with women. I mean bitches. Every single bit of me went into trying to get bitches to like me. And what did it get me? ‘Loser’, ‘State of that’, ‘Are you on something? I wouldn’t ride you if ye paid me.’

I used to like bitches. Used to love them because they are lovely sometimes. They’re soft and kind and thoughtful. Just not towards me. 

Why?

I’m cursed, that’s why. 

That’s another thing I’m sure of now. Curses.

I spent my precarious teens in a place called Buttercup Close. When Ma said we’d been given a gaff there and could move out of the hotel—temporary accommodation—I thought we were moving to somewhere posh. There I was, lying on the floor of the hotel—a B & B really—dreaming about a swimming pool in the back garden and tennis courts down the road. I’d soon be going to the library to read in the mornings, meet my new friends for a few matches on the courts, and then head to the local cafe in the evening to hang out with whichever new birds we’d met that weekend. 

Yeah. Buttercup Close was nothing like that. Whoever named it was trolling big time.

I didn’t know anything about Darndale—I’m a Southsider. The roads are called things like Marigold Place, Primrose Grove, Tulip Court. You’d swear the place was full of hippies riding mares bareback not youngfellas with sticks riding pieballs and scramblers. 

I was cursed from the moment we moved in there. Right next door to a bunch of mad yokes who punched the head off me on day one for being ‘a little faggot’. I am not gay, as I have already clarified, I just like the finer things in life, like sanity, a stable household and a day without non-stop roaring the head off.

The curse kicked in when next door’s Jane Murphy decided that Ma was too nice and too good looking for Buttercup Close—the irony—‘You’re not gonna go a day without knowing what a little sap you are.’ 

Sap is a powerful word from the southside that made it to the northside, apparently, and it means that nobody respects you. And if they do, they won’t for long. The only way you get respect is to not be ‘a little faggot’ and fight—with whoever looks at you funny, for no reason. You make sure everyone respects you, that’s the way. If you have a big ugly head on you, and a mouth to match, respect is afforded, and you need to only look like you might. I was, unfortunately, cursed with good looks. Gentile types like us, we were dirt in Darndale. 

The irony of those road names still makes me laugh, even barred into this bedsit in the Liberties, with only a PS5 and Pornhub to keep me occupied. Just me and Jimmy now. And the stories I read to him at night. Maybe the neighbours upstairs too, because it always goes dead quiet. We’ve been flipping between three books. The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Count of Monte Cristo and Heart of Darkness. Jimmy only comes out for Joseph Conrad. He likes Kafka, too, but he despises Sartre and Jung. He used to admire them, but now sees their brand of self-analysis as nothing more than pontificating in expository soliloquies—over-intellectualizing transitory human experiences—for status and profit. Jimmy thinks modern thinkers should explore curses because they’re real. 

I know that because the minute Jane Murphy hexed Ma, my parents started referring to me as ‘the waste of space.’ When we lived in the hotel, B&B I mean, Ma always asked me how I was. She rubbed my chest and back and talked things through with me. Da did sometimes too when he wasn’t at work. We’d been evicted because the landlord needed the house for his family, who were moving over from Pakistan. We were given three months to find a place and couldn’t find anywhere Da could afford. Luckily we were only in the B&B a few weeks because Da knows a local Fine Gael TD. But even before that, I had parents who tried to figure out what I was going through and got me to talk. 

But When Jane Murphy cursed Ma into being a mad bitch like her and cursed Da into staying in the pub to get away from her, I knew curses were real.