Jack (A Short Story)

Woah, it's been a while since posting anything on here! In a bleak attempt at making up for lost time, here's my first short story post! It's a tad long, coming in at 9 pages double-spaced. This was the last piece I wrote for my Intermediate Fiction class, and the professor encouraged us to make our last stories experimental in terms of what we were used to doing with style, since a writer rarely gets the security of a group of impartial critics to judge their work and give feedback, at least before publication. So this is what I wrote, and I had been toying with the idea of it for a while - the content, not the actual style of it, that came on the spot. I even wrote my first story for the class partially on this content, on secret writing that is, but it didn't come off the way I wanted it to. I'm posting this here un-altered from when I submitted it to my class, mostly because I got very mixed reviews on it - most people loved it and were caught up in it, but others found the style annoying. All I'll say more about it is that I used very long sentences - very, very, very long sentences - so it might get irritating if it disagrees with your reading style. Also, with the font changes at the end, I had more creative fonts originally but they don't carry over well to Blogger, so I changed them, which is why they're a bit bland...sorry!

Please leave comments! I'm open to all forms of harsh and tough criticism, let me know if anything doesn't work or if some aspect is lacking. The more you tell me, the better the second draft will be! This was really fun to write, so I hope you enjoy reading it.
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Jack
by Matthew Stalbaum

The baby was a boy, and they wrote “Jack” down on as his name, and his parents smiled and held him and couldn’t wait to write to their friends about him, “Baby’s born, he’s a boy, his name is Jack,” and they wouldn’t get any response, they’d just call, but it was nice to have an occasion to send a letter for anyhow.
Jack cried and Jack grew and Jack fell and Jack grew, and after doing that for four years they put a pencil in his hand, and he wrote “Jack” down on a piece of paper and he smiled and held the piece of paper and said, “that’s me!” He wrote his name on that paper over and over and over, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, until his pencil ran out of lead, and then he asked for another one, just to see himself on that piece of paper like that, “Jack.”
After a small bit more crying and falling and growing he wrote a whole sentence, “Jack is a boy,” and now he was something. There was a pretty girl in his class, so he got another piece of paper and wrote, “Sally is a girl” (it took him forever to figure it out), and he gave the paper to her but she said it was ugly and that she couldn’t read his handwriting, so he ripped it up and wrote, “Sally is ugly,” and he gave that to her and he got in trouble but he didn’t care because she had been mean to him. Later on he wrote, “I’m sorry” (that took even longer), but she moved away and he never gave it to her, so he put it in a drawer and let it echo there, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorrrrry,” and even after that piece of paper was lost it was written in his memory and in his heart, though it stopped echoing after a while, and then it was just there, like a scar.
Jack read and Jack played and Jack got in trouble like all boys do but got out of it just as quick, and he worked himself up to writing an essay on Benjamin Franklin, because he was the most smartest person in history, and it was a page and a half long and looked like a whole book to him, and the teacher gave him an A and he smiled and held it and put it on the refrigerator and bragged about it until his friends yelled at him (obviously because they wished they had gotten A’s). Jack wrote a poem too, but that got a B, so he didn’t talk about it much, and when Scott bragged about his poem getting an A Jack yelled at him because it was annoying and rhyming was for sissy’s anyways.
Jack kept growing and Jack kept writing, and he got it in him to write something just for himself, a short story, and it was about bullies being dumb and a regular kid named Jack (no relation) rising up and beating them up, and then they didn’t bully anyone anymore. A year later Jack wrote the story again, but this time Jack (still no relation) was saving a pretty girl named Penny (all relations to real people is entirely coincidental) from the bullies, and at the end she kissed Jack and he smiled and held her, and Jack liked this story much better and felt light and heavy every time he wrote “Penny,” and sometimes he wrote it over and over and over just to feel her name, “Penny, Penny, Penny.” He gave her the story and he wrote her a question on the back of it, and she wrote back a “no, sorry” on a scrap of paper, and Jack didn’t feel light and heavy anymore, only heavy, and he didn’t want to write again, but then he wanted to write so good that she would write back a “yes, yes!” Jack started to write another story but he never finished it – it would’ve been about a boy named Jack (pure coincidence) who beat up all the bullies in the school, but then he still felt lonely, and Jack didn’t know why the character was lonely at the end but he knew he had to be.
After that Jack only wrote for school, and he wrote research papers and essays on how everyone was equal or something like that and how he wanted to help people when he grew up, and he didn’t know if that was true or not but it didn’t really matter cause it got him an A and he wasn’t ever gonna look at those papers after high school anyways, he barely looked at them while he was writing them to begin, they just blew out of his fingers like steam. He did write start writing a poem for one English class though, and it was supposed to be about himself, so he started with “My name is Jack,” and he wrote some characteristics like “I am smart,” and “I am white,” but then he wrote, “sometimes I’m sad,” and he wrote, “I hate things sometimes,” and part of him told him to erase these lines, they were bad, they sucked, they were pathetic, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t, he needed them somehow, and he wrote more, and each line was only five words at the most but he wrote more in them that only he knew about, wrote things under them, he wrote about divorce and about having to meet new potential Dads every couple of weeks and about running away to his real Dad’s house and about how quiet it was there, how the boredom was nice somehow, and about how his best friend Billy was gay and had a crush on Jack, and about Jack punching him in the arm and calling him a fag and then crying when he was alone because he knew he had acted like a bastard but it was all he could think of to do, and none of these words were in the poem but they were all there, like a heavy fog surrounding it, and he titled it “Jack” but had to rewrite it on another piece of paper because some teardrops stained it, only he never turned it in, couldn’t turn it in, there was too much of him there, more than people could see, so he made a revised version with only the simplest and lightest lines and turned that in and got a B, but he kept the original version for himself, under his bed, and he didn’t smile at it or hold it, it was just there. In senior year he had a teacher great enough that he wanted to show him the poem, but he added three more pages to it, and added some images, and each one was colored with sadness and confusion and an occasional moment of happiness in love, and the teacher said he was a good writer and he should write more, but Jack didn’t write, he refused to write, he couldn’t write cause all he could see in his poem were his own hidden sorrows and he didn’t think he could handle another soul hearing them.
Jack wrote a page to get into college and Jack wrote papers there too for his requirement classes, and it wasn’t any much different from high school except he had to write more and his teachers accepted a little less bullshit but he got by anyhow, and he majored in Math because it was something he knew how to do, and he wrote the answers to the problems and got A’s and made Math major friends who introduced him to other-Major friends, and Jack partied and Jack drank and Jack smoked, and before Jack knew it he was out of college and he had a Bachelor’s degree and nothing to do with it, and he wasn’t sure what to do but he couldn’t write, he was sure of that.
Jack found a job at a cubicle punching in numbers to a computer, and that was his writing, and occasionally he wrote emails to his co-workers and to his boss, and he came in everyday at 9 and left everyday at 4:58, and he put on a smile and held it there, and when he got home he had a beer and watched TV, but mostly his eyes glazed past and he fell into thoughts about dreams and wishes and the way things always should be but never are, and eventually he would snap out of it and eat some dinner and then daydream some more until he went to bed where he never dreamed, and he grew quiet and his smiles grew pale and his sighs grew longer and longer.
He had carried that one poem with him since he had moved out for college and then into a real apartment, tucked deep in his luggage beneath old socks and used books, and sometimes he’d found it and held it and thought that the lines could use some touching up like a painting, and he’d change a word here and add an image or a scene there, and he bought a binder for it because it quickly grew to 30 pages long, and he’d spend hours some nights long past his bedtime haunted over the right word to describe a subway station, but not just the subway station, its depth and darkness too, the abyss where those trains really emerge from, and not just that either but Jack himself, and his depth and darkness too, and he wrote feverishly and tirelessly of countless scenes, and they were all under the heading of “Jack,” and when he was done for a night he would hold the poem but he wouldn’t look it over and he wouldn’t read all that it said, he was too afraid there was a wrong word, or even worse, that there was a right word, and that the word would speak of empty jobs and a meaningless life, it was better not to read it at all, just not at all.
Despite his quietness and his lack of writing by daylight, save for checks and bills and taxes and census forms and work forms and catalogue forms and emails to his Mom about whoever her boyfriend was because it was useless to remember names, and emails to his Dad that were only responded to with a word or two, and emails to the few friends who kept in touch and were all in the same place as him only he couldn’t read if there was any despair in their words like there were in his because despair in language was always so faint like carbon monoxide or radon – despite his lack of writing, Jack received an email from one of his co-workers that was distinctly not about work, and Jack responded back with a hint of a blush, and they emailed back and forth during the days and talked and kissed and pressed back and forth during the nights, and eventually they wrote each other lovely little somethings and gave each other rings for them, and people applauded even though their somethings were not very original or poetic and Jack’s was more somber than it should have been, because it didn’t really matter what was written, it was lovely that there was an occasion for their little somethings to be written at all. Jack said little to his Sara, but he kissed her whenever he could, on the lips and on her forehead and on the neck and on her chest, and he wrote his love along her body in hickies as she wrote her love in little notes around the house on tiny scraps of paper in elegant handwriting and in the depths of his heart in red ink that bled throughout Jack’s body so that his smiles seemed to glow with a flush, and they wrote themselves into each other’s lives indelibly and irrevocably, like engravings in stone.
Jack still wrote on the poem, and over the previous lines of desire and despair there was now something brighter, something lighter, not anything like some bright light at the end of a tunnel but at least a spark, and it glowed on the words he added, washing over the sadness they hinted at before like the ocean tide over seashells, and within the scenes there emerged those glimpses of love he had written earlier in high school, and he hadn’t understood them those years ago, they just seemed like some nice thing to hold onto, but now they were real, and he smiled and held the poem, and afterwards he smiled and held his Sara. But he didn’t tell Sara about the poem, he didn’t know why, it never occurred to him, she had a Jack, she didn’t need his “Jack” poem, and he only wrote on it after she’d gone to sleep or while she was in another room, and maybe he’d only add a quick word in a margin while she was going to the bathroom, and she’d return to see him lying quietly on the bed with a smile.
Soon enough Jack’s Sara got pregnant, and the baby was a boy, and Jack wrote “Billy” down as his name, and his parents smiled and held him and couldn’t wait to write their friends about him. But Sara got sick, and she wrote some words for Billy and she wrote one more note for Jack, and then she stopped writing, her hand went limp just as she finished “Love, Sara,” and Jack wrote a list of people to contact for the funeral and he wrote other things for that too but he didn’t notice all of them very much, the words fell out of his fingers and into the right places but only by accident. Jack would rock Billy to sleep, and he’d hold Billy and he’d try to smile, but once Billy was asleep he would go to his poem, and Jack added another 20 pages to the poem from coloring every scene that he could read without crying with the overarching shadow of Death and Loss, and written into every word was a fatigue that went deeper even than Billy’s crying at 4 in the morning, and everywhere Jack wrote “loss, loss, loss,” though he rarely used the actual word, it washed over the poem like oil on water, it was even written on his forehead in wrinkles and creases and in his hair in wiry gray strands.
Billy cried and Billy grew and Billy fell and Billy grew, and Jack was there with him for it all, and Billy smiled and Billy laughed and Jack smiled and Jack laughed, and the creases of sorrow written into his face were written over with new joy, and they didn’t rewrite his face, there was still evidence of that sadness, it would always be there, but there was hope and it colored even the darkest shadows of his years with something lighter, not a promise, not anything clear or absolute, just something lighter. Jack even told Billy fairy tales, ones that Jack made up on the spot, and some were about boys named Billy (no relation) fighting dragons and saving princesses, and at first Billy said “yuck!” to saving girls, but after a few years he asked to save them again, and the endings were usually happy but not always so, but even the sad endings were happy in a way, and Billy would stare with wide-eyes at his Dad while he told them, and though the stories were never written down they wrote themselves in Billy’s memory and in Billy’s heart. Jack thought about writing them down but it was nice enough to only tell them out loud and let them fade into echoes and then nothingness, but he continued writing on his poem, and he wrote into it the wrinkles of hope that had formed on his face, and over the “loss, loss, loss” of before there was now “Billy, Billy, Billy,” and the poem grew to over a hundred pages long, but Jack never read over it as a whole, maybe a part here or there for a few changes but never as a whole, not just yet, he wanted to wait just a bit longer, he would know when the time was right.
Time rolled on and Billy grew and Jack grew too, though there wasn’t much growing left for him to do it seemed, and yet it seemed he couldn’t grow tall enough, and Billy wrote more and more each day and Jack wrote less and less each day, and Billy grew tall and big as Jack grew short and small, but they both grew in a way, and Billy graduated high school and college and Jack retired, and his co-workers wrote him a goodbye card, and it wasn’t anything original or poetic, but it was nice that there was an occasion for one anyways, and Billy emailed his Dad and Jack emailed him back and that was most of his writing, and the rest of his writing was just for himself. Sometimes he wrote a response to his Sara’s last little note to him, and sometimes he wrote a lot of responses, but he usually burned them and imagined she was getting them somewhere, somewhere so far and so close, and sometimes he wrote on his poem, and he never wrote much, only a few words, but they were just the right words, written with all the undertones of his life, like the deep creases in his knuckles, and if you read them carefully you’d see that each one really spelled out “Jack.” One day, after making some changes to his poem, Jack decided to read the whole thing, and he read over handwriting that was his but not anymore, words he hadn’t written in 50 years, and reading over himself, he remembered days of confusion and days of emptiness and days of happiness and days of loss and days of hope, and as the poem went on he felt their accumulation, like dust, and when he finished he smiled and held his poem, and he crossed out the “Jack” written at the top, and he wrote “Jack,” and he did not ask himself what he’d do with it, it didn’t much matter to him, it was done and that was enough, and soon after he finished reading it he went to bed and he went to sleep and wrote himself an end.
At the funeral, Billy saw death written all over his Dad’s face, written over the heat of life like white-out, but it was not a perfect cover, and Billy still saw wrinkles of contentment there, and his mouth upturned in the slightest hint of a smile, and Billy smiled and wanted to hold him but couldn’t because he was gone now and he’d only be holding emptiness, but for a moment he held the binder that Billy had found in his Dad’s house, it was a binder filled with countless pages of images and scenes and stories and they were all formed into one poem and words were scratched out and written over and the handwriting changed from front to back like a different person had written it by the end but not a completely different person, so Billy could tell it was old, and Billy had seen it headed as “Jack” and thought it deserved to be with Jack, even though Billy liked it very much and wanted to keep it. But it was written in Billy’s memory and Billy’s heart like the fairy tales that his Dad told him as a child were, because Billy felt that some of what he read in “Jack” was himself, in some way he couldn’t really explain, even the parts that weren’t about him, they were about him, and they were about everybody who could read it, so Billy took the parts of “Jack” that were “Billy” and let them write themselves in his memory. The funeral ended, and the funeral home needed Billy to write his name, and with a sad smile Billy wrote “Billy,” and his eyes stared at it for a second, at that “Billy” there on the paper, because it wasn’t just “B.i.l.l.y,” it said so much more, of happiness and loss and sadness and hope, all in those five letters: “Billy.”