Jack

His name is Jack. His hair is black and stands upright, slightly greasy from neglect and stands off against his pale skin. He has a square jaw and wouldn’t be out of place in an old vampire movie from the fifties or sixties. When movies had none or barely any colour and sound, and actors had to act “big”. The great ones stopped acting like that, but Jack still does.

I don’t remember when I met him. It is like he has just always been there. But when someone introduces him, he stands tall, stretches his arms and bends forward with one foot in front of the other, as if bowing to an audience only he sees. “For yours and mine entertainment; Jack White!” he will mumble, before looking up from his bow. Taking his time to take you in. You can feel his eyes pierce your skin causing shivers and goosebumps. As if he sees and knows all about you from that point on.

Jack plays with knives, tosses them around and makes them disappear and reappear in between his hands. I hope he had the wisdom to practice these useless tricks with dull or plastic substitutes, but the scars on his fingers say otherwise. “Pain is the best teacher” is his motto. Or is that just one of the lies he tells to see how you would respond?

He drinks tequila without any lime or salt, whiskey without ice and smokes cigarettes without filters. Because perfection doesn’t need addition. And what is more perfect than self destructive behaviour? It is the pinnacle of autonomy. “They can’t hurt you if you hurt yourself first.” A laugh follows and a quote after that; “Never forget what you are, the rest of the world will not.”

At night when silence falls and living becomes surviving, I see his grin. I hear his laugh through wordless mumbling in the background of my mind. I see the bottle of tequila next to the box of knives on the table and ask myself when I put them there. The bandages on my fingers prevent me from putting the bottle away because I don’t want it to slip between my fingers.

When my eyes finally close and my body falls asleep but my brain is still awake, I see a dark, vibrating black figure in the corner. Red eyes stare me down. A grinning smile, as the black turns to a pale, vibrating skin, bending over with his arms wide.

“For yours and mine entertainment…”





-VLH