Poor Jack Has a Headache

Some years ago (too many, really), I began writing vignettes about a character named Jack.  When I began putting the vignettes to use in a plot I was building, I came to recognize that he was simply too pitiful and unfortunate to carry a good story (I didn’t want to make people too miserable as they read.)  In the end, Jack has been absorbed into another story, as a supporting character.  Though he is no less unfortunate, he is no longer the focus of the story, which I hope will allow him to survive without making a miserable reader.

I thought I’d let Jack live a little from his old life; this snippet no longer fits anywhere in Jack’s new world.

   A Gallagher's supermarket was five blocks from Jack's apartment. He inhaled deeply when he entered the store, immediately familiar with the smell, unique to this Gallagher's. Jack placed it as a combination of industrial degreaser, spoiled milk, and body odor. Gallagher's was the only store in the city that would permit most of the general public to come in and loiter in the heated aisles during the cold, nighttime loneliness. The market boasted none of the scanners, electronic tellers or automatic doors of most stores, but it offered the largest selection of cigarettes within sixteen blocks.

   Jack needed aspirin. There, sharing the shelf space with toothpaste, shampoo, and foot powders, numerous and confusing bottles of aspirin waited. Jack was in short supply of money, as usual, so he searched the shelf for the smallest, cheapest bottle he could find. The permanent headache he battled for the last four days was growing and intensifying. None of the bottles was priced under two dollars, which was all the money he could find in his apartment. The pain in his head seemed to get worse as he realized he could not buy painkillers. He stretched his arm out to hook his fingers under the shelf's edge and keep himself from falling.

   Jack stared down at the floor to regain his stability. The tiles were yellow, with the appearance that they were once nearly white. For twelve years, since the first time Jack entered it, the store had looked exactly the same. While he stood stabilizing himself, Jack wondered if some of the products were the very same ones as those which were in the store that first time.

   When Jack was strong enough to stand on his own, he shivered with a fear mixed with exhaustion and cold. Thinking about it, he realized that he had at least one of these spells of light-headedness nearly every day for two weeks, and on a few days he had actually fallen down a few times.

   He picked up a bottle of pills. It cost four dollars and sported a brand name. Jack closed his eyes to force back the headache, which seemed to roam around to different areas. It crouched at the very front of his head, pushing against his eyes and forehead. Jack pushed his index fingers against the soft part of his temples, at the end of his eyebrows, and rubbed in circles, until the bottle he had clutched with his other three fingers fell out of his grip and rattled on the yellowing floor.

   Jack bent over and picked up the bottle, casually passing it by his coat pocket and dropping it in. He held his arm in front of him, pushing the other bottles on the shelf in crowded bunches with his open palms as he searched to balance himself in the aisle. He guessed he had been standing in the same place for as long as twenty minutes. The young girl at the check out could have easily seen him the entire time. He held on tightly to the shelf. He could see nothing through his blurry eyes, dotted with a variety of colored sparkles, except the other bottles of aspirin that looked just like the one in his pocket.

   He hung his head down, pushing his ear against his outstretched arm. He breathed deeply, feeling his ribs, chest, shoulders, and back flex and bend from the intake of air. He was beginning to regain his sight. Jack had not stolen anything since he was twelve. He felt sure the check-out girl saw everything that had happened and was waiting for him to leave so he could be caught.

   When Jack finally stepped out of the store, no one stopped him. The girl was far more interested in her chewing gum than Jack. The enormous relief struck him so suddenly his knees gave with his first step.

[more to come...]