Barbara Jacksha's Editor's Pick
Jack & Jill
by Eirik Gumeny
I enjoyed the freshness of this piece — the voice, the imagery, and the creative re-weaving of an old tale.
So it's late, and there's Jack, sitting in a room without lights, with a cold cup of coffee and an even colder monitor staring him down. And so Jack's sitting there, thinking about how he used to relish this kind of situation, how bohemian it was or some shit equally as foolish as that. Now, though, now he's tired and he wants to sleep and he realizes he must have been retarded in college because there's no way that this could possibly be beneficial in any way. Jack's thinking that maybe his addiction to caffeine has finally become detrimental, or maybe its just insomnia come calling again. But then Jill calls and Jack stops thinking, because thinking isn't something he does with Jill. Not that he's got anything against Jill, far from it, but she sure as hell isn't what he's fairly certain he wants.
So it's even later, and there's Jack, sitting in a room without lights, head against the bed frame, listening to Jill drone on about something or other. And Jack's thinking back to when he met Jill, trying to reason his way into the situation so he can reason his way back out. Jack's thinking, remembering, reading Jill through her rings, but the wood is rotted now, rotted from the beginning really, and he's having a hard time of it. That's when he first met her, when he first moved down south. Then later, their first date, the end of that night. A parking garage overlooking the ocean. Or was it a coffee shop. And then the two of them... no, that was Caroline. There was that time, that time they went to Atlanta. The rings get a little better, he remembers actually wanting to spend time with her now, a few good weeks back in the autumn. That time there, and the car ride to her parents'. And now here's Jill, the queen of the world, with a cardboard crown and a picnic table throne as the leaves fall down around her. Jack remembers that day all right, but it gets rotten real quick and the reign of the queen is little more than a mound of decaying splinters.
So it's early now, and there's Jack, sitting in a room without lights, half-asleep and listening to Jill go on and on and on. And then it gets even darker, the monitor clicking into power-save and the sun still not rising and Jill making plans for the summer. The phone is somewhere around Jack's neck now, words and static just drifting upward, drifting with no loss of emphasis. And so Jack starts thinking, about Jill, about the summer, about what he's going to do for breakfast, what he's going to do after that. Words and static, and then there are some more words and Jack gets up to get a glass of water and Jill is swallowed by the clack of a cell phone closing.
So its early, and here's Jill, the girl with the broken crown, the queen of a time long gone, watching without realizing as her world tumbles down around her.
Eirik Gumeny is perpetually in need of a better job. He has previously been published in SaucyVox and the late Cyanide Magazine.