Jack -Short Stories

Everything Was Always a Bore

Jack Nolan was born September 1, 1977 into Ronald and Mary Nolan's loveless marriage.

Ronald and Mary had been married for 17 years.

They thought they were in love. They thought that they wanted to be with each other forever...

Oh how we can be so wrong.

As the years passed, Ronald's job as an insurance salesman grew to become a bore and caused him to fall into a deep depression.

Mary, sensing her husband's change in mood, did what she could to turn her husband attitude around, but the man would have none of it. This drove Mary to start drinking, and quite heavily, but only behind her husband's back. She had no job, as she was only a house wife and her life became somewhat pointless, at least to her.

With no children and nothing to hold her interest, Mary wondered what else she could do to get Ronald to notice her again and to look at her like he once had. They had always talked about having children and in a last ditch effort, Mary, drunk on liquor, seduced her over worked husband one night and, as luck would have it, became pregnant with their one and only child at the age of 38.

Ronald, at first, was quite pleased with this turn of events and it had seemed that his life had made a turn for the better. However, this was short lived. In Mary's 7th month of pregnancy, Ronald had an affair with a woman he had met while on a business trip into the next town over. Mary never found out, at least not right away.

When Jack was born, Mary was over the moon.

'I will name him 'Jack' after Ronald's father,' she told herself, in hopes that it would please her distant husband.

However, her attempt had been in vain.

Ronald hardly noticed the small child whenever they were near one another. This made Mary quite upset as she did not want to raise Jack all alone, but it seemed she had no other choice in the matter.

Mary Nolan wanted her son to be everything she could never be. She dressed the boy in nice clothing, well, as nice as her husband's salary could afford and never allowed him to interact with other children his age for she thought them to be a bad influence on her son.

Jack was a quiet child. Even from a very young age, he hardly cried or showed any signs of emotion or distress. He was a beautiful child, as he was so often told by those who happened upon him. He was also very smart and learned to read at only three years old. This made his father, somewhat proud, but never fully. From the start, Jack had trouble gaining his father's approval.

As the boy grew, he had issues with his attention span. This would later become known as Attention Deficit Disorder. Of course when he was a boy there were no real tests to discover what was wrong with him and so, his mother dealt with it however she could.

Mary treated her son as if he was a small adult. Never using a soothing, motherly tone when conversing with him and never showing him any real affection other than the occasional peck on the cheek before he was off to school.

School was a difficult place for Jack Nolan. He was an outcast in the truest form and had not a friend to his name. He always maintained good grades, but because of his short attention span and intelligent mind, he would often smart mouth his teachers, at least that's how the teachers saw it. This was not on purpose; he was only trying to correct them when they were misinformed. The teachers, never wanting to be shown up by one of their students, especially a slight boy like Jack, would send him to the principal's office. This happened all too often and Jack became quite used to it.