Changes

Memories

Jack was given a short exam to test his cognitive function, along with a brief overview of his injuries, before the doctor left to let him rest. Dr. Stephens was quick to assure him he was quite lucky;other than the broken forearm and couple of staples required for the crack in his skull,   he had only received superficial cuts and bruises across body. He told Jack that things could have been quite more severe, such as ending up in a coma, or suffering severe brain damage. The most pressing thing on Jack's mind had been one question:

"How bad does my truck look?" He asked the doctor with a worried look on his face.

"I have not seen it personally, but from what I've been told, it is nearly totaled." The Doctor told him, not trying to hide the disappointment showing on his face from the boy's seemingly lack of interest in his medical condition. "I'm no mechanic, but my understanding of accidents involving heavy animals is that it requires at lot of front-end work to get the vehicle back up to snuff. This can be quite costly, and given the prevalence of older-model vehicles in this area, most people just scrap their vehicle and buy a new one."

Jack understood what the man was saying, having seen a lack of newer vehicles in his travels through town and the area surrounding. But he also knew that he could never just scrap his truck; it was bad enough that he would probably have to replace some of the original side panels on his orange, slightly rusted 1982 Ford f-150.

The truck and its contents had been the sole possession left to him of his father's. He had disappeared ten years earlier when Jack was eleven. Jack's father had been prone to nightly excursions such as the one Jack had been enjoying just prior to his accident, except the reason for his last hadn't been a positive one.

 His father was on the tail end of one his week-long benders, when Jack had gotten fed up. His parents were fighting over who got to choose what was on television, and Jack walked in to see him strike his mother. Had he walked in a few moments earlier, he would have seen his mother viciously slap his father. This may not have changed Jack's opinion of the incident he witnessed, but it might have helped him understand it more.

When Jack saw his father hit his mother in the stomach, he snapped. He ran into the room and started hitting his father with all of the might his scrawny eleven year old body had, screaming "I hate you, I hate you" at the top of his lungs, ending the tirade with one final statement, "I wish you were dead!". This seemed to hit his father with the same force Jack would later hit a cow with in the same truck his father left in soon after, only taking with him the remainder of his forty ounce bottle of Jack Daniels, and two packs of cigarettes from the carton above the kitchen sink.

His truck was found a few days later in the parking area for a hiking trail at the base of a local mountain; one of the packs of cigarettes was left in the glove compartment, but the other pack and the bottle of whiskey were gone. Search-and-Rescue had spent two weeks combing the mountain in search of Jack's father, to no prevail. They had found the shattered remains of the whiskey bottle about three quarters of the way up the mountain, roughly two kilometers away from the nearest trail. Jack had always wished the bottle hadn't been smashed, so he could have had one more physical memory of his father, despite the negative connotations it would have carried. The lone pack of cigarettes had stayed in its spot at the back of the glove compartment for ten years, but would have been removed on the night of Jack's accident, having been decided he wanted a cigarette more than he wanted the memory of his father which the pack carried.

As he lay in his hospital bed alone, the part of him which had always blamed himself for his father's disappearance took over his mental state. He deeply pondered the final night he had seen his father, body aching, on the verge of tears. He had long ago wished to take back the things he had said on that distant night, and the thought of the totaled remains of the only major heirloom he possessed of his father's gave him one more wish: that he had never decided to reach for that pack of cigarettes.