Capacity
          
Smoothing off-white, recycled, 50 pound text I linger as familiar passages pull me back into a story I’ve never really left and my eyes trace the hook of a serif J.
          
J for Jack.      

I fell for him too soon — before he arced. Back when his tears mingled with the rain and his bag of fresh shirts lay forgotten on the Tube. Jack had me then. It wasn't his tears that got me. Not the fact that he was in pain, so much as his capacity for it.

All that spam you get is true boys — size matters. The more capacity the better. And Jack? He's larger than life. Except when he's so small you need tweezers to find him.

But that's part of the fun. I glory in not knowing from one page to the next if he'll be the perfect combination of edgy-sweetness or some self-absorbed bastard you'd tell your best-friend to kick-the-fuck-out.

Jack's my literary drug. Crash hard in this chapter, soar breathless through the next, aching for more imagined capacity.


* Rebecca Gaffron says “I am a mother and sometimes writer who recently traded the lush valleys and rolling hills of my native central Pennsylvania for a wind-swept barn in Britain. Occasionally other people read my stories at places like Colored Chalk, The Salt River Review, SNReview and Pear Noir.”