Telling Stories
A short story by J M Jackson
John the shelf stacker worked six days a week. Sunday was his day off apart from when it wasn’t.
He was always telling stories. He would relate them as if they were from his own history but they were invariably appropriated versions of fairy tales or recent movies.
Upon his birth, his parents had almost named him Mark. Learning this when he was older, he failed to see why his parents had bothered telling him. What was in a name? Whether he had been called Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, it was of no consequence. He was of no consequence.
He lived in a one-room apartment. Actually, to be claustrophobically accurate, he lived in a room. A very small room. No sane person would call it an apartment.
‘Would you like to come to my apartment this Sunday?’ he asked me one day on our coffee break. I agreed out of politeness — torturous, misguided politeness — and discovered his apartment to be a room. A very small room.
I sat on his sofa while he related a condensed version of his life. Having finished, I felt sure that he had missed something out. Perhaps he had missed everything out.
I gleaned that he had lived in this room for twelve years and he had completed twenty-eight years of life. Twenty-eight years etched into his…
