Jack D. Schmiege*

Jack was low-down and tired, all he wanted was dinner and another pack of cigarettes. The cigarettes were cheap, and dinner was a handful of shrink-wrapped, miniature pound cakes. You know, the kind that are so loaded with preservatives that the wrapper proudly proclaims that they have a shelf life of five years, and that they'll withstand nuclear warfare and the Rapture, too! Jack didn't care about their shelf life, though. He was neither internationally aware nor religiously inclined. To him, it seemed merely appropriate that they shared the fate of his grandmother, the baker of his childhood: both she and the pound cakes were preserved against rot and decay, sealed within their respective wrappings for eventual consumption.
Pound cake and cigarettes for dinner, coffee and cigarettes for breakfast, cigarette or two on his coffee break (forget the coffee), and the cafeteria's dinner special, taken in the smoking section of course. Jack had his first smoke when he was 13, but didn't pick up the habit of two packs a day until the summer that he turned 18. They shared cigarettes and kisses while they talked about what it must be like to die and to be God and other things much larger than they were. But he went off to college and she went off to find her answers, so they never got to keep all those plans that they made. She did not hesitate in her goodbye, but he never felt quite whole again without a cigarette between his lips, and even then not entirely.
Todd, on the other hand, never had trouble finding himself. He joined up with the army straight out of high school, and they were glad to have him. He was everyone's all-American boy, and he knew it. "I hope you earn enough to buy yourself a new life when you finally realize what a shit hole you're in," he told Jack on the day he shipped out. Jack had realized it almost immediately, but never thought of getting out. Todd had good sense, he often thought, to get killed before his tour was up. Todd had his chest ripped open by a missile while he shoveled a latrine.
Jack often felt as if his chest were being ripped open. He assumed that his cigarettes were to blame, and hoped that it was fatal. That's lucky for him, because he got shot, twice in the chest, by some kid that got $47 out of the register.

Schmiege, Jack D., 26, of New York City, NY, died on March 3, 2008 at Lenox Hill
Hospital. He is survived by mother, Petunia, of Vienna, Austria, and father, Owen
Schmiege, of El Cepo, Mexico.


*Inspired by an earlier work by an acquaintance, titled "Attention Whore."