Jack's Overdue Abortion

Jack remembers the womb and wants to return there.

Jack always argued his first and worst mistake was being born. You see, Jack was in a fairly unique position in being able to remember life in the womb. That perpetually warm and comforting floating blanket where no effort needed to be spared even to eat or go to the bathroom.

He also remembered being violently pulled from that warm, suspended world to the cold, heavy, stinking world outside. He remembered the feeling behind his first throat ripping cry. It was like his whole safe universe had been taken away.

It had, in fact, made Jack quite a bitter and lazy person and how he'd managed to reach his 25th year was quite a quandary considering that unlike most people Jack found the idea of getting up to eat or go to the toilet reprehensible as he clearly remembered a time when he didn't have to do it.

He'd never found a normal job because he hated the idea of working and had gone through a phase of wearing nappies while curled in a foetal position on the sofa in an attempt to replicate what he had before.

But it still wasn't right. He just ended up with aches and a massive rash on his arse and that simply wasn't good enough. Mind you, Jack was lucky. Lucky Jack they called him in the newspapers. He'd bought a lottery ticket a few years previously on a rollover week during one of his rare trips to the shops and won 17 million pounds.

The newspapers called him a recluse because he was.

The newspapers called him boring because he was.

The newspapers called him secretive because he only allowed his newly hired servants into his house.

The newspapers eventually got bored, even with the added fricassee of secrecy, as even if you scraped the walls away, there was no good story there.

So for Jack life was pretty good for a while, he had servants for everything, to do his bills, clean up, cook his food then whiz it up into a kind of paste he could sip through his specially designed straw, an accountant who kept his money and slowly siphoned parts off for himself. He even had an extra-comfortable chair made with a toilet at the bottom so he could sit, eat and drink and go to the toilet without moving.

He put all this in a room with white walls and floor and no windows so he could try and replicate the womb. But it still wasn't right. He could feel gravity, he could see and feel the air on his body, sometimes the pain of unused muscles and that simply wasn't good enough.

He tried a sensory deprivation tank where he had a combined oxygen and food mask and a plastic nappy, which pulled away his feculence with a tube. The water was kept at body temperature to get as close as possible to the experience of being in the womb. He didn't know of course that some of that warmth came from the piss of his servants who took his social ignorance as scorn and decided to pour their own yellow steaming scorn back at him.

Jack didn't care. He couldn't feel it and the scorn of other people meant nothing to him. His tank was the closest he had been and as long as the money kept rolling his servants were happy to clean the empty rooms, cook and liquefy food before pouring it into the plastic container by the side of his black coffin and occasionally empty the opaque containers of their masters waste.

But it still wasn't right. He still felt the plastic on his skin, he still tasted food, he still had to breathe and he felt the pain of limbs that moved rarely and were always immersed in liquid and that simply wasn't good enough.

So he started to think about surgery and because of his money, doors opened that would normally remain closed and morals that would normally remain unbroken lay shattered on the floor. He had his nerves deadened for the most part to pain, He had his throat bypassed to a tube which came from his abdomen ready for connecting into his new world, he had his bowels and bladder bypassed via a tube coming from his lower back, he had a tube from an artificial lung plugged in to replace breathing and all areas around these tubes had all nerves removed so he would never feel them and to all intents and purposes he would be ignorant of their existence.

He finally got connected to his machine and was sealed into his soundproofed box, completely filled with warm liquid, no longer needing to breathe, eat or excrete.

It was right. His life could now return to the way it began and the way he had always wanted it to be. It was simply good enough.

Or at least it was.

Time has no meaning in Jacks world but one day after many many days he noticed something was wrong. He felt hungry.

In jacks new world he should never have felt hungry. You see, the accountant had done what people always do. He'd taken a bit and didn't get caught, so he took a bit more and so on and so on until Jack had nothing left.

And of course, people don't come to work if they're not paid, especially if they don't like their boss. And leading on from that everyone else assumed someone else would tell Jack and let him out to face the world. Nobody had.

Not that it would have mattered of course, Jack could no longer live as a normal human being. Besides, Jack was unaware of this, he just knew something was wrong. He tried to push at the door of his coffin but his weak, emaciated limbs could do nothing. His pathetic knocks made no noise in the soundproofed box

He attempted to scream but his movements were soundless because his lungs were bypassed. Had he known what was going on he'd have been aware that at least he was going to be able to continue breathing for his final hours, the electricity bill had been one of the final things to be paid.

Jacks hunger began to fade. He mistakenly believed that someone must have heard him. But it still wasn't right, what had actually happened was that his waste pipe had backed up and was feeding his own crap back into his stomach and it simply wasn't good enough.

He started to relax back into his womb as his excrement slowly poisoned him to death. Not that anybody noticed he'd died. His family hadn't seen him for years since he sealed himself away from the human race and, of course, nobody cares about a disappearing poor person.

It was only when his house was auctioned that someone finally found the body, pickled and stinking as it and the fluid from the small tank drained onto the floor. The body that flopped on the floor looked like a cross between Freddy Kruger and a bad sci-fi monster. The new owner was so shocked, she dropped her pot of begonias.

The funeral was pretty much a joke. There was nobody there and nobody to pay for it. They used the coffin he'd spent the last 20 years of his life in to bury him.