Dante's Fire

Chapter Forty Four: Big Jack

BIG JACK

As a child, Jackie was a small bundle of soft.

Dimpled fists and fat legs were her lot, and she had a nest of hair that remained untamed despite her mother's best efforts. You picked her in your arms and she formed a knot from her hands which she wound around your neck, her grip vice-like. She held on to things like a child who had been greatly deprived of good things in her early life, like a castaway. That was how her mother described it. She would have known better than anyone else. They both did. They were castaway children, you see. She had lived at an orphanage for a long time, perhaps most of her childhood, or at best, as long as she could remember, and if anyone could tell you the truth of it, she could: orphanages were no place for a child without any parents.

It had been frightfully easy for him to connect with her and more so for them to become an item, a steady thing. Big Jack— who back then was just Jack—knew what yearning was and knew how to sustain it without