Imagine a city. Early morning, the sun creeps out in the horizon like a shy child, bleeds light over the skyscrapers and streets that are slowly accumulating cars with tired people pining for a coffee as soon as they get into work. The birds perch along power lines like spectators, alarms blare to wake sleep-deprived students for school.
A normal city, a normal day.
Look a little closer.
It's five in the morning and there's a mousy-haired boy walking a cold alley. He's young, probably no older than eleven. There's a handgun tucked into his waistband, and two days from now, he's going to try and rob a corner store, engage in a shoot out with three cops, and lose his life to a bullet straight into his Adam's apple.
This is normal.
Four streets down, a hooker in five inch heels blows some john in his front seat. Her hair is stringy, arms punctured from too much heroine. She'll overdose tomorrow, and no one will find her body for days because her landlord doesn't care, and she's alone.
This is normal.
Imagine a city where the crime rate has doubled dramatically in just three years. Where blood is more commonplace on the asphalt than rain. Where the life expectancy is only fifty, the vast majority of citizens are below the poverty line, ad robberies are considered passe because of how often they occur in a week. Where suicide rates have tripled.
This is Jack's normal.
Normal is prisons being so crowded and overpopulated that schools need to be emptied out to accommodate. Normal is having to suck more dick than the most wanted whore in town, especially if you want cops to let you go with only a warning when they pull you over for shitty driving.
(Jack has many pairs of jeans ripped at the knees.)
Normal in the Dauph household is screaming, bruises, and broken glass. It's his mother crawling into his bed at night and threatening him to fuck her. It's his father never hitting him with his fists, but always grabbing his skinny wrists and littering his skin with with circular bruises.
(Normality is so relative.)
What Jack sees as normal are the burn marks along his inner arms (not self-inflicted), the single vertical and faded cuts along both wrists (self-inflicted, old), the flurry of prison-issued tattoos along the back of his shoulder blades, and the white scars decorating his back in slashes, particularly the word SLUT carved cruelly into his lower back. They're a part of him. An acceptance.
He doesn't figure he deserves it, only knows it's going to happen whether he likes it or not.
Imagine this city where movie theaters are dusty and graffitied and abandoned, where local newspapers sell more than printed material, and common courtesy is a long forgotten memory. Where cars aren't safe on the road, where the municipal government is so corrupt they accept bribes and are sinking into what could soon be communism, and rapes are so common that victims are turned away from the police because it wasn't considered a crime.