Nutter Gunner

Jack Gunner was a truly peculiar fellow. No matter where he walked by, he always got noticed. This seemed strange to him since he didn’t seem to exhibit any kind of erratic behavior, nor did he really have a peculiar look. He was always twitching his face into an unpleasant expression, though. This was due to his left hand hurting very much, he said, further explaining that said condition caused him to always wear leather gloves in every occasion.

Jack was a former detective, dismissed by what the reports called “trauma related disabilities”. The only thing he remembers from his last day on the force is lying on the scene of the crime he was assigned at the time, an empty and dark alley, surrounded with blood, clutching his face due to the extreme pain felt. When he first woke up at the Hospital, Jack went straight to the mirror and, after a thorough examination, thought to himself that the only consequences from the episode were a couple of scars to his left arm (nothing a little plastic surgery couldn’t fix).

But upon his return to the station, the bad news was broken down to him: he had too much of an ill health to continue working. Jack categorically denied this, claiming that despite his advanced age (he was 55 years old at the time), he was still fit enough as well as had a feeling of being young at heart and that was all it mattered for him to carry on.

Despite thinking that he was taken for a ride regarding the subject, Jack eventually resigned to this new reality and since he felt there wasn’t any kind of legacy in his family to live up to (all the male members of his family were related in some shape to charity; Jack always thought this was because they were gullible enough to believe in one person’s power single-handily change the world ), decided to gather a huge parcel of his most valuable belongings and realize a dream he was planning to accomplish before his death: climb Mount Everest.

While preparing for the journey Jack got a strange call on his cell phone, where a sobbing voice on the other side told him to return to the alley where it all happened; upon his arrival there Jack was blindsided by a frying pan straight to the face. After gathering his senses, while massaging his left side of the face, Jack looked up to a shady figure; upon closer examination it turned out to be his wife. Jack’s features quickly became almost static and after his crying wife whispered something to his hear they became completely motionless. Jack couldn’t believe it so he removed both gloves; then it truly hit him. The shock was so big he tripped over backwards and yelled an expressive “No” whilst crying.

Jack suffered from a severe case of Phantom Limb Syndrome. In other words this meant that while his left hand disappeared in the accident, his body was still so attached to it that the brain still suffered everything (cold, hot, pain, etc…) said hand would feel despite not being anything in its place, like a prosthetics. Where Jack’s case took a turn for the worse was when his eyes and mind tricked him so well into believing his hand was still there, they deleted the reason why there was so much blood in the scene of the crime. In fact they went so far that Jack believed the reason he was always in a state of pain was because his hands got cold really fast, hence him always wearing gloves even though his left one was always empty, which garnered the attention of everyone he met.

After this realization, Jack decided to make his trip to Mount Everest anyway. The reason now was different. Unable to take the expression “time heals everything “at heart, Jack Gunner decided that not only was the physical pain hard to deal with, but also the newfound psychological made impossible for him to continue. He killed himself with a gunshot through the chin. Indeed, Jack Gunner was a truly peculiar fellow.

By: Daniel Fernandes and Hugo Rosa