To be honest, Jack had been in better shape. He couldn’t remember when, but there was a slight memory of a man that was capable of something. This man had long gone – Jack knew that much – but from time to time the memory of this man came up in his mind. The part of Jack’s mind that was still intact that is. 

To say that Jack was a recovering alcoholic was a blatant lie. Jack wasn’t recovering because he didn’t consider himself to have an issue. Others said so, but Jack couldn’t disagree with them more. He knew he was an alcoholic, but for him, this wasn’t a problem, it was just a character trait, like others were bibliophiles or melomaniacs. Jack and his lucky bottle were old pals that never got separated. 

Explaining how Jack became the man he now was wouldn’t have been worthwhile. He said that things have happened, then life has happened and then the bottle has happened. For him it was just a matter of fact. He never became a problem to anyone else. He had never been in a fight, he had never troubled anyone, he just lived his life with his bottle. When he woke up, the bottle was there, over the course of the day, the bottle was with him and in the night it was the last thing he saw before closing his eyes. Jack didn’t drink to forget – or at least he couldn’t remember he was doing that. 

The bottle Jack kept with him was his lucky bottle. Jack considered it as such, because magically it never emptied. It also never broke, no matter how many times he had stumbled over it in his not so good shape. Whenever there was a fight, the bottle stood calm, and somehow Jack always got out unhurt, when his lucky bottle was around him, no matter how nasty the fight got. There had been other times – his head was a blur when he tried to remember the incident – before he got his bottle. There had been a bar fight, Jack had not been involved or dealt a blow, but in the end he had been the one hospitalized. Jack couldn’t remember if he had been an alcoholic back then, but he remembered finding the bottle. It was the day he had left the hospital, the bottle was just standing there on the corner stone. It had been covered in an aura that was eerie and Jack couldn’t stop himself from picking it up. Something about having it just felt right. The same day he had a car crash (speeding driver, no fault at Jacks), a piano falling on his head (even he considered that a little bit overdramatic) and a stampede (from escaped cows, it had been a really weird day). After surviving those nearly fatal incidents, he had claimed that his bottle was his lucky bottle and decided never to get separated from it again.

The weirdest thing however happened on a sunny winter day. It had been oddly warm that day, as it had been for some days already. Although it was still the middle of the winter, Jack had the desire to take his jacket off and walk a little bit just in his T-shirt. He didn’t follow through because he knew that people would have considered that weird. He didn’t want to be considered weird. So he just sat down on the bench in the sun, unzipped the jacket and enjoyed the nice weather. Not far from him on a tree was a picture of a runaway dog and the owners asked for help to find him. Jack didn’t care much – it wasn’t that he didn’t like animals or that he didn’t want to help, it was just that he didn’t see anything that he could do. After he sat down, he noticed the eerie glow from his lucky bottle. He lifted it into the sunlight, because he enjoyed the colors in the liquid, when he noticed a movement from the corners of his eyes. As he lowered the bottle again, he saw the dog – it was directly standing in his view, watching him as he was watching it. He decided to be a good samaritan and called the family. They came just a few minutes later, the dog hadn’t moved before they came and everyone was seemingly happy to be together again. The family even gave him 20 bucks as a thank you so he could get something to eat. But Jack wasn’t hungry, he had just eaten before, so he decided to test his luck and use the 20 bucks on a lottery ticket. He bought the ticket and went to cross his numbers. As he sat down the bottle to get his hand free, some of the liquid sprinkled on the sheet. The numbers marked weren’t numbers Jack would have crossed himself, but this was his lucky bottle and he was gambling with his luck so he decided to let the bottle decide. When the numbers were picked in the evening, Jack suddenly was a millionaire. 

The weirdest thing was, Jack had never drunk from the bottle. Jack despised the taste of alcohol. But he would never get separated from his bottle. After all, how else could he have been an alcoholic? It had the money that had destroyed his life and made him the man he was. But he had the odd feeling that his lucky bottle would get him out, so he never separated from it.