Nervous Wreck - part 1

    People called him Shine, and those that knew forgot to smile and those that didn't wouldn't have anyhow, but the fact was this: Shine was short for sunshine, which was, at least poetically, the inverse of cloudy, which had connotations of dark and stormy, or just plain gloomy, and that was what he was most of the time - dark, cloudy, or stormy - and that's why no one called him Gary, or Gimpy, as his father and brother had before the two of them drowned in the bottom of the duck pond, soggy in the Dodge with a dead bottle of Jack pierced through the windshield like an ugly reminder of a bad idea.
Most people who met him were happy enough with not calling him anything, or pretending at least that they didn't notice the damp, dim shadow of his presence. An embarrassing ploy on an elevator but he couldn't  blame them. He thought about it some mornings while he stood in front of the bathroom mirror drawing black marker circles on the glass around the dark-ringed reflection of his eyes. He did it almost daily to track the tendency of his growing despondence. There were a lot of pairs of circles on that mirror: misalignments, scale issues due to simple issues regarding optics, physics, posture - the fact that he was a schnook and just couldn't stand still long enough to do the job right.   

    The mirror looked diseased.