A Case of DW-U

It’s freezing.

The sky is dropping ice, calling it rain.

No-one’s venturing outside.

Fires are lit, radiators fit to burst.

Hot water bottles have been placed into slippers and slippers into the oven to warm them up.

Jack is running circles in the living room; thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.

He stops and takes off one of his scarves.

Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three.

He should have eaten more when he was younger, put some meat on the bone.

Now it is jumpers.

He’s wearing three of them.

And a bobble-hat.

Jack is one of the few people who still has a bobble-hat, most of his neighbours have no idea what he is talking about when he mentions them.

They prefer beanies.

Or is it beenies?

Jack has no idea, if it’s not a bobble-hat it doesn’t count in his book.

Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty.

He takes it off and puts it over the tea-cosy that is trying to keep the pot warm.

The pot is waiting on the top of the stove that has been burning all night. The tea is waiting for Jack to stop running.

Jack is waiting to feel the warmth back in his toes before he does.

Perhaps four pairs of socks are over-doing things?

He bends forward and removes the first pair, red and black with a snow flake pattern.

A Christmas present from himself.

It’s the twenty-third of December, he has started opening his presents already. A little early.

But then again, he knows what they are. He wrapped them himself.

Chose them.

Jack lives alone.

Jack lives and sleeps alone.

An immaculate child, he has no parents.

So, not really an orphan.

Unfortunately, not a saviour either.

On the sixty-third run around the room he trips on a piece of mistletoe, falls, bangs his head on the edge of the coffee table and dies.

No happy Christmas this time the.

But at least he can say - I feel like death warmed-up.