Cold

He zones out pretty much with his head at this weird angle over the back of the leather chair. A sort of reverie - his teeth, the odd taste & the unaccustomed extra blood flow.

It's this story about ill prepared arctic explorers boiling up boots in melted snow, fading out into a tiny pinprick of nothing in some dreamy bed of ice and scurvy. The dogs might howl, if they hadn't all been eaten weeks ago.

Soon the explorers are all just so many little shards defrosting in the warm bellies of wolverine cubs, arctic foxes, or each other. It's night now and everything goes to sleep in caves or holes hollowed out of compacted snow. The paws of the mother fox twitch in her sleep as one of her babies hacks up some indigestible fragments of tweed and horn button, scratches and returns to sleep. Finished.

The story ends before whatever it is that's going on behind him does. One of the men says something derogatory about his feet. He's pretty sure that the soles of his feet have this covering - layers of dirt on dirt, compressed and shiny smooth like tar or really unsavoury lacquer or ... whatever.

Something tickles, something else stings.

A trickle of blood escapes from his nose & runs upwards, or downwards, towards his eye. He's about to wipe it away when he remembers that his hands are bound together behind his back. The knots are sort of loose and ineffectual but acknowledging this seems a particularly crass and discourteous thing.

Wearily he moves his head a little, as if to brush off the blood on the rough pelt of some sibling or other. Fragments of leather in his teeth & his paws twitch filthy in his sleep.

Finished.