The Eiderdowners

The bedroom was cold. Cold like bedrooms used to be when he was a child. The sort of cold that meant once you had warmed up your sheets you didn’t want to get out of bed ever again.

He could see his breath in the air. God only knows what had gone wrong with the central heating. “Thank goodness I pay for the emergency call out service,” he muttered bitterly recalling the phone call that had promised an engineer within three days.

So here he was, a thirty nine year old man lying in bed at 9.30pm on a Friday night. “Ah well,” he thought, “If I’m here I might as well get some sleep.” He turned to his side and shot his arm out into the cold air to turn off the bedside light. Even in that brief moment his arm was now like a frozen block attached to him. He turned to his other side to trap it between the slightly warm sheet and his body.

“Bugger,” he shouted creating a breathy fog in front of his eyes. Illuminating it like a fog lamp was a light from underneath the bedroom door. He stared at the light and cursed again. He knew he would have to get out and turn it off the hall light but the distance from the bed to door meant all the warmth his body had finally managed to create would dissipate.

He couldn’t leave it on. It hit hard at both his beliefs. First, that everyone should do something to fight global warming and secondly that a unwatched light bulb will start a fire.

He cursed again and decided that he would count to ten and then make a dash for it. “Count to ten or down from ten?” he mused knowing he was merely delaying the inevitable. “To ten” he decided, he was not a child and it was not the start of a race.

“.. Eight, nine, ten,” and he was out of the bed faster than an Olympic 100m finalist from the blocks. He opened the door just a he realised his feet were already ice. He reached his hand to the light switch only to realise that it was already off.

He stared at the light beneath the door. It was not coming from the hall or from his bedroom. It was emanating from inside the door itself. A bright insistent light that bathed his frozen toes and chilled his core in a way that  climate change would never do.

“Oh god,” he spoke in hushed tone, “They’re back.”