Running hot and cold: A play in three acts

Act One: These are not sensible shoes. In fact, they're soaked through with snow and your feet are freezing. You know that your body is cold, but it doesn't matter while you wonder if the anesthesia they give you for foot amputation puts you under or if you're still conscious, thinking about how different it all could have turned out if only you'd had the sense to wear your boots.

Then a kind soul gives you some extremely warm, extremely thick, dry socks, and it's like your feet had never known cold.

Act Two: The alarm clock goes off and you think there couldn't be a worse sound. There you are, warm in the covers, feeling the tiniest bit of cold seeping in, and the alarm has the fucking nerve to try and break it up. You wonder if there could be a worse sound than this tiny tolling of the digital bells, signaling the doom of the dawning work day.¹

It's round about then that you hear another alarm, this one set to go off when there's a fire, and a look out the front door and into the hallway reveals there's a pretty good amount of smoke, and you wonder just how much hotter it's about to get.

And you thought the air around the bed was cold? Try the air around the ice in front of the building as the firefighters hoist their ladders up onto the roof and trudge into the building with a disinterest that says they know exactly how these things turn out: boiler room, everything's fine, back inside.

Act Three: Only a month ago, you were wondering if the heater in your apartment worked at all. You piled blankets on you to try and sleep and wondered if there were any force in the world strong enough to pull you out from under them.

The the heat started dribbling out, enough so that you no longer felt like you could believably write a novel that takes place in a tenement. Then the landlord finally sends someone over to fix it up, and now you're thinking that, if it's warm enough for shorts on the first floor, it must be a fiery furnace on the third floor.

¹ Come on...like you haven't been this dramatic at 7 am.