Boneditch By Ian Bird

www.boneditch.wordpress.com (c) Ian Bird 2018 a short story from the Boneditch anthology... Jon Tennant had never been so cold in his life. It was mid-December at midnight, and the rain that tore against him had in it slivers of ice and bone. His clothes had been rags before the storm started – now they were a sodden shroud. He would never be this cold again. This was the end. The boy stumbled to the ground. All around him were houses and flats, lights burning in the windows, curtains drawn against the storm. He was going to die in this city, surrounded by civilisation. It clearly just wasn’t his civilisation. It was the end of the world, but no one had noticed. He tried to crouch down against a short wall, trying to hide from the storm. It still found him, lit as he was by all the lights in all the windows. He closed his eyes, and he stopped shivering, and he stopped bracing himself against the wind and the knives that it hid within it. Jon didn’t realise that he had stopped breathing. www.boneditch.w