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The sun wakes the old man.

The room is cold, and last night’s fire nothing but ashes. It is spring and with warm days, but winter cold still rules the night. The earth is cold.

He is cold.

He doesn’t move. His lonely bed is lukewarm from the modicum of heat his body supplies. He wants to return to the dream and feels the sun has cheated him. He wants to return to when he was young and leave behind the pains his body has accumulated over the course of years; over the curse of years.

He repeats the numbers to himself.

These are the same numbers she’d whispered to him on a summer night of no importance when the two of them were side-by-side in that Garden where the fireflies were drunk on glow-light sex, and the smell of the Garden’s jasmine hung thick and sweet. And her bare skin brushed his, and he bristled, but in a good way, and he wondered the world over this marvel he’d somehow joined with and how contented he was now with her, and how he’d never be the same after her.

“Those numbers, those numbers,” he laments, “’my kingdom for those numbers.’”

And he chuckles at this.

Because of the way the sun woke him or perhaps it is time, he rolls slowly away from the sun and onto his side in his lonely bed, and he closes his eyes, and the room fades.

And he returns to the dream of jasmine and lace, and fireflies. And her.

And he is warm, again.