The jacket sits on the fence, listless and forgotten. Creepers stretch tendrils towards the imposter in their midst, testing its legitimacy, waging a war of attrition that it cannot hope to win. The snow is thick now, almost a foot deep in places. The jacket has its own jacket of snow, white on red like Santa’s suit. How many sunsets has it seen? How many frosts has it endured? So many questions left unanswered by the perpetrator of its demise. From time to time a passer by will stop, their eyes alighting on the arm that hangs limply from the fence post like a rag, or a fallen soldier on the edge of the battlefield. They will look around, frown and move on, it being quite apparent that the jacket’s owner has done the same.

What they don’t know is he hasn’t. He lies there too, beneath the foot of snow, his frozen hands clasped tightly as if in prayer. He was drunk, of course (at this time of year they always are), on his way home from the Christmas party. When they find him several days from now they’ll all be baffled as to why he removed his jacket when it was so very cold. In truth he would be just as baffled had he lived to tell the tale, for there was no logic to his whisky-addled thinking. And now there is no thinking at all.