WHERE TO WEAR YOU'RE HEART

Next door to me lived a man as mean as a wounded tiger. The guy had no compassion. His son told the roofer who spent a week fixing broken slates not to bother to send an invoice as his dad never paid anything. All he’d do was snag the work, find spurious defects and challenge them one at a time until trying to collect became impossible. He called himself a professional non-payer.

Seventy-two he was with a trail of tears stretching back fifty of them which was the consequence of having super intelligence; plenty of brain power to think up schemes. Tax avoidance schemes, money making schemes, scams to rip the wealth out of bank accounts. 

Fifty years of enemies followed the trail of tears. Ruined people stacked up high with resentment enough to commit murder. Some had tried; all had missed. Until one day when a man whose wife had been diagnosed with terminal cancer cheered the life of so many people. Cryogenics, suspended animation, that was his game and he froze his wife to be thawed when a cure for cancer had been developed. 

Seventy-two was Mr Mean Man who thought this a great opportunity and by then rich enough to buy space in a freezing tube with the instructions to be revived when a cure for ageing had been found. Without hesitation, he was popped in and turned to ice.

The scientist had one son who had died before he could be saved, before the process had been developed. His son was a roofer who had been unable to handle the loss of what some said was a small part of his monthly pay, but to him was the straw attached to an already high pile of debt.

Every day the scientist let people file past the frozen body in the clear glass tube where they read the words on the name plaque. ‘This is where to wear a heart of ice’ and laugh at the body doubled over with a red heart stencilled on his left buttock.