One More Morning

At precisely six twenty-three on Thursday morning, James woke, filled with all the vitality and energy he’d come to loathe. At two hundred and sixty-three, he reflected, I’m too old for this feeling-like-a-kid-again shit. Ever since the thrice-damned day that the bedside alarm clock was invented, he had invariably awoken exactly seven minutes before the thing went off. As such, it typically chose to go off just as the kettle was boiling, thus denying him the moment necessary to the perfectly-brewed cup of tea. Once you got to his age, tea was very important to you.
He didn’t really know how he had managed to live this long and to be prefectly frank he wished it would please stop now. Really. Any time it liked would be all too convenient for him. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to take care of that himself. Oh no. The most awkward things kept happening. He had thrown himself off a road bridge once, and of course what was passing by underneath but a truckload of hay. He had attempted a couple of times to shoot himself (invariably bad aim), slash his wrists (knives always too blunt) and even throw himself in the lake (got caught in a fisherman’s net – most embarrassing), but no dice. Apparently someone somewhere wanted him alive, and he was getting more than a little sick of it. He had even considered taking out a contract on his own life, with the payment up front of course, but for some reason none of the professional hit men ever returned his calls.
The mail came, as it usually did, as he was nearing the end of his close-to-perfection-but-ultimately-flawed tea. Without looking up, he knew what most of it was. There would be at least one application form for a credit card, which if he did apply would be rejected due to the computers not believing him about his age. A polite offer of a subscription to a magazine he didn’t want. An even more polite offer to disconnect his telephone line due to them wanting some sort of payment. This he knew without fail would be there, since it had been in the mail every Thursday since the late 1970s. Curiously, his phone had stayed connected the entire time. But then, it hadn’t rung since the late 1970s either. One thing about being old enough to retire at least four times over was that most of the people who would have been calling you had probably been dead since before the invention of the telephone. Not that it mattered much any more, since he’d now forgotten most of their names.
In short, James Kenson was a cantakerous old bastard, and this was just fine with him.