Page 23 of The Unhinged Christmas of a Cat Lady
That’s what normal people do, isn’t it?
The treadmill hums beneath me, steady and joyless. My feet slap out a rhythm, sharp against the rubber. It's just gone six, but the world outside is still thick with night; black sky pressing in against the gym’s long windows.
The air in here is cooler than I like. I didn’t bother waiting for the heating to kick in. Just yanked on my kit and started moving. Better to sweat into the cold than sit still and listen to the silence claw at the walls.
Normally, I’d swim. Nothing clears the mind like cutting through water—smooth, silent, solitary. But the local pool doesn’t open until seven, and I can’t be arsed to sit around waiting for chlorinated serenity.
I’d have had one built by now. A proper pool house out in the garden, something sleek and warm and mine, but the parish council got twitchy. “Out of character with the village aesthetic,” they said. “Obtrusive.” As if I’d planned to install a disco and a hot dog van alongside it.
So, no pool. Just this. A tiny home gym.
I increase the speed slightly, the incline a little more. Make it bite.
A dull ache starts in my right calf. The good kind. Reminds me I'm not entirely ornamental. That something still works.
I used to know what my days were for.
There were meetings, pitches, problems with edges. Things that needed solving, urgently, with consequences if I didn’t. People who looked to me like I was the adult in the room. And I suppose I was.
Now?
Now there’s this: silence, sweat, motion without direction. A treadmill in every sense.
I don’t need to work. That’s the headline, isn’t it? Clever man makes clever thing, retires before forty, becomes a cautionary tale for ambitious twenty-somethings who think they’d enjoy having nothing to do.
No one says what comes after.
The money’s fine. The freedom’s fine. The doing nothing is... not.
I’ve invested. Dabbled. Stuck my name on a few things to make other people feel better about theirs. But nothing’s lit that part of my brain that used to wake me up at three in the morning because it couldn’t wait to try something.
Now I wake up because I can’t remember why I sleep.
I increase the pace again. Not by much. Just enough to feel it in my chest.
After another twenty minutes of running that gets all my muscles burning. I finally push the button and the machine slows down. I need a shower; but first a coffee.
As I head downstairs in my running shorts, I toe off my socks and trainers, pull the soaking wet T-shirt over my head and drop it in the basket in the utility room.
My skin is cooling in patches where the sweat’s started to dry. The kitchen tiles are cold underfoot, a sharp little reminder that November doesn’t care if you’ve just burned five hundred calories trying to outrun a vague sense of purposelessness.
I flip on the lights and basically can taste the coffee on my tongue already. Still overheated, I open the door to the garden. A gust of cold air rushes in, biting against my skin. I exhale sharply. Better.
I pop the lid on the coffee pod jar, pick one at random and slide it into the machine. Familiar movement. Something automatic. Hands doing what they’ve done a thousand mornings before.
And then—
Something soft brushes against my ankle.
I freeze. Not metaphorically. No, I’m at a full stop. Like a statue.
My first thought—entirely rational, given the hour and my blood sugar levels—is rat. Some bold little menace from the neighbour’s compost heap staging a kitchen coup.
I glance down, preparing to launch a mug if necessary.
It’s not a rat.
It is... orange.
