An Old Man

His ears have kept on growing throughout his lifetime, and now, at a grand old age of seventy-nine, the lobes stretch down nearly to his chin line. His stepson and family used to joke in secret that they look like the saggy dried out bits of meat that they sell in baskets outside the pet shop.
He is all alone now in the big house on the leafy private road in Surrey. His lost his wife to cancer nearly ten years ago, and his only son followed suit two summers ago. Secretly he was pleased his wife went, it released him from the years of bullying at her hands. He was free now to do as he pleased, and he had the means to do it, having inherited all the money from both deaths. Why should he have to bother with her two other sons from her first marriage? They only serve as a reminder of her, and of a ghost of a man who came before him whose shoes he could never fill.
Left alone to his dark thoughts his flesh and skin has wrinkled and dried out, his body as thin and shrunken as a skeleton. His eyes are bitter and full of hate, sunken deep in his head under hooded lids. His skin is stained deep brown from the sun, from many years spent pottering about in the garden and going to and from his workshed. He has calloused fingers and knarled knuckles with rough fingertips. They bear the scars of a lifetime of making and sanding and creating, working as a design teacher in the nearby prep school.