The Ice Storm

This is another postcard story from Welsh Cakes: Book of Short Stories; and, again, it is narrated by an elderly woman. I wrote this story after a particularly devastating ice storm in January 1998. Many people had no power for many days and elderly people, in particular, suffered and some died from hypothermia. I am putting this story in its totality.
My teeth chatter and my body shudders deep inside, so that my muscles and spine ache from the effort. The layering of clothes isn't helping at all and I fantasize about lying naked inside a sleeping bag next to Joe's unclad body. If I could wrap my arms around him and entwine my legs with his, skin touching bare skin, I would feel better.
I can't feel my toes, not even a tingle. My fingers are waxy-white like the emergency candles we keep in the kitchen drawer. The candles are almost finished, burned down to streaky grey-black stubs. I hold up my bloodless fingers in front of my eyes and contemplate snapping them off at the knuckles like frozen twigs and striking a match to them to light the dark.
A cup of tea would be nice, but there's no power. I'd have some brandy even though I'm teetotal, but Joe finished the bottle a while ago. Doesn't look like it did him much good.
“At a hundred degrees below zero, I button up my vest.”
I shake myself to stop the words of Joe’s firewood song repeating in my brain like a needle stuck in the worn groove of an old 78. With a final hiccup the singing stops in response to a loud knock on the front door. A young chap in army fatigues, no older than our Billy would have been next birthday, peers at me with eyes wide and bright from too little sleep and too much coffee.
“I'd better take you somewhere warm, ma'am,” he says.
“We'll wait. Joe'll feel better when the guy comes with the generator to warm the house through.”
“I'd better take a look at Joe,” he says.
He comes in without so much as a “by your leave” and walks over to where Joe propped himself up next to the wood stove last night.
“Ma'am, he don't look so good. I'd better get him to the hospital.”
“I told him we should get naked together in the sleeping bag. But he never would let his skin touch mine, something to do with his religion he always said. I told him, that's the way God made us, Joe, naked. That's the way we came into the world and that's the way we'll go out.”
“Ma'am, will you come with me to the hospital?”
“Billy? My, you've grown tall. Are you taking your dad and me home?”
“Yes, ma'am. Let's go home.”