The warm morning has smeared itself on me, has shivered through my jacket until my skin feels spat on under all my layers and the sound is unbearable, like the sound in the house, a rough drone’s strata smoothed and compressed like sedimentary rock, and I feel something move through me that amounts to mere nausea and I lean over to vomit at the place where the wall of the cave transforms into the floor, where vertical changes to horizontal, but the man doesn’t move toward me. He is uninterested in my weakness.
