Dawn was already there. Not much to be seen from inside the house: a sliver lining under the door, rose-colored spots from the roller shutter, scattered on the ground like a flower of light had died.

The house only had one room downstairs and two rooms up. The downstairs room was connected to a small bathroom, and served at the same time as a kitchen, a dining room and the place where Andy slept. He couldn’t afford to climb stairs to go to bed anymore.

He had been vaguely awake for hours now. His whole body was sore, his head pounding. His entire digestive tract was a gutter and his mouth smelled like it. He had been unable to move until now, acidic sweat pouring from his pores.

Those were the words moments. The lucid ones. When he had his mind whole enough to feel it all yet not energy left over to knock himself back down. He felt everything so intensely: the blanket on him, the weight of his on body on the mattress, the diffuse light that had come in uninvited. The rioting life of his own body. Yet there was a twist on every single one of those sensations, making them turn bad, rotten, prickly, burning. It was like pessimism could be felt instead of thought.

He felt everything and all of it was genuinely awful.

Soon came the heaving, folding his body against his will. The cramps didn’t care whether he was able to move or not: he would be bent, no matter how much it hurt. Sometimes, that part was a relief, as the intensity of the pain overcame all though. The world was simpler again. He was pain and not much else.

He managed to get up using the pain’s momentum. He could hear his limbs creaking like green wood under strain. Yet he was standing, staggering towards the entrance door. If he vomited inside the house again, it would take him the day to get over the nausea enough to clean it.

He didn’t make it. His knee buckled as he reached the wall. He ended up puking on the tiled floor. This time, he had leaned forward enough and didn’t get much on himself. He laid there for a while, breathing through the acidic mess. The moments right after always were a relief, a brief suspension of the loudness and pain. It lasted while it lasted, but for a few minutes Andy was a toddler curled up in his mother’s lap.

Moving again was jarring. He crept away from the puke and towards the bathroom. Delaying that mission would only make it worse. For now, a distance sometimes crossed in a few steps was a land to conquer. Hands and knees used all their edge. Once in a while he missed strength, landed on his side and shivered from the coolness floor. With those heightened sensations of his it was pure ice.

He managed to get to the shower’s door. Now he had to get up again to open it. He summoned what was left of his strength, gritted his teeth, pushed hard against the floor and found out he couldn’t get up at all. Despair came over him, overcoming sadness over a little thing as if he was a child again. He sobbed against the glass door, undone.

It was a good half an hour before he could calm down and push himself up with a groan. He got inside, turned on the water, took the shower head and crumpled back onto the floor. The wet warmth spraying down his neck and back felt calming. He was still dressed, wearing the tank top and boxers he slept in. He would take care of that later. For now, he was going to wash the grime off his body. He would be warm and almost comfortable again.

He dozed off every now and then, getting nauseous a few more times without retching again. Not such a bad morning, after all. If only his body could stop shaking. He dozed off again, let himself get embraced by the warmth. He would stay there until the water turned cold.

The bathroom was filled with mist, a small pile of vomit laid near the entrance. The house in itself was an old, peaceful building, unaffected by the drama inside. A strong stone dependency on a century-old farm, renovated for living purposes. Apart from that small construction, the rest of the place was pretty much abandoned. Vines went up into the caved-in tiled roofs. Grass grew high. Nettle and bramble pretty much owned the place.

There was a cobblestone road that came up to the old farm. It ran two miles through the french countryside, went up a hill again and reached a proper road about as wide as a large car. The closest village was still four miles away.

So tiny against this grand picture, lost and forgotten, a man was going mad from his own alcohol consumption.

Where was Josh when you needed him?