The floor is hard underneath me. It’s about the only sensation I’m sure of.

My vision keeps coming in and out, or maybe I keep passing out and coming to again. I can’t tell. I don’t know what day it is or much time has passed. I don’t know if I’ve been on the floor here for days or minutes. I don’t have any clue how I even got to the floor. My head is throbbing and my bones feel like heavy concrete. My brain feels like it’s crawling, running at half speed and sometimes backward through a dull, burning feeling. Somewhere near the floor, my heartbeat feels erratic: much too slow and then much too fast.

I’m sure, when I can think, that this is poison. I’ve never been poisoned, but I did once take an antibiotic I turned out to be allergic to. I’d been hospitalized, my stomach pumped, and put on twelve hours of continuous fluid. This feels like that, only magnified a hundred times over.

I move, slowly, every inch seeming like a mile, across my floor. There are dark shadows in my vision, so I feel my way along. I know that in my emergency kit, I’ve got something that might help if I can just make it there. I slide along, bit by bit. The effort of it is almost too much, and I close my eyes sometimes, not sure how much time has passed when I open them again.

I feel each floorboard as I move, using the grooves in the old wood to pull myself along. I’m about halfway there when a floorboard gives out under my hand. Not the whole board, but just enough that my hand slams through. My fingers catch on what feels like a piece of paper, dry and crumpled and folded. I can’t quite figure out what to do about it. My vision is crossed with shadows in the corners, and I know that if I have any chance of not dying, I need to keep moving. I need something to focus on to keep me going, to keep from slipping back out of consciousness again and reach emergency supplies so I can pull myself together long enough to call for an ambulance.

Mia, my brain shouts at me immediately.

So I take a deep breath and keep my mind focused on Mia as I pull myself across the floor to the kitchen. That first morning, with all her cute, fiery energy, all her indignance in calling me out on my shitty first impression. The memory pulls me along another couple of feet.

Our flirtation over the phone, our conversations about our grandparents and their recipes. Her laugh. Her beautiful smile. The way her hair falls on her face, the way she waves her hands around when she’s getting all worked up about something. It’s hard to keep a clear picture through the haze around my eyes and the dark fog in my brain, but I block everything else but her out as I pull myself along.

Our conversations at her job, the sound of her breath hitching over the phone at the words I’d said, the things I’d told her I wanted to do to her. The way I’d felt it in person, her pulse racing and her heart fluttering for me, sitting on her couch, kissing her for the first time for real the other night. How incredible it had felt to be inside her, to taste her and have my fingers in her and make her melt under my hands, make her come over and over.

I don’t know how long it takes me to reach my emergency kit or even how long it takes me to open the kit itself, but it’s the thought of Mia that pulls me all the way over and up to where it’s stored in my kitchen cabinet. Inside, I find the survival remedy I’d learned to make when I’d first moved out here. I take the bottled water out along with the mixture of charcoal and powdered bone broth, and mix it all up to the best I can. I make myself drink all of it, not letting my eyes close again until I do.

When my eyes open again, I feel clearer and better. Not good. There is still a throbbing in my head and my heart rate still feels all wrong, but I feel like I can move now, and think. I slowly sit up, watching those same dark shadows swim in front of my eyes. When I can, I move to standing and then walk carefully across the floor, holding onto furniture as I go.

I make it to my computer and open it, pulling up the security footage for the cameras on my property. I have a suspicion I know what happened. I don’t want to be right about it, but it seems like the obvious answer.

I wince when I see I’m right. When I see the actual evidence. When I watch my own brother try to kill me.

He’s there on the footage, out behind the cabin, swaying and staggering a little as he dumps a generous amount of something deadly into my well. On the footage, I can see him squinting at a label on the canister like he wants to make sure he did it just right.

I call the police and tell the operator what happened. I don’t see how I have any choice now but to give up on him and turn him in. The operator says they’ll send a squad car and a paramedic to check me out. I hang up to wait.

I remember, in a flash, that floorboard my hand had gone through, and make my way over to figure out what it was.

The paper is old, but it’s neatly and precisely folded like it had been placed there on purpose. I unfold it and have to sit down again, not sure if I’m lightheaded from my brush with death or from what I find written on the paper.

It’s instructions for making whiskey, with my great-great-grandfather’s initials written at the bottom.