beard felt ragged and starting to go beyond the prickliness of first growth to the softer feel of multiple days’ growth, but gritty with dirt and drool and the dried minerals of his own sweat. His teeth felt gummy and slimy and he ran his tongue over them with disgust. He needed a sip of water. He checked the fox. The one eye closed. Then the man shimmied his body a bit to reach for the dehumidifier tube where it was tacked to the structural beam running along the underside of the house’s main floor. He pulled it from the plastic brackets, and reaching his other arm around and up and at an angle over his head, and using his index and middle finger like a pair of tweezers pulled out the broken pen tip he’d used to stop the hole he’d made, then with the first hand, brought it to his mouth, his lips secure around the thick plastic line, and sucked until he felt the water start to back up from the machine down the hose and into his mouth. Not much, but enough. It was supremely satisfying, pushing all other discomforts momentarily to the side, the feel of water on the membranes of his mouth, under his tongue, the sudden clarity of it, and he felt the muscles in his body ease, and he sighed through his nose with the happiness of water. Then the eye opened. He must have disturbed the fox. The man fought inside to stay calm as he kept one eye on the fox’s eye while bringing his far arm back up to replug the hole, which he did, and then replace the hose, and then shimmy backwards slowly. All the while, the fox and man held each other in their gaze, and the man felt afraid, terrified, yet the fox muÌ be dying; it muÌ be, he thought. This is it. Today I will kill the fox and free myself. That is exactly how the man thought, in a kind of existential stand-off, as if his life depended on it, which, absurd though it all was, he realized it did, his life really did depend on it, as his family was nowhere, hadn’t even seemed to know he was gone, unless something had happened to them, which he couldn’t imagine, but was worried about, but also realized that he was trapped, and no one had come for him, how could that be? How could no one be coming to save him? Unless they just didn’t care, unless they knew he was down there holding up the house in a way, the way he always fixed what was broken, and somehow they’d forgotten he even existed, and so he would have to save himself. This was it. The fox was staring, the wound oozing, but it had started to pull its legs underneath it, the tail shifting out from under its chin, and it was wobbling and trembling, and the man began to shimmy again, slowing for a second, which he realized in his gut was the wrong move; if one was to do this it would have to be fast, so he gathered his strength, he gath-
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