The homestay

The kettle on the iron stove has just started to tick. It is not boiling yet; it is only warming — the sound of metal remembering how to be hot.

It is a little after six. The room is cold in the specific way of places three thousand metres up — a cold that has weight, that sits on the blanket and does not lift when the light comes. Through the small window the sky is going from black to the colour of skimmed milk. A dog barks once, somewhere down the single road, and then thinks better of it.

He has been awake an hour, doing the thing he does at home — running the list. The email he should send. The call he keeps not making. The form. But here the list has nowhere to go. There is one bar of signal that comes and goes like a rumour, and this morning even that is gone. Whatever he hasn't done, he cannot do it from here. The feeling is not quite relief. It is closer to vertigo.

The woman who runs the house comes in without a word and feeds two pieces of wood into the stove. She sets milk and salt and butter to heat, the way it is done here, and the smell fills the room — animal, warm, strange to him and then, after four days, not strange at all.

Outside, a line of prayer flags runs from the roof to a pole in the yard. The one nearest the glass has faded almost to white, its printed horse and its words worn off by years of wind. It still lifts and falls. No one has taken it down. No one has replaced it.

He reaches for his phone out of habit. Then he sets it face down on the blanket, and picks up the warm cup instead.