Fieldwork in Milot, in Haiti's north, grounds an argument about what being stuck means where movement is what keeps people alive. Bulamah begins with the removal of fuel subsidies in July 2018, agreed with the International Monetary Fund and announced during a World Cup match, which put petrol beyond reach and turned an older word for gridlock, blokis, into lòk, a term people applied to the country and to their own bodies. When the coronavirus reached Haiti, residents read it through earlier impositions, above all the killing of the creole pigs during the swine fever campaign of the 1980s and the poisoned powders that local accounts of illness have long invoked. The vocabulary of sorcery, holding and tying and restraining, and the figure of the zonbi who works forever on another man's land, states the same fear. Households answered with care organised through the lakou, plant baths and hot teas.