Cardboard Monuments

"Visionaries see cathedrals whilst everyone else is still quarrying stone—inspiring when you need direction, infuriating when you need a doctor."

Approaching the Drop Zone to collect the tent boxes, I noticed the absence of the small truck that had been there before. The space where it had sat was marked only by shallow depressions in the dust, tyre tracks already beginning to blur at their edges as the fine powder reclaimed its territory. It clicked in my mind that Luke must have taken it back when he brought over Duke and Henri's beds and toys — a detail I'd missed entirely while I was busy climbing hills and shouting into empty landscapes.

It was a moment of realisation that perhaps I had been too quick to judge Luke's contributions; he was doing what he could, in his own way, to help us manage. The thought carried a weight of guilt. I'd been so focused on what wasn't being done — the concrete, the shelter, the medical crisis unfolding in Jamie's chest — that I'd failed to notice the smaller kindnesses. Dog beds. Chew toys. A truck returned to its rightful dimension before anyone could report it stolen. These weren't nothing. They were the quiet work of someone trying to hold together more pieces than any single person should have to carry.

I found a large box with a blue, plastic strip on top and started the laborious task of dragging it through the thick dust back towards our campsite. The box resisted every inch of progress, its cardboard bottom catching on the uneven ground, its weight multiplied by the friction of dust that seemed designed to impede movement. My arms burned with the effort. My legs trembled with exhaustion that had accumulated over two days of crisis after crisis.

The work was monotonous and physically draining — the kind of labour that leaves no room for the mind to wander toward productive thoughts, only enough bandwidth to register the next step, the next heave, the next breath. The heat bore down on me mercilessly, mixing with the dust to create a gritty film on my skin that felt like sandpaper with every movement. Sweat plastered my clothes to my body, the long sleeves I'd chosen for sun protection now serving as portable saunas, trapping moisture against skin that was already protesting its treatment.

Fatigue tugged at my muscles with each step, that particular kind of tiredness that lives in the bones rather than just the flesh. Despite the exhaustion, the relentless churn of thoughts and worries in my mind spurred me on, not allowing me the luxury of rest. Jamie's wound. The concrete we'd ruined. The vast, indifferent landscape I'd seen from that hilltop. The near-miss with the cliff edge. The questions the lagoon had stirred that I still couldn't bring myself to examine directly. Each concern took its turn at the front of my consciousness, demanding attention I couldn't afford to give while my hands were occupied with more immediate tasks.

As I neared the end of my task, moving the last of the boxes, the Portal caught my attention once again. The familiar burst of colours across its screen heralded Luke's return, that impossible tear in reality that I was beginning to accept as just another feature of our environment, like the dust or the heat or the endless blue sky. This time he was driving another small truck, the vehicle emerging from the swirling light like something being born from a fever dream.

I paused in my work to watch him navigate the vehicle with a level of ease and confidence that spoke of his growing familiarity with the process. In the two days since we'd arrived, Luke had made this crossing dozens of times — maybe more. Each trip was a theft, a deception, a risk. And yet he did it with the casual competence of someone running errands on a Saturday morning. He steered the truck with surprising skill through the narrow passage between two rock stacks and into the Drop Zone.

I had no idea what to expect. My latest requests to Luke had been focused on personnel, not supplies — a doctor for Jamie, a handyman for the construction work that kept defeating us. So, when the truck ground to a halt in the Drop Zone, my curiosity piqued. What had Luke prioritised this time? What did he think we needed that we hadn't thought to ask for?

Opening the back, I peered into the dim interior, the low light casting shadows on the contents. Boxes. More boxes. Stacked neatly in rows, their labels too dark to read in the truck's shadowed cargo space.

"An assortment of shelving," Luke declared, materialising beside me as if summoned by the very act of my investigation. His voice carried that particular tone I was beginning to recognise — the one that suggested he'd already moved three steps ahead in a plan he hadn't bothered to share with the rest of us.

"Shelving?" I echoed, the word feeling foreign in the context of our current situation. Shelving. Metal frames and particleboard, designed for garages and workshops and garden sheds. The kind of thing you bought from Bunnings on a weekend when your biggest concern was whether your power tools were properly organised.

"What for?"

"For the sheds," Luke replied, his tone suggesting that the purpose should have been self-evident. As if we had sheds. As if sheds were something we could simply conjure into existence by thinking about what might go inside them.

I couldn't help but let out a slight, incredulous laugh. The sound escaped before I could catch it — not cruel, exactly, but carrying the exhaustion of someone who has been handed a puzzle piece for a completely different puzzle.

"I think we're a bit far from needing shelves," I admitted, my initial enthusiasm for Luke's arrival ebbing away like water in sand. The reality was quite different to the one Luke seemed to be imagining — we were still grappling with the basics of construction, still failing at tasks that any competent tradesperson could complete in an afternoon.

"We still haven't finished the first concrete slab."

The words came out flatter than I'd intended, weighted with the accumulated failures. The concrete that had clumped. The tools we didn't know how to use and the skills we didn't possess. Luke was planning for shelving while we couldn't even create a flat surface to build on.

Luke's response was nonchalant, almost as if he had anticipated the course of our conversation.

"Oh, that reminds me," he said, reaching into the back pocket of his jeans to retrieve several folded pieces of paper.

"The concrete instructions," he announced, extending the paper towards me.

"Thanks, Luke," I responded, accepting the papers with a mix of gratitude and resignation. My fingers closed around the folded sheets, feeling the slight warmth they'd absorbed from Luke's body, the crisp edges where they'd been creased.

Without even glancing at the contents, I tucked the papers into my back pocket, their existence a reminder of the tasks that lay ahead. There would be time to read them later, to parse the steps and procedures, to try again at something we'd already failed. Right now, there were boxes to move and a tent to construct and a wounded man sleeping in our only shelter.

Helping Luke unload the boxes of shelving from the truck felt somewhat surreal, given our current priorities. Each box we lifted and carried represented a future that seemed impossibly distant — a future with sheds and organisation, with tools hung neatly on pegboards and supplies sorted into labelled containers. The businessman in me appreciated the forward planning even as the survivor in me questioned the timing.

Nonetheless, we worked together to stack them neatly in their designated corner of the Drop Zone. The physical labour was familiar now — the rhythm of lift and carry, the careful placement to maximise stability, the unspoken coordination between two people who had known each other their entire lives. Whatever else had fractured between us, we could still move boxes together.

"I'll be back soon," Luke announced with a sense of urgency, his figure quickly disappearing into the cab of the truck.

The words were tossed over his shoulder, an afterthought rather than a promise. I'd heard them before. "Soon" in Luke's vocabulary could mean minutes or hours, could mean before sunset or after Jamie's wound had festered beyond saving.

The engine roared to life, a sound that momentarily filled the expanse of the Drop Zone before fading away as Luke and the truck vanished through the Portal.

And then I was alone again. Alone with the boxes and the dust and the weight of everything that still needed doing.

I turned to face the large stacks of shelving boxes, their presence almost mocking in the vast emptiness of the Drop Zone's borders. Cardboard monuments to a future we might never reach. I shook my head slowly, a mix of disbelief and resignation washing over me like a wave that couldn't quite knock me down but wouldn't stop trying.

Luke's priorities seem a little off, I couldn't help but think.

Despite the logic that might have driven his decision — and there probably was logic, buried somewhere in the mystical calculations that governed his choices — the timing felt completely ill-conceived. We needed hands, not hardware. We needed skills, not shelving. We needed someone who could look at Jamie's wound and know what to do about it, not someone who could envision the warehouse those shelves might one day fill.

But that was Luke. That had always been Luke. He saw the cathedral while the rest of us were still quarrying stone. He planned the symphony while we were still learning to tune our instruments. It was infuriating and inspiring in equal measure, this capacity to look past the immediate crisis toward some distant resolution that only he could perceive.

Pulling the folded paper from my back pocket, I carefully unfolded it, my eyes quickly scanning the concrete laying instructions Luke had provided. The pages were dense with text and diagrams — step-by-step procedures laid out with the kind of clarity that technical writers specialise in. Mix ratios. Curing times. Preparation of the substrate. The precision of the instructions was apparent, an appealing contrast to the ambiguity that often shrouded our daily existence here.

I could follow these. I could learn from them. Somewhere in these pages was the knowledge that Jamie and I had lacked, the expertise we'd tried to improvise and failed. If we could get Jamie healthy enough to work again, if Luke could bring us someone with practical skills, these instructions might actually mean something.

Yet, even with such clarity, the task ahead seemed daunting, reinforcing the reality of our situation — so much to do, with so few hands to do it. Three of us in this entire dimension, and one was lying in a tent with an infected wound while another kept disappearing through a hole in reality. That left me. One middle-aged businessman with soft hands and a burned foot, holding printed instructions for a task that required strength I wasn't sure I had left.

"Oh, Luke," I murmured to myself, a sigh escaping as I refolded the paper and tucked it away. "Please bring us a handyman soon."

The sentiment felt like a prayer, a plea for relief in the face of overwhelming odds. I wasn't a praying man — hadn't been since the quiet doubts of my twenties had hardened into something more like indifference — but this place had a way of drawing out the supplications you thought you'd outgrown. When you're standing alone in an alien desert with nothing but cardboard boxes and exhaustion for company, the boundary between prayer and wish becomes difficult to locate.

With the instructions secured in my pocket once again, I turned my attention to the last tent box, its blue plastic strip a beacon of my immediate focus. The strip caught the light, a small flag marking the task that actually mattered right now. Not concrete. Not shelving. Not the grand vision of whatever Luke was building toward. Just a tent. Just shelter. Just one more small victory against the forces that wanted us dead.

The tent is your priority now, I reminded myself, the resolve hardening within me like the concrete we'd failed to pour properly. One task at a time. One step at a time. One breath at a time, if that's what it took.

I bent to grip the box's edges, feeling the strain in my back, the protest in my shoulders, the complaint of muscles that had already given more than they had. The dust stirred around my feet as I began to drag, leaving a trail behind me like a wounded animal marking its passage.