Dirty Optimism

The tent pole slipped through my fingers like a wet bar of soap, and I watched the entire bloody corner of the structure begin its slow, inevitable surrender to gravity for the third time in thirty minutes.

"Glenda, grab the pole!"

The words tore out of me with more desperation than the situation probably warranted, but I'd reached that special level of frustration where everything felt like a personal attack from the universe. The fabric wobbled overhead, threatening to undo every adjustment we'd made, every stake I'd hammered into dust that refused to hold anything properly, every rope I'd tightened only to watch it slacken moments later as if the very materials had decided to conspire against us.

"Yeah!"

Her response drifted back from somewhere behind me with all the urgency of someone ordering their second coffee. That casual, almost breezy acknowledgement landed on my already frayed nerves like salt on an open wound.

For fuck's sake. 'Yeah.' As if the entire structure isn't about to collapse on our heads.

Over the last half hour, my face had transformed into something even I wouldn't want to look at in a mirror. I could feel the tension carved into my features—the tight jaw, the narrowed eyes, the mouth pulled into a line so thin it might have been drawn with a ruler. Every minute had added another layer of vexation until I was wearing my frustration like a mask.

The morning had started with Henri's triumphant theft of the last bacon, continued with the awkward arrival of Karen and Chris and their philosophies about blank canvasses, and had been briefly interrupted by that small, precious moment watching Joel write his own address with trembling fingers. That memory—my son's determination despite everything—had been the only bright spot in hours that felt more like days stretched on a rack.

But even that couldn't sustain me for long. After leaving Joel to rest, after extracting myself from the suffocating optimism of Karen's pronouncements about masterpieces and painting futures, I'd needed to do something. Something physical. Something that might tire my body enough to quiet my mind.

Joel's droopy eyes had followed me to the tent flap, and his gentle prodding—a weak gesture with his good hand, encouraging me to go, to take a break from hovering over him—had managed to push me back outside. He could probably see the storm brewing behind my eyes and wanted me to discharge it somewhere other than his sickbed.

Get out of here, Dad. Go punch some dust.

That's what he would have said if his throat weren't still healing from its impossible journey back from death.

So here I was, attempting to help Glenda and the Owens pitch another tent. Attempting being the operative word. The enjoyment I'd hoped to find in the physical labour—in the honest work of my hands against canvas and rope—was nowhere to be found. Instead, I'd discovered only a growing sense of futility, as if Clivilius itself was mocking my efforts.

Nothing stays fixed here. Nothing stays still. Everything wants to fall apart.

The far corner had been wobbling since we started. The stakes refused to grip in the loose, sandy substrate. The ropes stretched or went slack without explanation. And now, with Glenda's attention apparently captured by something more fascinating than our collective failure, the moment of catastrophe had arrived.

I felt it before I saw it—that subtle shift in tension, that give in the fabric—and my stomach dropped even as my hands scrambled uselessly. The neglected corner surrendered to gravity with what felt like vindictive satisfaction. Canvas billowed outward like a sail catching a rogue gust, and the pole I'd been gripping twisted from my hands as if possessed by its own malicious will.

The weight of the unmoored section dragged everything down with it. My corner followed, the structure succumbing in a cascade of failure that left me standing in a heap of fabric and frustration. The whisper of canvas settling against earth seemed to mock me, a soft sound that somehow carried more accusation than a shout.

I exhaled through my teeth, a sharp hiss of exasperation that did nothing to relieve the pressure building behind my eyes.

Fantastic. Absolutely fucking fantastic.

My boots churned dust as I marched around to the other side of the collapsed tent. Each footfall was a punctuation mark, a physical expression of the ire that had been simmering all morning and was now threatening to boil over. I could feel the grit working its way into my socks, that insidious red powder that got into everything—clothes, food, lungs, hope.

The scene that greeted me did nothing to improve my mood.

"What the fuck are you three doing?"

The question exploded from me before I could even process what I was seeing. Glenda, Karen, and Chris were huddled together in the dust like children examining something fascinating in a schoolyard. The collapsed tent behind me, the task abandoned, the work undone—none of it seemed to register with them.

Wonderful. I'm wrestling with poles and they're having a garden party.

"Come take a look at this."

Glenda's voice cut through my brewing storm, but her enthusiasm seemed utterly unbothered by the annoyance that must have been painted across my features in bright, unmistakable colours. She beckoned me over with a gesture that spoke of discovery, of something apparently worth abandoning our construction project for.

I released a heavy sigh that felt dredged up from somewhere deep in my chest—a sound that didn't quite manage to mask the remnants of my frustration—and trudged toward them. Each step kicked up small clouds of ochre dust that clung to my boots and ankles like the place was trying to claim me one particle at a time.

The scene was incongruous, to say the least. Glenda and Karen, huddled together in the dirt, their attention fixed downward with an intensity that seemed wildly disproportionate to anything this barren landscape could offer. The contrast with our abysmal tent-pitching failure couldn't have been sharper. They might as well have been examining artefacts at a museum while the building burned around them.

I bent slightly, my height giving me a clear view over their shoulders, and squinted at what held them so captivated.

Small green leaves.

Green. Alive. Growing from the ground as if this were a perfectly normal thing to happen in a dimension that had shown us nothing but dust and stone and that strange, still lagoon.

My brain refused to process what my eyes were clearly seeing. The sight was so out of place, so fundamentally wrong for everything I'd come to expect from Clivilius, that it felt like a glitch in reality. Like someone had spliced a fragment of Earth footage into the wrong film.

"What is that?"

The question emerged with a mixture of genuine curiosity and the residual irritation that I couldn't quite shake. My voice sounded strange to my own ears—uncertain in a way I didn't much care for.

"They're coriander plants."

Karen's response carried an edge that felt like a cold draught cutting through an already chilly room. There was something in her tone—a pointed quality that made it clear the mutual distaste between us had sprouted as unexpectedly as these impossible plants. We'd known each other for less than an hour, and already the friction was palpable.

The feeling is mutual, bug lady.

The nickname surfaced in my mind unbidden, petty and probably unfair, but I clutched it anyway like a small act of rebellion. If she was going to lecture us about masterpieces and blank canvasses while we struggled to survive, she could bloody well be reduced to her profession in the privacy of my thoughts.

I stared at the small green leaves, my mind still wrestling with their existence. The only life we'd encountered since arriving—aside from ourselves and the dogs and whatever had brought Joel back—had been the lagoon and its strange, healing properties. Otherwise, Clivilius had presented itself as a tomb of dust and emptiness, a place where nothing grew and nothing thrived.

"Did you bring those here?"

The question left my lips before I could catch it, the obviousness of it striking me a moment too late. Of course she'd brought them. Seeds didn't spontaneously appear in another dimension. The mystery wasn't the presence of coriander—it was the fact that it was growing at all, here, in soil that shouldn't be able to sustain anything.

"In a manner of speaking, yes I did."

Karen's reply was wrapped in ambiguity, her words creating more questions than they answered. She wasn't quite looking at me, her attention still fixed on the seedlings as if they held secrets she was still deciphering.

"In a manner of speaking?"

I echoed her phrase back at her, letting my frustration seep into the repetition. The vagueness grated against nerves already worn raw by the morning's accumulation of disasters. Either she'd brought them or she hadn't. Either she'd planted them deliberately or she hadn't. The middle ground she was occupying felt like evasion, and I had no patience left for games.

Just give me a straight bloody answer. Either you did or you didn't. Is that so much to ask?

But Karen's explanation spilled out before I could voice my irritation, her words painting a picture that my cynical mind immediately wanted to reject.

"We found soil below the hard crust that's hidden beneath all the dust and sand. A few seeds accidentally fell out of my pocket and landed in the soil."

Her voice was calm, matter-of-fact, as if accidental botanical discoveries in alternate dimensions were simply part of a Tuesday. The clash between her casual delivery and the implications of what she was describing made my head swim.

Soil. Beneath the crust. Seeds. Accident. Growth.

"And look what happens," Glenda chimed in, her enthusiasm cutting through my scepticism with a brightness that felt almost painful. She plucked a seed from the zip-lock bag that Karen was holding—how many seeds did the woman carry in her pockets, exactly?—and demonstrated their discovery with a flourish that struck me as both hopeful and dangerously naive.

I watched as she pressed the small seed into the dirt cradled in Chris's hands. He'd formed a makeshift planter from the soil they'd extracted, holding it cupped in his palms like an offering or a prayer.

"My hands are getting a little tired."

Chris's complaint carried a hint of weariness that was the first honest thing any of them had said. I could see the tremor in his hands, the strain of holding his arms steady while the others conducted their experiment.

"Last time," Glenda reassured him, her tone gentle but insistent. Karen's hands slid beneath her husband's, adding support, steadying the precious cargo of possibility they'd created between them.

What a touching tableau. The miracle of life, cradled in the palms of strangers.

My scepticism refused to wane. I stood watching their coordinated effort, and something in me wanted to turn away, wanted to dismiss this as another false hope in a place that seemed designed to crush hope as thoroughly as it crushed everything else. My eyes rolled involuntarily, a physical expression of the doubt that saturated every cell of my being.

"Just because you've planted something, doesn't mean it's going to grow."

The words snapped out of me, sharp as broken glass, carrying all the edge of my rapidly diminishing patience. They were investing so much faith in this barren place, and faith was a currency I'd learned to distrust. Luke had asked for faith. Look where that had landed us.

"Just watch. It's incredible."

Glenda's whisper was a mixture of awe and conviction that I found simultaneously irritating and—against every instinct telling me to remain guarded—slightly infectious. There was something in her certainty that tugged at parts of me I'd rather keep dormant.

I shifted my gaze back to Chris's trembling hands, half expecting nothing, fully prepared to be validated in my cynicism.

What I witnessed instead made my throat tighten.

My eyes widened—I felt them doing it, felt the muscles of my face betraying the shock I couldn't contain. The seed, that tiny, insignificant fragment of potential, began to crack open. It split with a deliberateness that seemed impossible, as if time itself had decided to run at a different speed within the circle of their palms.

Roots emerged. Thread-thin and white, they pushed into the dark soil with a voracity that bordered on aggressive, anchoring themselves with a hunger that made something in my stomach lurch. A stem followed—impossibly fast, obscenely eager—piercing upward through the surface like a prisoner bursting from a grave.

Are my eyes deceiving me? Am I hallucinating?

The questions crashed through my consciousness in waves, each one more incredulous than the last. I'd seen strange things since Luke had shoved me through that bloody portal. I'd watched my son die and come back to life. I'd walked across a landscape that shouldn't exist under a sky that held no stars. But this—this aggressive explosion of growth from dead soil—struck something primal in my understanding of how the world was supposed to work.

Tiny leaves unfurled with a swiftness that mocked everything I knew about botany, about time, about patience. They spread themselves like miniature flags of conquest, claiming their small territory of air and light.

What the fuck just happened? It's a fucking seedling!

The reality was undeniable even as my mind fought to reject it. Green life in a dead place. Growth in seconds that should have taken days. A beacon of something—hope? possibility? warning?—in what I'd resigned myself to viewing as a tomb for the living.

In that moment, the impossible had become possible. My world, already redefined by dust and despair, was being punctuated by shoots of green that had no right to exist.

"This is great news." Chris's voice shattered the spell of astonishment that had frozen me in place. His eyes swept across the empty expanse stretching around us—that endless, barren plain that went on until it met the horizon—with something that might have been hope if I squinted at it just right.

Great news. Sure. We've discovered magic dirt. All our problems are solved.

But even my internal sarcasm felt hollow in the face of what I'd just witnessed.

"Perhaps this might help to explain Joel's condition."

Glenda's gaze lifted to meet mine, and in her eyes I saw the suggestion form—a potential link between this miraculous growth and the mystery of my son's resurrection. It was a thought that had already begun to scratch at the edges of my own consciousness, an unwelcome connection forming in the dark.

"I'm not sure that Joel was buried in the dirt."

The words came out blunter than I intended, a reflexive pushback against a conclusion that felt premature. Despite the evidence of life that had just sprouted before my eyes, the leap to explaining Joel seemed too great, too dangerous. I didn't want to build theories about my son's impossible return on foundations of guesswork and garden experiments.

He wasn't planted like a fucking seed. He died. He came back. Those are different things.

But even as the thought formed, I knew I was grasping at distinctions that might not exist in a place where seeds became plants in seconds and dead men drew breath again.

"Maybe not. First it was the lagoon's water and now it's the soil. There is definitely something different about this place."

Karen's voice carried that mixture of wonder and scientific curiosity that had been irritating me since she arrived, but this time the irritation was tempered by something else. Acknowledgement, perhaps. The lagoon had shown properties we couldn't explain. The soil was demonstrating more. Clivilius wasn't just barren—it was strange in ways we were only beginning to catalogue.

Different. That's one word for it. Fucking terrifying is another.

"Chris and I will make the study of the soil our priority. It may be possible to get a controlled ecosystem up and running."

Karen's declaration carried determination wrapped in academic confidence. The prospect she was painting—turning this desolation into something liveable, something sustainable—sparked a flicker of excitement within me that I tried desperately to smother. Hope was dangerous. Hope got you killed. Hope made you trust people like Luke.

"Hold up. Don't get too ahead of yourselves."

Chris's voice cut through with an edge of caution that felt like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. I found myself mentally nodding, grateful that someone else was pumping the brakes on this runaway train of optimism.

"We should still apply a great deal of caution. Sure, these plants are a great sign, but we still don't know what the conditions here are really like. You and I have been here for less than a day and the others not much longer. We have no idea what dangers we might be yet to face. Cracking the surface could release more than we realise."

His words landed with the weight of wisdom earned, a sobering reminder of how little we actually understood. We'd been in Clivilius for days that felt like years, and yet we'd only scratched at the surface of its mysteries—sometimes literally, as today's discovery proved. What else might be lurking beneath that hard crust? What else might we unleash with our desperate attempts to make this place home?

The delicate balance between hope and caution felt more precarious than ever. We stood on the edge of something—discovery or disaster, salvation or damnation—and I couldn't tell which way we were about to fall.

"With miracle soil like this, it can surely only get better from here."

Glenda's excitement bubbled over, irrepressible and infectious in ways that made my skin crawl. Her enthusiasm served as a mirror to my own internal battle—that war between the part of me that wanted to believe and the part that had learned believing was just the first step toward disappointment.

My expression must have been a battleground in its own right. I could feel my mouth twisting into shapes that couldn't commit to any single emotion—not quite a smile, not quite a grimace, suspended somewhere in the uncomfortable territory between hope and habitual pessimism. Part of me—the part that still harboured the smallest ember of faith despite everything—wanted to see these seedlings as a sign, a promise that maybe, just maybe, we could scratch out something resembling life in this empty place.

But the cynic in me, the part that had watched too many hopes crumble to dust in thirty-odd years of living, felt the familiar tightening in my gut. That silent herald, warning me not to get carried away, not to invest in possibilities that might evaporate like morning dew.

Nothing good lasts. Nothing stays. Why should this be any different?

"I'm ready to paint that masterpiece with you, Karen."

Glenda's voice shattered my reverie like a rock through glass, her laugh bright and unguarded and brimming with an enthusiasm that felt like an assault on my senses. That phrase again. That bloody metaphor about canvasses and masterpieces, as if we were artists with a choice rather than prisoners making do.

The sound of her optimism made something inside me recoil. It was a visceral reaction, a full-body flinch away from what my brain screamed was naivety dressed up in motivational poster language. The sensation was almost physical—a wave of discomfort that started in my stomach and spread outward, leaving nausea in its wake.

Paint a masterpiece. In a prison. With guards we can't see and bars we can't break.

As if summoned by the universe's sense of dramatic timing, the sound of an engine roaring to life cut through the moment. Every head turned in unison toward the familiar mechanical thunder—Kain's ute, that symbol of our tenuous connection to everything we'd left behind, struggling up from the Drop Zone where Luke had deposited our latest batch of supplies.

The vehicle had become part of our rhythm here—carting goods back to camp, coughing through dust that threatened to choke its workings, providing transportation in a land that offered no roads. The sound of it now was like a bell announcing recess, a chance to escape the classroom before the lesson could sink in any deeper.

"I'll go." The words left me almost before I'd consciously decided to speak them, a reflexive escape hatch opening just when I needed it most. My feet were already moving, carrying me away from Karen and Glenda and Chris with their soil and their seeds and their insufferable hope.

Each step felt like liberation, putting distance between me and the suffocating optimism that seemed to radiate from the trio like heat from a fire. Their visions of the future were painted in colours too bright for my current state of mind—I couldn't look directly at them without feeling burned.

The dust kicked up around my boots as I walked, a familiar companion that I'd grown to hate but now welcomed as an excuse to keep moving. Behind me, I could feel their eyes tracking my retreat, probably cataloguing my departure as further evidence of whatever they'd already decided about me.

Let them think what they wanted. Let Karen paint her masterpieces and Glenda dream of miracles sprouting from dead ground. Let Chris study his soil and theorise about ecosystems.

I had a ute to meet and a son to return to.

The engine noise grew louder as I walked toward it, and I let its mechanical rumble drown out the echo of Glenda's laughter, the memory of green leaves unfurling at impossible speeds, the unsettling question of what else this strange soil might birth if given the chance.

Whatever they're growing out there, I don't have to watch it.