Don't Bring Your Children

"Luke called it destiny. Jamie called it a piece of shit. I was too busy laughing like a madman to vote."

Luke materialised from the swirling colours like a man stepping through a waterfall, the portal closing behind him to become that flat, translucent screen once more. The transition from dancing light to solid presence felt like a magic trick performed by someone who'd forgotten to explain the rules—one moment empty air, the next my brother standing before us, whole and unharmed and infuriatingly calm.

Jamie was on him before Luke's feet had fully settled into the dust, a torrent of curses pouring from his mouth with the force of water breaking through a dam. The words were ugly, raw, the kind of language that strips away all pretence of civilisation and leaves only animal fury behind. I barely heard them. My attention was fixed on Luke's face, searching for something—anything—that might explain how we'd ended up here, whether this had been the plan all along.

"Did you know?" The accusation left my mouth before I'd consciously formed the thought. My voice sounded strange to my own ears—cold, flat, the voice of a man who'd just discovered the ground beneath his feet was made of paper.

"Know what?" Luke's response came with a tilt of his head, an expression of innocent confusion that might have been convincing under different circumstances. Here, in this wasteland of rust and silence, it felt like an insult.

"That we wouldn't be able to get back." I stepped closer, my fists clenching at my sides. Thirty-four years of brotherhood, of shared secrets and childhood alliances and the unspoken understanding that we would always protect each other—all of it suddenly felt as insubstantial as smoke. Had he known? Had he brought us here deliberately, knowing we'd be trapped like flies in amber?

"How would I have known? I've been the only one here until now and I've been able to come and go as I please." Luke's defensiveness carried a note of genuine bewilderment, but I couldn't tell anymore if that was truth or performance. The brother I'd known—the dreamer, the mystic, the one who saw visions and heard voices and somehow made it all seem like a gift rather than a curse—had he been preparing for this moment all along? Had every conversation, every cryptic hint, every urgent phone call been part of some design I couldn't see?

If Luke was telling the truth, then this was accident, catastrophe, the universe playing a cosmic joke at our expense. If he was lying... I couldn't finish the thought. Couldn't bear to examine what it would mean if my brother had knowingly led us into a cage.

"So, this is it then." Jamie's voice cut through the tension, resignation wrapped in bitterness like barbed wire in cotton. "This is our fate. To die in this god-forsaken dust."

"Not fate. Destiny."

Luke's response hit me like a slap. His voice had shifted—no longer defensive, but elevated, touched with that particular fervour I'd heard in missionaries and true believers and people who had convinced themselves that suffering was merely the price of transcendence. His eyes were bright, alive with a certainty that seemed grotesquely misplaced given our circumstances.

Jamie and I exchanged a glance. In that brief moment of shared eye contact, I saw my own incredulity mirrored back at me. Whatever Luke was seeing—whatever glorious future he imagined rising from this barren wasteland—neither of us could perceive it. We saw only dust and distance and the terrible weight of forever.

"You're so full of shit sometimes." The words escaped me with a casualness that belied the fury churning beneath my ribs. It was more than irritation at his current delusion. It was years of accumulated frustration—every time his dreams had disrupted our family, every mystical pronouncement that had left the rest of us scrambling to make sense of his certainty, every moment when his visions had seemed more real to him than the people standing right in front of him.

Silence descended again, thick and suffocating. The alien landscape offered no comfort, no distraction—just endless brown and that impossibly blue sky pressing down on us like a judgement. The gulf between Luke's enthusiasm and our despair felt unbridgeable, a canyon carved by conflicting realities that could never be reconciled.

Then the question that had been clawing at my chest since I'd first understood our predicament finally broke free, sharp and desperate.

"What about my children? Am I ever going to see them again?"

My voice cracked on the last word. Mack. Rose. Their faces swam before me—Mack with his curious eyes and his experiments and his dreams of starting a band, Rose with her infectious laughter and her drawings and her absolute certainty that her daddy could fix anything. They were in Broken Hill with their grandparents, probably asking when I'd be home, probably wondering why Daddy hadn't called. And I was standing in another dimension entirely, trapped by forces I couldn't understand, at the mercy of a brother whose grip on reality seemed increasingly tenuous.

Luke's response stopped my heart.

"I can arrange to have them come here?"

The suggestion was delivered with such casual sincerity, as if he were offering to pick up groceries or give someone a lift to the airport. As if bringing two young children through an inter-dimensional portal to a barren wasteland was simply a matter of logistics.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" The words erupted from some place beyond conscious control, volcanic and unstoppable. My body was moving before my mind caught up, closing the distance between us with steps that felt like hammer blows against the dust. "I know you don't have the first clue about parenting, Luke, but here's the number one, golden rule for how to be a dad. You ready?"

I didn't wait for his answer. Couldn't have stopped myself if I'd wanted to.

"Don't, under any circumstances, bring your children through a one-way inter-dimensional Portal to an alien wasteland where there is literally nothing but dust and a tent!"

The absurdity of the sentence—the fact that I was standing in another world articulating basic parenting principles about inter-dimensional travel—would have been comedic under any other circumstances. But there was nothing funny about the terror that had seized my chest, the image of Mack and Rose stumbling through that wall of light only to discover they could never go home, never see their mother or their friends or their school or their beds or anything familiar ever again.

Luke had no children. He'd never held an infant in the small hours of the morning, making wordless promises to protect them from every harm the universe could imagine. He'd never felt the weight of that responsibility, that sacred contract between parent and child that superseded every other obligation. And now he was suggesting—casually, thoughtlessly—that I should condemn my children to the same imprisonment he'd already inflicted on Jamie and me.

The last threads of hope I'd been clinging to evaporated into the arid air. The adventure, the impossible journey, the trust I'd placed in my brother's hands—all of it had curdled into something monstrous. I'd walked willingly into this trap, and now Luke was proposing we should bait it with children.

My children.

The realisation settled into my bones with the weight of tombstones. I might never see them again. Never watch Mack grow into the man he was becoming. Never see Rose ride her first bike without training wheels, discover the world in all its wonder and terror. The distance between us wasn't measured in kilometres anymore—it was measured in dimensions, in the fundamental fabric of reality, in barriers that no amount of love or determination could bridge.

I was a father who had abandoned his children. Not intentionally, not willingly, but the result was the same. Somewhere in Broken Hill, Mack and Rose were waiting for a daddy who would never come home.

The desolation around us seemed a perfect mirror for the devastation within—vast, empty, offering nothing but the slow erosion of everything I'd ever valued.

Jamie's exasperation shattered the silence like glass.

"I can't believe you've gotten us stuck in this bloody place!" His voice cracked with the accumulated strain of everything that had happened, anger and disbelief braiding together into something that sounded almost like grief. He paused, gathering himself, then pressed on with the question I should have asked from the beginning. "How long have you known about this?"

Luke's explanation, when it came, had the mundane quality of something that should have been impossible. He'd been dozing at his desk, he said. The object he called the Portal Key had slipped from his grasp as he drifted into sleep, and when he'd woken... this. All of this. A gateway to another world, discovered by accident, explored in secret, and now shared with companions who hadn't asked to be included.

"Portal key?" I couldn't keep the scepticism from my voice. The term sounded like something from a video game, a fantasy novel, the kind of fiction Luke had always consumed voraciously while the rest of us dealt with the mundane concerns of actual existence. "You're aware that you are not, in fact, living in a sci-fi novel, right?"

"Well, that's what it is, isn't it? The key to open the Portal?" Luke's response carried its own edge of sarcasm, a defensive thrust against my mockery.

"Yeah, but... Portal?" I gestured at the translucent screen behind us, that impossible gateway that had swallowed our lives and refused to spit them back out. The word felt inadequate, a placeholder for something language had never needed to describe.

"What else would you call it?" Luke asked, his gaze following mine to the shimmering barrier.

"A piece of shit." Jamie's voice was flat, stripped of everything except raw contempt. "One giant piece of shit."

Something broke inside me.

The snort of laughter that escaped was completely involuntary—a sound that had no business existing in this moment of crisis and despair. It burst from my throat before I could stop it, startling in its incongruity. I clapped the back of my fist against my mouth, trying to contain it, but the absurdity of the situation had found a crack in my defences and was flooding through with the unstoppable force of water finding its level.

Luke and Jamie turned to stare at me, their expressions caught somewhere between confusion and concern.

"Sorry," I managed, the word muffled by my hand. But even as I spoke, another snort escaped—louder, more unhinged than the first. I turned away, unable to face their bewildered gazes as my body shook with laughter that felt dangerously close to sobs.

Here we were. Three grown men standing in an alien wasteland, debating the proper terminology for the inter-dimensional gateway that had stranded us in a world of dust and silence. One of us believed we were fulfilling some cosmic destiny. One of us wanted to call it a piece of shit. And I—I was losing my grip on sanity entirely, my exhausted mind finding comedy in the catastrophe because the alternative was screaming until my throat tore.

The laughter rolled through me in waves, beyond my control, beyond reason. Each time I thought I'd contained it, another spasm would seize me, shaking my shoulders and stealing my breath. The tension of the past hours—the sleepless night, the desperate journey, the betrayal and entrapment and the terrible knowledge that I might never see my children again—all of it found release in this inappropriate explosion of mirth.

I didn't know how long it lasted. Time had stopped meaning anything in this place where the sun hung motionless in an alien sky. Eventually, the laughter subsided, leaving behind a hollow ache and the taste of something that might have been grief.

When I finally turned back, the landscape had shifted. The dancing colours of the portal had vanished, replaced by that flat, translucent screen that marked Luke's absence. Jamie stood alone near the gateway, his figure a silhouette of dejection against the pale shimmer.

"He's gone back for supplies," Jamie said, his voice carrying across the dust with the flatness of someone who had stopped expecting anything to make sense.

"Oh." The single syllable was all I could manage. My gaze dropped to the ground, tracing patterns in the rust-coloured dust that coated everything. Supplies. As if we were on a camping trip. As if cardboard boxes and whatever provisions Luke could carry through the portal would transform this wasteland into something habitable.

"What now?" I asked, though I already knew the answer. There was no now. There was only this endless present, stretching out before us like the barren landscape itself.

Jamie's shrug was eloquent in its defeat. "No idea."

I released a breath I hadn't realised I'd been holding and turned toward the pile of boxes Luke had optimistically called our first shelter. They sat in a forlorn heap against the backdrop of emptiness—cardboard and plastic and whatever else Luke had managed to drag through the portal during his secret preparations. Rudimentary at best. Pathetic, if I was being honest. But standing still felt impossible. The thoughts circling in my head would devour me if I didn't give my body something to do.

"What are you doing?" Jamie called as I began walking.

I paused, turning to face him. The weight of our situation pressed down on my shoulders, bending my spine, making every movement feel like wading through honey. "I don't really know," I admitted, my voice barely above a whisper.

I rubbed at my brow, where a headache was beginning to build behind my eyes. My mind churned with questions that had no answers, accusations that served no purpose, grief that had nowhere to go. How could Luke do this to us? The question repeated itself like a broken record, each repetition cutting deeper than the last. I had trusted him. With my life, with my presence here, with the faith that whatever secrets he was keeping would ultimately make sense. That trust felt like ashes now—bitter, grey, the residue of something that had once been alive.

The sense of betrayal was sharper than the physical discomfort of the heat, more present than the dust coating my clothes and skin. It wasn't just the landscape that felt alien. It was the very foundation of my relationship with Luke, now fractured by the weight of decisions made without consent, actions taken without warning. As I stood there confronting the enormity of our predicament, I felt lost in a way that had nothing to do with geography—adrift in a sea of shattered assumptions, with no clear path forward and no way back.

I reached the boxes and grabbed the nearest one, hoisting it against my chest.

The weight caught me off guard—far heavier than I'd expected, packed with whatever provisions Luke had deemed essential for the founding of his new civilisation. My grip slipped, and the box tumbled from my grasp, one end slamming into the ground with a thud that sent a cloud of rust-coloured dust billowing around my ankles.

I glanced toward Jamie. He'd returned to the translucent screen, his back to me, his posture speaking of determined futility as he attempted once more to coax the portal back to life. I didn't watch for long. Some instinct told me his efforts would prove as fruitless as my own had been, and there was something unbearable about witnessing hope die repeatedly.

Grasping the strip of blue plastic strapping, I began to drag the box across the dust. The landscape stretched endlessly in every direction—brown and orange and rust, a palette of desiccation that made even the arid reaches of Broken Hill seem lush by comparison. No shade. No relief from the alien sun that beat down with relentless constancy. No sign of life beyond the three of us and whatever Luke had packed in these boxes.

I hauled the box up a small rise, then down the other side, muscles straining against the weight. The physical effort was almost welcome—it gave my body something to focus on besides the churning of my thoughts, the ache in my chest where hope had once resided.

Then I heard something that stopped me dead.

Water.

The sound was so utterly unexpected, so completely at odds with the parched landscape surrounding me, that for a moment I was certain I'd imagined it. A trick of the heat, perhaps, or my exhausted mind manufacturing comfort from nothing. But the murmur persisted—that unmistakable burble and rush that could only mean one thing.

I dropped the plastic strap and climbed the second rise, my heart hammering against my ribs with something that felt dangerously like hope. Each step brought the sound closer, clearer, more undeniable. Water. Actual water, in this wasteland of dust and despair.

The crest of the rise revealed a sight that made me forget, for one precious moment, everything that had brought me to this place.

A river.

It stretched across the landscape like a living thing—wide and meandering, its surface catching the alien sunlight in patterns of silver and gold. The water moved with purpose, carving its patient path through the rust-coloured earth, a ribbon of possibility threading through impossible desolation.

For a long moment, I simply stood and stared. The river changed nothing about our imprisonment, nothing about the children I might never see again or the wife who was probably already planning her fury or the life I'd left behind without warning or consent. And yet, somehow, everything felt different.

Water meant life. Water meant possibility. Water meant that perhaps—just perhaps—this wasteland wasn't as barren as it appeared, that Luke's visions of a new civilisation might not be entirely delusional, that there might be something worth building here even if we could never go back.

I let the thought settle into me, testing its weight. Hope was a dangerous thing in circumstances like these. It could sustain you or destroy you, depending on whether it had any foundation in reality. But standing there, watching the river flow through this alien landscape, I felt something shift in my chest—a loosening of the despair that had been constricting my breathing since the portal had first rejected Jamie.

We were trapped. That much remained unchanged. But perhaps being trapped didn't have to mean being finished.

The river continued its patient journey toward some destination I couldn't see, carrying with it the promise of survival and the weight of questions I couldn't yet answer. I watched it flow, letting its constancy anchor me, until I felt steady enough to turn back and share the discovery with Jamie.

Perhaps not all was lost.