Dust in Open Palms

The river behind the tents was wide and unhurried, threading its way through the dust with the quiet persistence of something that had been finding its path long before anyone arrived to witness it. Karen had taken Chris by the arm and led him away from the settlement with the purposeful urgency of a woman who needed space to think without an audience, and Chris had followed without resistance, which was itself a kind of concession. The camp fell behind them. The sound of Jamie's retreating footsteps faded. The tents shrank to shapes against the skyline, and the silence of Clivilius closed around them like a held breath.

They stood at the water's edge, two people still wearing the dust of a garden they had been tending that morning in Collinsvale, in a world that now felt as distant as something read about in a book. No wind stirred the surface. No birds called from branches that did not exist. The absence of life was not merely visual but acoustic, a silence so total that it pressed against the ears and made you aware of your own breathing in a way that felt almost intrusive, as though the landscape preferred you to be still.

Chris was the first to voice what they were both carrying. The disbelief. The inventory of things left behind — the house, the animals, the ducks, the shed, the retaining wall they had rebuilt with their own hands only hours earlier. Each item was a thread tethered to a life that was unravelling faster than either of them could wind it back. Karen let him speak. She let the list unspool into the dry air without interruption, because she understood that the naming of lost things was its own form of grief and that grief needed to be heard before it could be set down.

When he finished, she did not offer comfort. She offered something harder. She asked him to remember the evenings they had spent in bed, laughing about the stories Luke used to tell on the bus. The dreams he described with such granular conviction that Karen and Jane Lathom had made a private joke of them — Clivilius, with its red sand and azure skies, its bridges and its stone guardians, its flourishing trees and its capital city. They had dismissed them as the harmless eccentricities of a man whose imagination outpaced his circumstances. Karen had repeated them to Chris as bedtime entertainment, and Chris had listened with the amused indulgence of a husband who loved his wife's way of collecting odd people and their odd stories.

Those stories were no longer odd. They were coordinates. Every detail Luke had offered on the morning commute between Berriedale and Hobart corresponded to something real, something that existed beneath their feet and above their heads in a dimension that should not have been possible. The dreams had not been dreams. They had been dispatches.

Karen crouched and gathered a handful of the fine Clivilian dust. It was soft as silt, strangely heavy, and warm from the sun. She told Chris to hold out his hands. He obeyed without argument, palms cupped, the posture of a man receiving something he did not yet understand. She let the dust fall slowly from her fingers into his, grain by grain, the particles catching the light as they drifted downward in a gesture that was part demonstration and part ceremony. A way of making the abstract tangible. A way of saying: this is not a hallucination. This is soil. It has weight. It is under your fingernails. It is real.

Chris stared at his hands. The dust settled into the lines of his palms, into the creases around his knuckles, into the same calluses that had gripped sandstone and driven tent pegs and turned soil in Collinsvale for twenty years. Something shifted in his expression. Not belief, exactly, but the withdrawal of resistance. The recognition that whatever arguments he might construct against the reality of this place would crumble against the simple, intractable fact of the dirt in his hands.

Karen watched the shift happen and felt something settle in herself as well. Not peace. Not acceptance in any resolved sense. But the steadying that comes from knowing your footing, however precarious the ground. If Chris could meet her here, in this impossible place, with open hands and a willingness to stop fighting what could not be fought, then they had something to build from. It would not be the life they had planned. It would not be the world Luke had described. But it would be theirs.

The sound of an engine reached them from beyond the tents — faint, mechanical, impossible in a world that should not have contained anything with a motor. It cut through the stillness with the foreign clarity of something that did not belong, and both of them turned toward it instinctively. The moment by the river had run its course. Whatever reckoning remained could wait. There were people at the camp, and the sound of an engine meant something was happening that required their presence.

They walked back together, side by side, the dust rising in small clouds around their boots and settling behind them in patterns that the wind would erase before anyone thought to look.