Fragments and Ghosts

"Mugs and socks don’t argue about where they end up. Dogs do—because they know where they belong."

I won’t bore you with the finer details of my second, third, and fourth trips to Paul’s house—the creeping steps, the careful pauses to listen for the scrape of sandals or the sharp edge of a neighbour’s cough, the way every flip-flop slap on the footpath seemed to amplify itself in Broken Hill’s morning air. By the end of my efforts, I’d become a commuter of sorts, shuttling back and forth between Clivilius and suburban weatherboard gloom, as though this fractured double-life had always been the plan.

Each time, I rehearsed the same justification: I was being selective. Practical. Thoughtful, even. Not scavenging, but curating. Paul didn’t need sentiment, he needed utility—or so I told myself. Which is how I rationalised ferrying through armfuls of jumpers, their wool smelling faintly of dust and old wardrobes; two children’s backpacks, straps twisted like they’d been flung aside mid-rush; a haphazard scattering of books, pages still dog-eared where Mack or Rose had last abandoned them; and socks—so many socks, none remotely resembling a pair, a testament to childhood chaos.

At one point, I even pocketed a pair of mugs. White ceramic, cheap, their rims lined with hairline fractures like spiderwebs frozen mid-spread. Utterly ordinary. Yet somehow, as I pressed them into my bag, I imagined Paul sitting with one, chipped handle warming under his palm, steam rising faint and bitter from instant coffee. The sort of gesture that suggested normality, even if it was nothing more than a lie propped up by crockery.

Claire’s ghost haunted every object. Not her, not really, but the residue she’d left behind: a cardigan snagged on a dresser corner; a lipstick smudge softening on the rim of a glass; the faint, stubborn trace of her shampoo clinging to the bathroom air. None of it was mine to touch, let alone take. Yet I took them. Piece by piece, I made myself into a thief who told herself she was a saviour.

I repeated the mantra—it’s for Paul. If he could shrug into one of his jumpers, if he could trace Mack’s scrawled notes in the margin of a homework sheet, if he could just feel the familiar weight of a thing that once belonged to his life, maybe it would keep him tethered. Maybe it would stop him drifting too far into despair.

And it was true, mostly. But under the surface, no matter how carefully I stacked my excuses, the undertone gnawed. Persistent. Needling. The awareness that I was trespassing. That every trip made me less courier, more thief. And perhaps worse—that some quiet, unspoken part of me wanted to keep going.

Paul never said as much, of course. He didn’t have to. Each time I came back through the Portal, weighted down with whatever mismatched bundle I’d managed to smuggle, he met me with that wide, grateful smile of his—the kind that turned tatters into treasure. To him, I hadn’t delivered laundry or scraps of domesticity; I’d delivered fragments of his life, hauled out of the void and pressed back into his hands.

He reached for the smallest things as though they were holy relics. Rose’s teddy bear, its fur worn down to patchy baldness, stitched seams sagging where too many hugs had thinned it. A battered copy of Matilda, its spine bent from being prised open too often, the corners soft as cloth. He’d lift them with a reverence that made my stomach knot. Because I hadn’t conjured miracles—I’d only crept through the stale corridors of his house, stripping it bare piece by piece. Loot, disguised in the language of kindness.

At least he never asked how. He didn’t want the logistics. He didn’t want to picture me slotting a stolen key into his lock, shoulders hunched against the thought of a neighbour’s slippers shuffling into view. He didn’t want to imagine me picking over his family’s belongings like a crow gutting a carcass, weighing up what might fit in my jacket or backpack and what I had to leave behind. He never asked, and I never offered. That silence suited us both.

Still, I went back. Again and again. Because the look on his face when I placed Rose’s missing shoe in his palm—just one, absurd, pink scrap of leather—was enough to silence the gnawing voice in my chest. His hands had closed around it like it was proof. Proof she was real. Proof she was still out there somewhere, waiting.

When I handed him his old toolbox, heavy and scuffed, his fingers had lingered over the worn wooden handle. The faintest smile broke through, relief etched into it so vividly that for a heartbeat I almost believed this was enough—that salvaging these remnants might hold him together.

For a while.

But never for long. Because no matter how tightly he held them, no matter how fiercely he tried to root himself in those scraps, they couldn’t fill the absence. They could only remind him of it. And me? I could only keep carrying the weight of being the thief who delivered hope in fragments too small to satisfy.

Every trip hammered it home: what wasn’t there. The silence of that house didn’t only mean absence—it meant Charlie’s absence. It was threaded through everything, stamped into the shape of the rooms. The tiles should have been alive with the rapid-fire tap of claws, her nails racing ahead of her as though urgency were a language only she spoke. There should have been the muffled shhhk-shhhk of fur shaking itself out, collar jingling like a set of mismatched bells. A tail thumping against the doorframe. A rush of movement towards me, every ounce of her body declaring, you belong here. Instead, nothing. Just that flat, unyielding hush, and in it, the ghost of her outline. Sharp. Unmistakable.

Paul felt it too—more than he’d ever let slip aloud. His mouth stayed careful, his words stripped of admission, but the absence gnawed at him all the same. I saw it in the restless set of his shoulders, the way his eyes flicked back to the Portal more often than he realised, as though half-expecting her to come bounding through it, tongue lolling, ears sharp. He carried it like a bruise he wouldn’t name: tender, unavoidable, always there beneath the skin.

And it gnawed at me, though not for the same reasons.

Charlie wasn’t another belonging to ferry across dimensions. Not a cardigan snagged on a chair. Not a mismatched sock dragged from under a bed. Not even a chipped mug, however noble its sacrifice in the cause of instant coffee. She was alive, thinking in her own doggish, devoted way, and she’d been lifted into the back of a police ute like evidence, neatly bagged and tagged.

The rest of it I could excuse. Call it burglary-adjacent, trespass by proxy, looting in the name of sentiment. At least the mugs didn’t care where they ended up. At least socks didn’t miss their pair.

But Charlie?

Charlie wasn’t cargo. Charlie was the mission.