Garbage and Hope

"Luke called this wasteland beautiful, then handed us garbage bags like they were treasure. Turned out he wasn't entirely wrong about the second part."

"What now?"

Jamie's voice cut through the quiet that had settled over us, carrying notes of both curiosity and the particular brand of impatience that seemed to define his every interaction. I followed his gaze up the hill, where Luke's figure was making his way down the slope with a spring in his step that seemed wildly inappropriate given our circumstances.

"I've got clothes on."

Luke announced this with a theatrical flourish, performing a small twirl that sent clouds of rust-coloured dust spiralling around his feet. His jeans—actual jeans, the kind that belonged to a world with shopping centres and laundry machines—flapped loosely around his bare ankles. The sight was so absurdly normal, so jarringly out of place in this landscape, that something in my chest loosened unexpectedly.

"You're such a dork."

The laugh that escaped me surprised us both. It bubbled up from somewhere deep, bypassing all the grief and anger and fear that had been clogging my emotional pathways since we'd arrived. For just a moment, Luke wasn't the brother who'd trapped me in another dimension—he was just Luke, the gangly kid who'd followed me around the house in Broken Hill, the man who still couldn't take a family photo without making some sort of face.

Luke's smile in response was pure warmth, the easy acceptance in the gesture reminding me of bonds that had survived worse than this. "I know," he shrugged, the word carrying decades of shared history in its single syllable. The nonchalance felt like a balm against the raw edges of stress that had been scraping at all of us.

Then he held up his offering, and the moment shifted back to practicality.

A roll of garbage bags. Black, industrial-sized, the kind you'd buy in bulk from Bunnings for a particularly ambitious garden cleanup. In Luke's hands, extended toward us like a gift, they looked simultaneously ridiculous and desperately needed.

"I figured rather than dirty a beautiful, clean world, you can put all the rubbish in these and I can take them back to Earth."

Beautiful?

The word echoed through my mind with the sour tang of disbelief. I looked around at the landscape Luke apparently found beautiful—rust-coloured dust stretching to every horizon, not a tree or bush or blade of grass to break the monotony, the river cutting its lonely path through barren earth under a sky that pressed down with an emptiness that felt almost malevolent. Beautiful was not the word I would have chosen. Prison, perhaps. Wasteland. Hell with better lighting.

And yet there was Luke, seeing something in this desolate place that my grief-clouded eyes couldn't perceive. His optimism, his apparently boundless capacity to find silver linings in the darkest of clouds, felt jarring—but beneath my skepticism stirred something that might have been envy. What would it be like to look at catastrophe and see opportunity? To view exile and find adventure?

I didn't know. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

"But how is that possible? I thought we couldn't leave?"

Jamie's question cut through my internal debate, voicing the confusion that had been forming in my own mind. If we were trapped—if the portal had rejected us with such violent finality—how could anything pass through in either direction?

"You can't," Luke clarified, and the sobering weight in his tone acknowledged the gravity of what he was saying. "But it seems that items can. I took Paul's phone, remember?"

The words landed like a physical impact.

I stared at my brother, the implications cascading through my consciousness in waves. My phone. The device I'd surrendered, writing down the passcode with shaking hands, convinced I was simply handing over a useless piece of technology. That phone had left Clivilius. Had passed through the same barrier that had thrown me back with explosive force. Had crossed the threshold that would forever remain closed to me.

My phone has left Clivilius.

The thought was almost too large to hold. Somewhere on Earth—in Tasmania, presumably, in Luke and Jamie's house—my phone existed. A piece of me that had escaped when I could not. A messenger that might carry... what? What could be communicated through a device when its owner was trapped in another dimension?

The sliver of hope that opened in my chest was almost painful in its intensity.

"You might want to keep anything combustible," Luke continued, pulling us back from the edge of possibility to the immediate concerns of survival. "We don't know what the conditions are like here at night, remember."

At night.

The words repeated in my head, carrying implications I hadn't fully considered until this moment. Night. Darkness. Hours of unknown conditions in an environment we didn't understand, with no shelter except a tent still being assembled and no knowledge of what dangers might emerge when the sun—if it was a sun—finally set.

Am I really spending a night here?

The reality of our situation settled over me with renewed weight. This wasn't a day trip gone wrong. This wasn't a situation that would resolve itself by dinner time. I was going to sleep in this place—if sleep was even possible—and wake to another day of dust and isolation and the slow, grinding work of survival.

Despite the apprehension that gnawed at my stomach, I found myself nodding. What other choice was there?

We set about the task of filling the first garbage bag, gathering the remnants of our chaotic arrival—cardboard from the tent boxes, the plastic wrapping that had defeated us before Luke brought the knife, various bits of packaging that had accumulated during our fumbling attempts at organisation. It should have been simple work, mindless and mechanical, the kind of task you complete while thinking about something else entirely.

But I couldn't think about anything else. Not with Luke's eyes on me.

I became aware of his gaze gradually, the way you notice a persistent itch before consciously acknowledging it. His glances in my direction lingered longer than necessary, his attention returning to my bare chest with a frequency that made my skin prickle with discomfort. I'd left my shirt off after the river—it was warm enough, and the fabric had felt oppressive against skin still damp from my impromptu bath. Under normal circumstances, going shirtless around family wouldn't have warranted a second thought.

But these weren't normal circumstances, and Luke's attention felt distinctly uncomfortable.

I know I've kept in shape. Years of hauling boxes, of chasing after Mack and Rose, of trying to maintain some standard of fitness despite the sedentary demands of business ownership—they'd left their mark on my physique. Under different circumstances, I might have taken some quiet pride in the evidence of that effort. But from Luke? My own brother?

The attention made my skin crawl in ways I couldn't quite articulate. There's a difference between noticing and staring, between casual acknowledgment and the kind of prolonged attention that feels like examination. Whatever Luke was doing fell firmly in the latter category.

"So..."

Luke's voice cut through the air, the syllable drawn out in a way that immediately put me on edge. I knew that tone—had known it since childhood—and it never preceded anything comfortable. Jamie shot me a look, a silent warning that seemed to brace us both for whatever awkwardness was about to unfold.

"So, what?"

Jamie's response was terse, his focus remaining determinedly on the garbage bag in his hands. His tone made clear he wasn't interested in entertaining whatever conversational direction Luke was steering toward.

"So..."

Luke pressed on, apparently immune to the warning signals both Jamie and I were broadcasting. His voice carried a weight of implication that made my stomach tighten with anticipatory discomfort.

"Why is it that you made such a big deal about me, your boyfriend, having no shirt on, yet you seem to be perfectly comfortable with my brother flashing himself around?"

The garbage bag slipped from my fingers.

The contents spilled back onto the Clivilian dust in a cascade of cardboard and plastic, but I barely registered the mess. Heat flooded my face with such intensity that I felt certain my cheeks must be glowing—a flush of embarrassment that seemed to radiate outward from some core of mortification deep in my chest.

Flashing himself around.

The phrase echoed in my skull, each repetition making me want to sink into the rust-coloured earth and disappear. I hadn't been flashing anything. I'd been hot, and wet from the river, and trying to dry off without a towel in a world where such basic amenities didn't exist. The decision to remain shirtless had been practical, not provocative.

And yet Luke had framed it in terms that made me feel exposed in ways that had nothing to do with clothing.

Jamie's voice, when it came, was unexpected.

"I think you better bring us a couple of towels, a few rolls of toilet paper and a shovel."

The pivot was so abrupt, so utterly divorced from the charged atmosphere of the moment before, that I almost laughed. Jamie had simply... moved on. Redirected the conversation with the kind of blunt practicality that cut through tension like a blade through butter.

Luke seemed equally caught off guard. His expression shifted from whatever provocative intent had driven his question to something approaching consideration, the change visible in the slight furrow of his brow. Even he, apparently, could recognise when the conversation needed redirecting.

"Oh, and I really need my overnight bag of clothes, too."

The words tumbled out of me, eager to pile onto this new, safer thread of discussion. My overnight bag—the one I'd packed for what was supposed to be a brief visit to Tasmania, a quick check on my brother, a trip measured in hours rather than... whatever this was becoming. The bag contained spare clothes, toiletries, all the small necessities that had seemed so ordinary when I'd zipped it closed in my Broken Hill bedroom.

Now those ordinary items felt precious beyond measure.

Luke nodded, silent and understanding. The tension that had crackled between us moments before dissipated—not resolved, exactly, but set aside in favour of more pressing concerns. An unspoken agreement to focus on survival rather than whatever complicated currents ran beneath the surface of our family relationships.

The moment of truth arrived with less fanfare than I'd expected.

We gathered near the portal's shimmer, the three of us united in purpose if nothing else. Luke held two garbage bags, bulging with the detritus of our arrival, their black plastic surfaces seeming to absorb the alien light. In his pocket, carefully folded, rested my list—the paper that had survived my river adventure, its surface still bearing the damp patches that testified to my ordeal.

I'd retrieved it from my jeans earlier, noting the way the ink had blurred slightly where moisture had seeped through the fabric. A futile gesture of breath across its surface had done nothing to erase the marks, but handing it to Luke had felt significant nonetheless. More than just a piece of paper. More than just a list of practical needs. It was trust, of a sort. Evidence that despite everything—the trap, the lies by omission, the impossible situation he'd created—I was still willing to rely on my brother.

Luke had received the list with a solemnity that surprised me. His careful folding, the deliberate way he'd secured it in his pocket, suggested he understood what the gesture represented.

"I'll be sure to get everything you need."

The promise carried weight—the weight of our reliance on him, of our complete dependence on his willingness to make these trips, to bring supplies, to maintain the thread that connected us to a world we could no longer touch. For all our anger, for all the resentment that simmered beneath the surface, Luke was our lifeline. Without him, we would have nothing except what we'd arrived with and whatever this empty world chose to provide.

He stepped toward the portal.

Jamie and I stood side by side, a silent support network bracing for whatever outcome awaited. The shimmer of the portal seemed to intensify as Luke approached, colours swirling in patterns that defied any natural precedent I could recall. I found myself holding my breath, chest tight with a tension I couldn't quite name.

The moment Luke walked through—his figure seeming to dissolve into the mesmerising display of light and colour, the garbage bags disappearing along with him—the breath I'd been holding escaped in a rush. He was gone. Simply... gone. Absorbed by whatever mechanism allowed passage between worlds, carrying our refuse and our hopes with equal indifference.

The sight was both awe-inspiring and deeply, fundamentally surreal.

Jamie turned to face me, and the expression on his face made something shift in my chest. He was grinning—actually grinning—with a light in his eyes that hadn't been there since before the portal rejected us. Hope, naked and unguarded, transforming features that had been set in anger and resentment for hours.

"There may be hope for us yet."

The words hung in the air between us, a declaration that carried far more weight than its simple syllables suggested. Not just observation—belief. Jamie believed there was hope. Jamie, who had attacked Luke in fury, who had sworn and raged against the unfairness of our imprisonment, who had met my every attempt at communication with hostility or silence—that Jamie was standing before me with hope in his eyes.

I found myself caught in a whirlpool of thoughts, spinning through possibilities that had seemed firmly closed mere hours ago. The successful departure of Luke, even carrying nothing more significant than garbage bags, had cracked open a door I'd thought sealed. Items could leave. Objects could pass through the barrier that rejected human flesh with such violent certainty.

Could Jamie be right? Was there indeed hope for us in this bizarre twist of fate?

The questions spiralled through my mind, each one spawning others. If items could leave, what else might be possible? Could messages be sent? Could supplies flow in both directions indefinitely? Could there be some mechanism, some loophole, some desperate possibility that might eventually allow us to follow our belongings back to the world we'd lost?

The portal shimmered on, indifferent to our revelation, ready to accept whatever Luke chose to bring through next. And somewhere on the other side of that impossible threshold, my phone existed. My list existed. Pieces of our world that had made the journey we could not.

Perhaps Jamie was right.

Perhaps there was hope for us yet.