Hunger Pains

“There’s empty like a plate, and then there’s empty like the whole world forgot you were here.”

I didn’t sleep. Not even a little bit. Not the way people do when they’re tired and safe and warm.

I just lay there—flat on the mattress, with the hard spring jabbing into my back and the sound of the wind whispering secrets through the cracks—blinking. Listening. Holding my breath every few minutes, like I could trick the dark into thinking I wasn’t there.

The mattress had gone cold underneath me. Thin and damp-feeling, like the cold had crept up from the floor and soaked into it during the night. I didn’t sink my head below my jumper. That felt like something a little kid would do. And I didn’t feel little. Not anymore. Not since he looked at me.

Sometimes, when I squeeze my eyes shut tight enough, I can make myself invisible. At least, that’s what I used to believe. Before the colours. Before the man with empty eyes looked right at me and saw me anyway.

He saw through things. Through hiding places and cracks and quiet. Through me. And the worst part wasn’t even that he saw me—it was that he didn’t want me. That he looked and left.

Mack had fallen asleep sometime after the silence came back. It wasn’t proper sleep.

His breathing was too shallow, too fast. His legs kicked out now and then like he was trying to run in place, and his hands twitched open and closed, like he was grabbing for something just out of reach. Once, he whispered something. Just one word, but it came out so strangled and slurred I couldn’t tell what it was. Might’ve been my name. Might’ve been something worse.

I wanted to ask if he was dreaming about the man—but I didn’t. I didn’t want to say anything that might make the night real again.

Words have power. Grandma Dawn taught me that. Some things, once you say them out loud, you can never take back. They change the air around you. They make things true in a way they weren’t before.

So I stayed quiet. Still. A shadow lying next to another shadow, waiting for the dark to lift.

The dark finally began to shift sometime after the coldest part—that strange bit of morning where black turns to blue and everything holds its breath. The trees outside didn’t rustle. The building didn’t groan. Even the birds were slow to start.

It’s like the world was waiting for someone else to move first.

I know that feeling. Holding back screams until your chest hurts and your throat feels tight and swollen.

By the time the sun peeked over the scrub, the building looked different. It wasn’t a monster anymore. It was something else.

Still broken. Still strange. But not scary in the same way.

The metal walls weren’t alive with light anymore. They just looked… tired. Bent and rusted, dulled by the dirt and sun. Like old skin, too thin to keep the bones in. The furniture, the locker with the name scratched into it, the faded warning signs peeling off the walls—they didn’t look spooky now. They looked forgotten. Like they’d been important once, but no one remembered what for.

Like a skeleton left behind, waiting for weather and time to finish the job.

Funny how daylight changes things. But not all things. Not the important ones.

I sat up slowly. My spine cracked, loud in the quiet. It felt wrong to make noise.

My back ached like I’d been sleeping on rocks, and my mouth felt wrong inside. Dry, but not in a normal way. My tongue was thick, too big for my mouth, like it had been left out in the sun and gone hard at the edges. My lips stuck together when I tried to open them, and my throat made a sound like someone peeling tape off paper when I swallowed.

I rubbed my sleeve across my face. Grit scraped my skin—tiny, sharp bits of dust clinging to the sweat that had dried there sometime during the night. My nose tickled, and when I sniffed, it made a strange, papery sound that didn’t belong in a human head.

Beside me, Ribbons was lying face-down on the mattress. Her ear had folded under her, bent the wrong way. Her pink fur was coated in red dirt, like she’d been rolled in spice jars. She looked like something that had been buried and dug up again.

One of her button eyes was crusted with something dark and flaky. I didn’t want to think about what it might be.

I picked her up gently and brushed her off with the corner of my jumper, dabbing at her like she was a wounded animal instead of a toy.

“Sorry,” I whispered. My voice came out dry and rough, like it had been rubbed against sandpaper in my sleep. “I didn’t mean to drop you.”

What I didn’t say was: I dropped her when the wall started to glow. When the man walked through it like it wasn’t solid at all. When the girl followed behind him with a face that didn’t feel like a face. I didn’t say: I forgot you were even in my hands. Because some things are too big to fit inside your head at the same time as other things.

Mack stirred beside me.

He blinked slow, like he was still half in some dream he didn’t want to come back from, then rolled onto his side and propped himself up on one elbow. His hair stuck out in strange angles, pointing in all directions like he’d been electrocuted in his sleep. There was a crease on his cheek where it had pressed against the rough fabric of the rolled-up hoodie he’d used as a pillow. His eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, sunk back in his face like they’d been pulled in overnight.

“Morning?” he said, but it came out lopsided, more like a question than a greeting. His voice cracked in the middle, like a stick snapping underfoot.

I nodded.

He didn’t smile.

We sat there for a while without saying much. Not because we didn’t have anything to say—there was too much. Words felt dangerous, like poking at a bruise you weren’t ready to look at yet.

Somewhere far off, a crow called out. Loud. Sharp. Like it was warning someone. Or blaming them.

Then silence again. Heavy as sleep. Like the world was still deciding if it wanted to wake up today.

My stomach growled. Loud. An ugly, growly sound that came from so deep inside it felt like it didn’t belong to me at all. Like something was living in there now.

Mack turned his head and gave me a tired look. “Hang on.”

He reached for his backpack, dragging it closer by one of the frayed straps. The zip made a harsh zzzzzt sound that felt like a shout. Like it would echo out across the dry scrubland and tell everyone exactly where we were.

I glanced toward the door, just in case.

“Here,” he said.

He handed me a sandwich bag, cloudy and wrinkled, with a few broken bits of cracker rattling inside. The plastic felt warm and greasy in my hand, like it had been opened too many times. They were salt and vinegar—my favourite. I remembered them from when Grandma gave us snacks in the car, back when things were still strange but not this kind of strange.

I picked one out, careful not to spill any crumbs. It had gone soft, like a biscuit left on the edge of a bathtub. I licked the salt off first, letting it sting the little cracks at the corners of my mouth. It made my lips burn, but I didn’t mind. At least it meant I could still feel something.

Mack found a crust in the bottom of the bag—just a scrap of sandwich bread, curled at the edges like it wanted to turn into paper. He sniffed it, shrugged with only one shoulder, and popped it in his mouth without saying anything. I watched his jaw move as he chewed, slow and quiet, like each bite was more a memory than food.

That was breakfast.

I crunched my cracker bits slowly, trying to make the chewing last longer than the taste. Pretending there was more. But there wasn’t. There wouldn’t be.

It was like feeding a hole instead of a stomach. And the hole just got bigger with every bite, like the food was reminding my body what it should feel like—and didn’t.

After that, we just sat. Listening.

Not for anything in particular. Just… in case.

The building creaked sometimes, joints shifting like old bones settling. A loose bit of tin clinked against something outside, tapping the same dull note over and over, like a song no one remembered the words to.

Something skittered above us in the rafters. Fast and light, claws on metal. Too soft for a person, too heavy for nothing.

“Lizard,” Mack muttered, eyes tracing the ceiling. “Or maybe a bird.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t care.

Everything outside that door felt wrong. Too big. Too dry. Too full of things I didn’t understand and didn’t want to see again.

And inside wasn’t much better.

The air was stale and thick. It smelled like rust and mouse droppings and something else—something older, like the breath of a closed-up cupboard that hadn’t been opened in years. The kind of smell that stayed in your clothes and hair and thoughts.

The floor was hard beneath us. Dusty, with patches of grime that left marks on our clothes. When I moved, tiny clouds puffed up, drifting like ash.

My shirt stuck to my back. My socks felt damp around the toes. My hair was matted into a single knot at the nape of my neck—tight and sore. Mum would’ve made that face she always made when she saw a proper mess, the one with the little frown lines between her eyebrows—

I stopped. Thinking about Mum made my chest hurt. A different kind of ache. Not hunger. Something worse.

“I’m really hungry,” I said, finally. The words came out dry and pointless, like dust spilling out of an empty jar.

Mack nodded, slow, like his head was filled with water.

“Me too.”

I hesitated. “Do you think Grandma forgot we’re here?”

He didn’t answer right away. His face changed—softened and hardened all at once. That look he got sometimes, like he was putting together a puzzle in his mind that had pieces missing. I’d seen it before, the day Dad left and didn’t come back for three weeks. The same quiet panic.

Then he said, “No. I think maybe she just... thinks we’re somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

He shook his head, not really meaning no. “I dunno. Somewhere better.”

Somewhere better than this?

That wouldn’t be hard. But the way he said it—it didn’t sound like hope. It sounded like a secret. A sad one.

My stomach growled again, but softer this time. Tired now. Waiting.

I rubbed it with my hand, slow circles like Mum used to do when I had a tummy ache. It didn’t help.

My tongue was thick again. Too dry to ask another question. I swallowed nothing.

So we just sat there. Still. Watching the light move across the floor.

The sun painted lines on the concrete, shifting inch by inch like the hands of a clock. But time didn’t feel real anymore. Not in minutes or hours. It moved in hunger pangs. In flashes of memory. In the space between now and the next time I remembered those empty eyes.

The sun had lifted properly now, high enough to stretch its arms across the roof beams and spill gold into every corner. It caught the dust floating in the air and turned it into something else—glitter, maybe, or tiny stars drifting just out of reach. They twirled in slow circles, like they were dancing to a song too quiet to hear.

It should have been beautiful. But it wasn’t.

There was something off about it all. Like a dream that looked right on the outside but was wrong underneath. Like one of those TV shows where someone presses pause, and everyone freezes mid-movement with their mouths half open and their eyes stuck too wide.

The building looked still, too still. Even the beams of light felt strange—too sharp, too straight, like they’d been drawn with a ruler instead of coming from the sun.

My skin prickled.

The air tasted different too. Metallic. Like when you bite the inside of your cheek and don’t realise until the blood hits your tongue. I ran my tongue over my teeth and swallowed, but the taste didn’t go. It sat there at the back of my throat, cold and sour like an old coin.

Mack sat cross-legged beside me, the phone on the ground between us. Grandma’s old one. Heavy, grey, with buttons that clacked when you pressed them too fast. The kind of phone you could probably drop off a roof without breaking it. He used to call it a brick, like grown-ups did, though he never laughed when he said it.

It didn’t even have a camera. Just big rubbery buttons, worn smooth in the middle where fingers had lived for years. The numbers were fading—fives and eights turned into half-shapes, like they were trying to disappear quietly.

He picked it up and pressed the side button. It clicked under his thumb, and the screen lit up pale green, casting a sickly light onto his face. It made him look like someone who’d been poorly a long time—hollow under the eyes, skin too thin, colours all wrong.

The battery flashed up. Two bars. Not great. But not gone either.

I leaned in closer, my shoulder resting against his. His jumper was warm, but it smelled faintly of old sweat and campfire smoke. I didn’t mind. It felt real.

“Will it work?” I whispered, without really knowing why I was whispering. There was no one around to hear us. Unless you counted the lizards Mack thought might be watching from the rafters.

“Dunno,” he said, voice rough. “Should.”

He began to scroll with the little black arrow, the plastic making a quiet, steady clicking noise.

He stopped at ‘Grandma Home’.

His thumb hovered over the green button, not pressing it yet. Just sitting there, trembling ever so slightly. I could feel his breath change—shorter, sharper. Like he was preparing himself for something. Or bracing for nothing.

Then he pressed it.

The screen blinked off for a second, like it was holding its breath too. Then: a dial tone. Tinny. Thin. Far away, like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

Brrr. Brrr. Brrr. Brrr.

The sound filled the building, bouncing off the metal and concrete and crawling back to us warped. It made the room feel bigger. Emptier.

No answer.

Four rings. Then a click. Not her voice. Just the blank, mechanical voice of the robot lady.

“Please leave a message after the tone.”

He jabbed the red button with his thumb—quick, like the phone had insulted him. Then tried again.

Brrr. Brrr. Brrr. Brrr.

Same result. Same emptiness, same pause, same disembodied voice. It felt like throwing pebbles into a lake and never hearing them hit the water.

The silence after the call was worse than the ringing. Thicker. Heavier. It made my ears feel strange, like they needed to pop. Like when we drove up the mountain that time and Dad told us to yawn and chew gum.

I picked at a crack in the floor while Mack redialled for the third time. The concrete was rough and dry, the crack jagged like lightning frozen mid-strike. My fingernail caught on the edge, bending back a little too far. Pain zipped up my arm, sharp and small. I didn’t stop.

Still no answer.

The beep came, and this time Mack didn’t hang up. He brought the phone to his mouth. I watched his jaw move—tight and twitching, like the words didn’t want to come out.

“Grandma... it’s us,” he said. His voice was quieter than usual, soft in a way that made it feel breakable. “We’re at the place you told us to go. We don’t know what to do now. Can you ring us back?”

He hesitated.

Then added, barely louder than breath, “Please.”

The word floated out of him like a balloon you let go of without meaning to. It hung in the air, fragile and weightless. A birthday candle wish. A message in a bottle.

Then he ended the call.

We stared at the phone like it might ring immediately. Like we could will it to buzz. Like we could pull her voice out of the air if we just wanted it badly enough.

But it didn’t. And the silence that came next was colder than any breeze.

After a while, Mack set the phone down beside his leg and leaned back against the wall with a sigh that seemed to come from somewhere deep in his chest. Not the kind of sigh you make when you're tired from running or carrying something heavy, but the kind grown-ups do when they think you're not listening—quiet and full of thoughts too big to say out loud.

He rubbed his face with both hands, slow and rough, like he was trying to scrub away whatever he'd seen behind his eyelids. But his hands moved sluggishly, like even that small thing cost more energy than he had left. Like gravity had grown heavier just for him.

I stayed on the mattress, cross-legged, pulling little threads from Ribbons’ seams and twisting them into tight spirals. The stuffing came out in tufts—tiny, pale clouds that clung to my fingers like spiderweb. I knew I should stop. Mum had sewn her up last time I did this, stitching her belly closed with pink thread that didn’t match. But I couldn’t help it. My fingers needed something to do. Something to keep them from shaking.

“Are we gonna call Mum?” I asked, trying to sound casual, like it was just a question and not the question. The one that had been sitting inside me all morning like a rock I didn’t know how to move.

“Not yet,” Mack said, not looking at me.

“Why not?”

“She’ll panic.”

“So?” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to. But I didn’t take it back.

He sighed again—longer this time, and lower. It made his shoulders drop a little, like something inside him had let go.

“Grandma’ll call back. I reckon she just doesn’t have signal out here. You saw how she drove—she was going so fast the car kept making that whining noise, remember? Like it wanted to stop but she wouldn’t let it. She probably didn’t even stop until she hit the highway.”

He paused, then added, “Maybe she thinks we’re fine.”

“But we’re not,” I whispered. The words slipped out without permission. They were small, but they landed hard.

Mack didn’t reply. He didn’t need to. His silence stretched out like a blanket between us—heavy, scratchy, full of things we couldn’t say.

We waited.

The phone sat beside his leg, still and lifeless, its dark screen staring up at the ceiling like it didn’t care. I kept glancing at it, willing it to light up, to buzz, to bring Grandma’s voice into the room. Just a single word from her—‘Hello?’—and everything would feel a little more real again.

But nothing came.

Only the groan of metal warming in the sun, the fluttering of dust in the rafters, and the quiet crackling sound that old silence makes when it stretches too long.

The dust had settled in the high beams now. I could see it suspended in the still air, caught in golden light like insects in amber. It barely moved, just hung there, as if the air was waiting too. As if the whole world was holding its breath, watching us from behind the rusted walls.

My stomach had stopped making noise. That was worse somehow. It had given up, folded in on itself like a crumpled bit of paper. The emptiness spread through my arms and legs, into my chest, like cold water slowly filling a bath. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be a ghost. Not dead, exactly. Just… not here.

“Why did she bring us here?” I asked, and it came from that hollow place. The place where questions curl up and wait for answers that never come.

Mack looked up. His eyes followed the beams across the ceiling, tracing the rust lines like they were a map he might be able to read if he stared long enough. Then he looked back at me, and I saw something different in his face. Not scared, exactly—but older. Thinner. Like he was made from see-through paper.

He didn’t shrug. He just let his head tilt sideways for a moment, like it had gotten too heavy to hold straight.

“I don’t think she meant this place, not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well…” He scratched behind his ear, just like Dad used to do when he was trying to remember something from a long time ago. “Dad used to talk about this area, remember? Said our family owned bits of land out here. Way back. Before the mines closed and people moved away.”

I tried to picture it. Fields maybe. Or trees. Something softer than this.

“Like treasure?” I asked, and for a moment something warm flickered in my chest. The tiniest spark. The kind that lights up when stories start with Once upon a time.

Mack smiled. A small one, just a corner of his mouth lifting, but it was real. The first one since… everything.

“Not treasure. Just land. Dad said his grandad worked out here. There was a cottage or something. A little house with a tin roof and a water tank. He showed me photos once. Said that’s where our great-grandad lived when he first came to Australia.”

I looked around us. Rusted walls. Broken floor. Faded posters flapping in the breeze like they were whispering to each other when we weren’t listening.

“This isn’t a cottage,” I said.

“No. It’s not. But maybe Grandma thought that’s where we’d end up. Maybe she just remembered the road. Thought we’d find the old place.”

I looked around again, really looked. At the way rust bloomed like dark flowers on the walls. At the sunlight slicing in through the gaps. At the shadows that crouched in the corners, still there even though the sun was high.

“This place is bad,” I said, barely above a whisper.

“Yeah.”

“We could go look,” I said. The words came out before I really thought about them. “For the other one. The cottage.”

Mack didn’t say anything right away. He just sat there, fingers tapping a slow rhythm on his knee. Like he was keeping time with something only he could hear.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “We could.”

But neither of us moved.

The idea of leaving—of stepping back out into that wide, dry nothing—made something twist in my stomach. Not hunger. Something deeper. A fear that felt old. Heavy. Like roots wrapped around my ankles, keeping me where I was.

Out there, anything could happen. The wind could change. The man might come back. The world might crack open again, just like it did last night.

And I think Mack felt it too. That same heaviness. That same waiting.

So we stayed.