Laughing Material

"Nothing teaches you the cost of sincerity quite like learning it was someone else's entertainment."

"I'll hold the bag open for you," Karen said, her voice breaking the comfortable silence that had settled. She took the black garbage bag from my hands, her fingers brushing mine in the exchange—a momentary contact that sent unexpected warmth through skin chilled by the evening air.

She stretched the bag open with the ease of someone who'd dealt with countless post-dinner camping cleanups in her life, the plastic crinkling loudly against the quiet of the settling camp.

As I gathered the discarded food containers—remnants of butter chicken and tikka masala clinging to their edges—my mind wandered backward through the past few years to a time when conversations with Karen had been different. More frequent. More open.

"You remember the dreams I told you about?" The question emerged barely above a whisper, as though speaking too loudly might shatter something fragile I hadn't realised I was protecting.

"How could I forget?" She held the bag steady, her laughter not quite reaching her eyes. "Jane and I used to make fun of you for them."

The words landed like a fist to the solar plexus.

I felt something contract in my chest—a tightness that was part embarrassment, part betrayal, part the particular sting of discovering that things you'd held precious had been someone else's entertainment. Those dreams had felt important. Prophetic, even. I'd shared them with Karen and Jane because I'd trusted them to understand, to see what I saw in those vivid nighttime journeys through impossible landscapes.

Instead, they'd been laughing material.

"You did?" My voice cracked slightly, the composure I wore like armour showing its seams. I dropped the last container into the bag, the hollow thud seeming to echo longer than physics should allow. I felt exposed in a way I hadn't anticipated—layers carefully constructed over years suddenly peeled back by a casual admission.

"Well," Karen began, her tone shifting as though she'd sensed the damage her words had inflicted, "you were always so serious about them. How could we not find it amusing?"

The justification did nothing to soothe the wound. If anything, it deepened it. My seriousness about the dreams—my conviction that they meant something—had been exactly what made them mockable. The memories I'd treasured, those vivid visions that had felt like glimpses of something greater, reduced to sources of amusement shared between friends who'd thought me too earnest, too intense, too Luke about things that mattered only to me.

"I guess I shouldn't really be surprised." The words escaped before wisdom could intervene—a quiet surrender to a truth I'd been avoiding. Perhaps my deepest thoughts and fears had always been just material for others' entertainment. Perhaps I'd been performing sincerity to an audience that found it funny.

I tied the top of the bag with slow, deliberate movements, as though through this simple act of completion I might somehow reassemble the fragments of dignity currently scattered around my feet.

Standing there, the weight of the garbage bag in my hands mirroring something heavier in my chest, I felt the particular loneliness of being misunderstood by people who should have known better. Karen and Jane had been friends—close friends, the kind you trusted with vulnerable admissions. But friendship, apparently, hadn't precluded mockery conducted safely out of earshot.

The laughter and connection of the past seemed suddenly distant, re-contextualised by this new understanding of what had been happening when I wasn't in the room.

"Oh, have you heard the news?" Karen's voice sliced through my brooding, carrying a curiosity-laden excitement that demanded attention.

I blinked, recalibrating. "What news?"

"Follow me," she said, releasing her end of the garbage bag as though it had become suddenly irrelevant. She turned and gestured for me to follow, her earlier revelation apparently already forgotten—or perhaps she simply hadn't noticed its impact. Either possibility was its own kind of hurt.

I set the bag down and followed, my longer stride required to match her quickening pace.

The sun was sinking toward the horizon, casting the kind of long shadows that made everything look both more dramatic and more uncertain. Clivilius's mountains stood in the distance like ancient sentinels, their peaks brushing against a twilight sky painted in colours that weren't quite Earth's palette—too much amber, too little pink, the particular shade of alien evening I was slowly learning to recognise.

"We didn't know what else to do with them, so we've just left them there for now," Karen said over her shoulder, her pace increasing as though she was racing the encroaching darkness.

"Left what where?" My curiosity had shifted from wounded introspection to genuine puzzlement. Karen's words carried the particular weight of revelation, but revealed nothing useful.

"The coriander plants," she finally offered.

I nearly stumbled. Coriander plants? My mind raced through inventories of what I'd transported through the Portal, searching for any instance where herbs had featured. I'm pretty sure I haven't brought any through, I thought, the pieces refusing to assemble into anything coherent.

"Huh?" The sound escaped involuntarily, confusion given voice.

Karen stopped abruptly on the far side of a newly pitched tent—one of the additions to our growing camp that I hadn't closely inspected yet. Her sudden halt nearly sent me colliding into her back.

"Coriander plants," she repeated, pointing at something near the tent's canvas wall.

I followed her gesture and found myself staring at a cluster of small, unassuming seedlings. Their delicate green leaves trembled slightly in the evening breeze, impossibly present in soil that had never known Earth vegetation.

"How—" I began, but my voice faltered, trailing into confused silence.

Karen reached into her pocket with the deliberate air of someone about to perform a magic trick. Her hand emerged holding a small ziplock bag, and from it she extracted a single coriander seed—tiny, unremarkable, the sort of thing you'd barely notice if it fell on your kitchen floor.

With a grace that spoke of recent experience, she pressed the seed into the soil beside the other seedlings, her fingers firm against the earth.

What happened next defied everything I understood about the natural world.

Within two minutes—I counted, I couldn't not count—the seed cracked open as though responding to some silent command I couldn't hear. Tiny roots emerged, questing downward into the welcoming soil with an urgency that looked almost hungry. A stem pushed upward, breaking the surface, and bright green leaves unfurled from it with a vigour that mocked every seed I'd ever watched fail to germinate in half-hearted gardening attempts on Earth.

The coriander grew before my eyes. Actually, visibly grew, like watching time-lapse photography happening in real time.

"Impressive," I managed, the word entirely inadequate for what I'd just witnessed. My mind was throwing up images from my dreams—those grand landscapes where flora burst from barren ground, where growth happened with impossible speed, where the very concept of seasons seemed compressed into moments.

The dreams weren't just dreams, some part of me whispered. They were showing you this.

But the wonder churning through me was accompanied by something darker—an unease that coiled beneath the amazement. Growth this rapid wasn't natural. It was miraculous, certainly, but miracles came with fine print that nobody bothered to read until the consequences arrived. What forces were we dealing with here? What did this mean for the people I'd brought to a world where seeds became plants in minutes rather than weeks?

"But there's a big problem," Karen's voice cut through my spiralling thoughts, her tone laden with the seriousness of someone about to deliver unwelcome news.

I crouched beside the fledgling plants, my fingers brushing across the tender leaves. They felt real—properly, ordinarily real. Delicate and green and alive. "What's that?"

"There's too much dust! We need to find a way to clear it."

I looked up at her, feeling a furrow carve itself across my forehead. The dust. Of course. The ubiquitous rust-coloured powder that coated everything, that Paul had been complaining about for days, that seemed to be Clivilius's most plentiful natural resource. If plants were going to grow—and apparently they were going to grow spectacularly—they'd need actual soil, not several feet of alien dust.

I don't have time to solve every problem, I thought, frustration flickering through me. My eyes rolled before I could stop them, betraying the internal struggle to remain composed under the mounting weight of everyone's expectations.

"Any ideas?" I asked, aiming for practicality.

"I've tried moving some with a shovel, but in most places that I've checked, it's at least a few feet deep." Karen's report painted a grim picture. Manual labour would be like trying to empty an ocean with a teacup.

"Hmm." My mind was already racing through possibilities, logistics clicking together like puzzle pieces. The dust wasn't merely an inconvenience—it was a barrier to everything this settlement might become. Agriculture. Sustainability. The difference between a temporary camp and an actual civilisation.

"I think a bit of heavy machinery would be best," Karen suggested, and the clarity of the solution cut through my churning thoughts like a blade.

Perfect. Heavy machinery. Tractors, perhaps. Earthmovers. Equipment designed to shift earth on a scale that human muscles couldn't match. The logistics would be complicated—transporting machinery through Portals, finding equipment I could access without raising questions, managing the fuel situation—but it was feasible. Actually feasible.

"Leave it with me. I'll sort it," I declared, determination surging through the words. The prospect of solving this problem, of providing something tangible and transformative, lifted my spirits in ways the evening's earlier hurt had dampened.

"And you know, I was thinking, now that we can grow plants quicker, that we can put a few fences up over there by the river for my ducks. They'd absolutely love it down there with a few reeds and a little duck house." Karen's voice had shifted into enthusiasm, painting an idyllic vision of farm life transplanted to alien soil.

I nodded silently, feeling the weight of her expectations settle across my shoulders like a yoke being fitted. My eyes widened slightly as I envisioned the scope of what she was describing—fences, duck houses, reeds, an entire pastoral setup requiring materials and time and attention I wasn't sure I had to spare.

"And my chickens will need to be relocated," Karen continued, her stream of consciousness flowing unchecked. "Don't forget their henhouse."

Each new idea piled atop the last, a tower of demands growing taller with every sentence. Ducks. Chickens. Henhouses. Fences. Heavy machinery. Dust removal. The list was expanding faster than my capacity to process it.

"Karen, slow down," I interjected, my voice a deliberate calm against her rising tide of plans. My gaze dropped to the small coriander seedlings, their rapid growth now feeling less like miracle and more like harbinger. If plants grew this fast, expectations would grow faster.

"Luke, I'm serious. You need to look after my animals until I am ready for you to bring them all here, to me." Her tone had shifted from enthusiasm to insistence, brooking no argument. Her eyes found mine with an intensity that felt almost physical.

I met her gaze unwillingly, finding determination there that I knew couldn't be easily redirected. Karen had lost everything in an instant—her home, her cottage, her life—when she'd touched a Portal she hadn't understood. Her animals were the thread connecting her to who she'd been before. Of course they mattered. Of course she'd fight for them.

"All of them. I don't want any of them suffering or dying before then," she added, her concern for her creatures clear and unwavering beneath the demands.

A knot formed in my stomach, tightening with each passing second. The scope of my responsibilities was expanding like the coriander seedlings—impossibly fast, in all directions at once. How the hell am I going to find time to care for her farm animals? The question echoed through my mind, a drumbeat of anxiety beneath my external composure.

Karen's stare bore into me with heat that seemed almost tangible, and for a moment I could have sworn the temperature around us had risen by several degrees.

"I promise," I heard myself say.

The words emerged almost against my will, a commitment that bypassed rational assessment and leapt straight from some part of me that couldn't bear to let Karen down—not after bringing her here, not after ripping her from her life, not after learning that she and Jane had spent years laughing at my dreams behind my back.

Perhaps the promise was penance. Perhaps it was simply the path of least resistance under the weight of her expectations. Either way, it hung in the air between us now—a solemn vow I'd have to find some way to honour.

The task ahead loomed daunting, a complex puzzle of time and resources and competing priorities. My mind was already racing through plans and contingencies, even as some part of me wondered how I'd possibly manage to keep this promise whilst juggling every other demand the settlement placed on me.

The coriander seedlings swayed gently in the evening breeze, innocent and green and impossibly vibrant.

In a world where plants grew from seed to sprout in minutes, perhaps promises could be kept just as quickly.

Or perhaps they'd simply collapse under their own weight, like everything else that grew too fast.