Scrolling for Straw

"Survival looks glamorous in theory—until you’re bargaining with yourself over goat feed on Gumtree."

I’d washed back up on Paul’s couch, as though gravity itself had resigned me to the role of reluctant lodger. The springs gave a tired little groan under my weight, the sort of complaint you’d expect from a pensioner’s knees, while my boots rested squarely on the coffee table like I owned the place. The posture was deliberate — belligerently casual, a temporary squatter staking her claim.

The air in the living room still carried that tell-tale tang of absence: stale, unmoving, a little sour where bins hadn’t been emptied. The echoes of Claire’s perfume, of children’s laughter tangled in the walls, had long since leached away, leaving only dust and silence.

But something had shifted. Now that I’d taken so many of their things through the Portal—clothes, photographs, favourite mugs, the teddy bear with one eye—I no longer felt like I was trespassing through someone else’s paused life. I wasn’t an intruder anymore. The sharp edges of guilt had dulled into something quieter. This wasn’t a home now—it was a shell, and I was simply occupying it.

The couch held a residual warmth, and the Wi-Fi connected without protest — which, by my standards, practically qualified it as luxury accommodation.

Balanced precariously on my knee, my phone glowed with the familiar blue-and-white Gumtree screen. A digital bazaar of broken promises. I’d always thought Gumtree was where optimism went to die, cheerful thumbnails disguising the ugly truth of lumpy sofas and refrigerators that smelled like something had crawled in, perished, and staged a protest.

Regional Gumtree, though? That was another beast entirely. These listings weren’t just second-hand sales pitches — they were cryptic dispatches from another civilisation, equal parts desperate poetry and veiled threat.

“Hay bales for sale — good condition, no low-ballers.”
“Mixed straw, cash only, don’t muck me around.”
“Lucerne, top cut, pick-up only, serious buyers.”

Each line carried the rhythm of a pub argument, terse and suspicious, like the sellers were already braced for betrayal. And the photographs — if you could call them that — were works of menace in their own right. Shadowy sheds caught in the half-light. Farm dogs lurking at the edges, eyes reflecting the flash. Grim close-ups of hay that resembled police evidence: Exhibit A, straw in suspicious condition.

I scrolled slowly, chin resting in my palm, trying to picture Sophie lifting the phone to her ear, breezing through the absurdity. “Hello, yes, I’m a completely normal woman with no ulterior motives whatsoever. How much for your straw? And no, of course I won’t be smuggling it through a cosmic doorway, why on earth would you even suggest that?”

Yeah. No. Not happening.

Of course, it wasn’t as though I’d suddenly developed a burning personal passion for animal husbandry, or a scholarly interest in the finer distinctions between hay and straw. No — this particular detour into rural larceny was courtesy of Vincent.

Vincent the goat.

Vincent the goat whom I had — against every ounce of good sense I still pretended to possess — “rescued” from that pitiful scrap of a man in Yunta yesterday. Him, and a half-mangled collection of chickens that looked one cough away from becoming stock for a pot of soup. I hadn’t planned on livestock. Not in Clivilius. Not anywhere. But there they were now: bleating, clucking, stubbornly alive. And now, apparently, mine. My responsibility. My headache.

Thanks Paul.

Which is how I’d ended up sprawled on Paul’s couch, doomscrolling Gumtree for bales of hay like I’d been born knowing what to do with them. Spoiler: I hadn’t. Vincent, for his part, was unfussy to the point of menace — my sleeve, my shoelace, a corner of my jacket, probably half the dust of Clivilius if he was given him half a chance. The chickens, however, were pickier. Their sharp little eyes had already appraised my offerings with disdain, and I had the distinct impression that “hope and good intentions” wasn’t going to cut it as feed.

Which left me with a problem. Hay. Straw. Chook feed. Something vaguely farm-like to keep them alive long enough to justify hauling them through a Portal instead of leaving them to their miserable fate.

The sensible option — ringing up sellers, negotiating, maybe even handing over cash like a respectable adult — was instantly dismissed. Sophie might bluff her way through police stations and coffee invitations, but “chatty small-town animal feed buyer” was a bridge too far.

So I defaulted to the lazier, more obviously criminal approach: mapping addresses.

And the thing about Gumtree sellers in Broken Hill? They weren’t subtle. Most had their full street details printed right there under the ad, like they’d personally drafted me an invitation. All I had to do was scroll, squint, and pick the right one. The most secluded. The least overlooked. The place where neighbours weren’t perched behind lace curtains ready to take notes for Gertrude’s gossip mill.

Find the right yard. Slip in. Help myself.

Easy. Well… easy enough, if I ignored the small matter of it being theft.

My finger hovered over the cracked glass of the phone as I pinched and dragged the map, streets dissolving into pale yellow nothing, then sharpening again into the ragged patchwork of farmland skirting Broken Hill. Dust tracks. Windbreaks. Square paddocks like someone had stamped order into a land that refused to obey.

One ad snagged my attention. A bloke out on the fringe, his profile picture a pixelated blur that could have been a horse. Or a very hairy cow. Or a shag carpet with aspirations. The description read like a ransom note scribbled in biro: “Past the old tin shed, follow the red gate, bales stacked against side wall.”

Subtle. Very discreet. Practically begging a stranger to turn up under cover of night with a ute or, in my case, a key to another universe.

I tapped the listing closed and let the phone fall onto my thigh, leaning back into the sag of Paul’s couch. The springs complained faintly, a sound I’d grown used to in the last hour — the soundtrack of my so-called operations centre. Because this was where I seemed to end up now: hunched in someone else’s lounge room, perched uneasily between the absurd and the practical.

Ferrying jumpers and kids’ books through a Portal like they were humanitarian aid parcels. Slipping family photographs into my jacket as though sentiment could be smuggled across borders. And now? Planning a hay heist off Gumtree.

Sophie, at least, would’ve been proud.

The ridiculous part? It didn’t even crack the top three most illegal-feeling things I’d done this week. Which probably said more about me than I cared to admit.

My gaze drifted, unbidden, across the room. A single mug still balanced on the mantel, faint brown ring dried around its base. A toy car had lodged itself under the rug, one wheel poking out as though waiting for its driver to return. It was too easy to imagine the family here — laughter spilling, arguments simmering, the ordinary noise of a house still lived in. I shook the picture loose before it sharpened into something with teeth. Sentiment was a luxury I couldn’t afford. Not now.

I hauled the phone back up and reopened the ad. Still there. Still smugly promising “good condition hay, cash preferred.” Still sitting like bait, waiting for the first idiot desperate enough to take it.

“All right,” I muttered into the empty house, voice bouncing off walls that hadn’t heard conversation in days. “Hay it is.”

The words sounded absurd even to me. But then — absurd had become something of a guiding principle lately.