4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
Six Cupboards and a Grocery List
Glenda presses a list into Luke's hands—antibiotics, syringes, suture kits, things he can barely pronounce. The paper feels heavier than it should. Back in Hobart, her examination room waits: six cupboards, a locked door, and a practice full of people who have no idea their doctor just vanished into another dimension. Luke calls it selective evolution. Taking what you need. Leaving what you can't carry. Hoping the math works out.
Jamie is alive. Barely. The fever still burns, the wound still seeps, and Glenda has made it clear: without proper supplies, she's working blind. The list she hands Luke isn't a request—it's a lifeline written in ink, every item a thread that might keep Jamie tethered to the living.
Luke steps back through the Portal into Glenda's examination room. The practice hums with ordinary business beyond the closed door—phones ringing, patients waiting, staff moving through corridors with no idea that the woman whose name is on the door has already fled to another world.
Six cupboards. That's all he has to work with. Six cupboards, a desk drawer, and whatever he can carry in bags he finds crumpled at the bottom of a filing cabinet. The asterisked items—the critical supplies from the shared store—will have to wait. For now, he takes what's here.
As he works, a phrase surfaces: selective evolution. Not random survival, but deliberate shaping. Taking what matters, discarding what doesn't. It's a philosophy born of necessity, and Luke clings to it like a man building a raft from driftwood whilst the tide rises around him.
