Sneezes and Standoffs

"Compassion looks reckless to the practical—but tell that to a goat with a second chance and a man choking on feathers."

The air between us practically crackled, a taut line stretched between Paul’s incredulous stance and my rapidly fraying patience. He stood rooted to the spot, hands braced on his hips in the universal posture of What fresh hell is this? His brow was knitted, his jaw tight, and his lips had folded into a pout so steeped in disbelief it could have curdled milk.

"Beatrix?" His voice had that unmistakable rising edge—part frustration, part barely-contained incredulity—that told me I was about to be treated to one of Paul’s patented explanations are futile interrogations.

"What?" The word slipped out sharper than I’d intended, my chest tightening as if bracing for impact. I could already feel the weight of his scrutiny pressing down, as though my very existence required a footnote.

"Why is there a goat in the back of the car?" He threw an arm toward the vehicle in a grand, sweeping motion, palm splayed as if to underline the fact that this was not, in fact, a normal occurrence.

"Oh." It was all I could muster at first, my brain scrambling to arrange words into something approaching plausible. I sidestepped quickly to the car, my hand finding the handle with muscle memory born of urgency. The latch gave way with a soft click, and the door swung open to reveal Vincent—now reclining in the hay like some small-town aristocrat, blissfully indifferent to the rising storm outside.

"This is Vincent," I announced, adopting the tone of someone introducing a dinner guest rather than a fugitive goat. As though his name alone might lend him legitimacy in Paul’s eyes.

I reached into the back, fingers closing around a handful of hay. The dry stalks rustled in my grip as I held them out like an offering, coaxing Vincent toward the daylight. His calm, unblinking gaze met mine, and for a heartbeat I thought he might ignore me entirely. Then, with the stately grace of one who knows he’s now centre stage, Vincent began to move.

Vincent emerged with a triumphant bleat, the sound ringing out with an almost smug satisfaction, as though he understood he had narrowly sidestepped doom itself. His hooves met the dusty ground with a solid thud-thud, sending faint clouds swirling around his legs. He took a moment to prance a little, head tossing in a show of new-found freedom, before discovering the straw I had laid out. Lowering himself to it with almost ceremonial care, he began chewing contentedly—blissfully unaware of the chaos trailing in his wake.

"What the hell am I going to do with a goat?" Paul’s voice cracked the air like a whip, each syllable heavy with disbelief. His eyes darted between Vincent, the hay, and me, as if trying to piece together the missing logic in this tableau.

I offered a helpless shrug, palms turned skyward in a gesture of your guess is as good as mine. The truth was, I hadn’t the faintest idea either.

"Are you trying to get us all killed?" The sharpness of his tone hit harder than I’d braced for, cutting through my thin veil of righteous conviction.

"I didn’t have a choice. Bill was going to kill him," I said quickly, the words spilling out before I could dress them in anything sturdier than sheer impulse. Even to my own ears, it sounded like flimsy justification—heartfelt, yes, but tactically useless.

"Who’s Bill?" Paul’s brow furrowed, deepening the crease between his eyes. His confusion was genuine, but there was a rising current of oh no, she didn’t lurking underneath.

"Vincent’s owner," I explained, matter-of-fact, as if that clarified everything rather than plunging us deeper into farce.

Paul’s eyes went wide, his jaw slackening as the chain of events clicked into place in his mind. "So, you decided to kidnap his goat instead!?"

I rolled my eyes skyward in a slow, deliberate motion, unwilling to dignify that framing with a full rebuttal. His words made it sound like I’d committed an act of calculated malice, rather than a last-minute rescue born of conscience.

"Look at him," I countered, my tone softening as I crouched to Vincent’s level. My fingers threaded gently through the coarse bristles along his head, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath. He leaned into my touch with a small, pleased huff, eyes half-lidded in contentment. "He’s so happy now." My voice carried both a plea and a quiet defiance, as if daring Paul to deny the evidence of simple joy staring back at us in the form of a rescued goat.

"I don't think he's going to be very happy when he gets eaten by a shadow panther," Paul retorted, his voice carrying that familiar cocktail of sarcasm and genuine concern. The words, meant to be a slap of reality, instead landed like a spark to dry tinder, igniting the irritation already simmering in my chest.

Annoyed at his inability—or unwillingness—to grasp the immediacy of the compassionate choice I’d made, I met his gaze head-on. My eyes narrowed, the weight of my frustration sharpening them to a point. "He can live in one of the motorhomes," I declared, as though unveiling a masterstroke of problem-solving brilliance. In my mind, it was a viable solution—practical, even—and I delivered it with a flicker of triumphant satisfaction.

"Beatrix!" Paul’s voice cracked across the space between us like a whip, a sharp rebuke that left no room for ambiguity. "We're not keeping Vincent in a motorhome. Those are for people." His tone was all steel and certainty, each word hammered into place like nails on the coffin of my plan. The line had been drawn, and it was very clear which side of it I was standing on.

But I had no intention of stepping back. Slowly, deliberately, I leaned in toward Vincent, lowering myself so my face was level with his. His breath was warm, tinged faintly with the scent of straw, and in that moment his wide, trusting eyes seemed to mirror my own resolve. I pressed a quick kiss to the top of his head, feeling the wiry bristles prick against my lips.

"Then Vincent's death is on you," I countered, the words heavy with accusation, my voice a low, dangerous calm. My glare locked onto Paul’s, daring him to look away, to sidestep the moral weight I’d just placed squarely on his shoulders.

For a moment, the air between us seemed to hold its breath, a silent standoff where neither of us moved. Then Paul exhaled in a long, drawn-out sigh, his shoulders sagging as his hands lifted in the universal gesture of surrender.

"Fine. I'll find Vincent a safe home." The words came grudgingly, but they were enough. In that reluctant concession, I caught the flicker of something softer—the humanity beneath his bluster—stirred, however briefly, by the sight of an old goat chewing straw in the dusty light.

With the knot of tension in my chest finally loosening—Vincent’s future no longer dangling by the thinnest of threads—I allowed myself a breath, then let my focus drift to the next item on my clandestine rescue itinerary.

"Time for accident number two," I muttered under my breath, the words curling with mischief. A smirk tugged at the corners of my lips as I approached the boot, anticipation fizzing in my veins. The illicit thrill of unveiling this second surprise was almost intoxicating, a guilty little spark that made me feel like a child caught red-handed yet wholly unapologetic.

"Beatrix, what are you...?" Paul’s voice materialised at my shoulder, the question hanging half-formed before dissolving into the warm air. His abrupt pause was followed by silence, the kind of silence that carried weight—heavy with the unspoken disbelief now radiating from him. I didn’t need to look up to know his expression; I could feel it in the way his sigh spilled into the space between us, long and drawn out, laden with exasperation.

"Well, I couldn't just leave them behind," I said, my tone a careful cocktail of defence and justification as I gestured toward the boot. There, the hens continued their gentle rummaging through the hay, utterly unfazed by their relocation, their soft clucks punctuating the stillness like an oddly domestic soundtrack to our moral tug-of-war. They were blissfully unaware that their presence here was an act of quiet rebellion against the natural order their former owner inevitably intended for them.

"You're in Yunta, aren't you?" Paul’s question sliced through the moment, his voice carrying that resigned edge of someone connecting dots they’d rather not see. It wasn’t so much a question as the inevitable conclusion of an equation I hadn’t realised he’d been solving.

"Yes," I admitted, because there was no point in dancing around it.

"I thought so," he mused, his eyes lingering on the hens with a look that hovered somewhere between curiosity and surrender. "Were they on the side of the road?" His head tilted slightly, the casual delivery doing little to mask the undercurrent of suspicion threading through the inquiry.

"Um... basically," I replied, letting the word stretch into an ambiguous space between truth and omission. It wasn’t a lie, exactly—it was simply an edited version of events, smoothed over for everyone’s comfort, especially mine. The less Paul knew about the fine details of how these hens had come to be nestled in the boot of my car, the better. Good intentions, I reminded myself, were the compass here, even if the path they guided me down involved the occasional detour through questionable legality.

Paul’s movements were unhurried, almost tender, as he leaned into the boot and coaxed one of the hens into his hands. His grip was firm enough to steady her, but gentle enough that she hardly protested. Watching him, I felt the tension in my shoulders ease just a fraction.

"I'm not surprised," he said, the faintest thread of amusement weaving through his tone as he crouched to place the chook on the ground. She blinked at the world, head bobbing as if sizing up the strange new terrain before taking a tentative step forward. “There are always chickens running around that town when I pass through,” he added, and the casual nature of his observation drew from me a small, nervous laugh.

Well… I guess they were running around the town, I thought, my mind supplying the unspoken correction like an aftertaste I didn’t quite want to examine too closely.

"You still need the car to get to Broken Hill, don't you?" Paul’s voice pulled me from my inner asides, just as he extracted a second hen. She flapped once, twice—wings whirring in a quick, panicked ballet—before folding them neatly against her sides, a stray feather spiralling away on the breeze. It drifted down to the dust at our feet, a soft punctuation mark to her surrender.

"Yeah," I said, as I stepped forward to help him with the others. One by one, they were lifted from the hay-lined boot into the open air, their claws finding purchase on the dust-covered earth, each adjusting in their own awkward, uncertain way. I felt the tug of a strange responsibility toward them—these birds whose lives I had so abruptly rerouted, their futures now tethered, however briefly, to my choices.

The boot closed with a metallic slam, the sound ringing sharp in the stillness. The hay inside returned to shadow, stripped of its temporary tenants, the scent of straw and feathers still lingering like an afterimage in the air.

"Can you bring the car back once you've found Charlie?" Paul asked, his tone shifting into something brisk, grounded. It was a reminder—subtle but unmistakable—that beyond this impulsive rescue mission, the larger game was still in motion.

As I watched Paul’s careful handling of the single brown feather—no more than a harmless byproduct of my latest escapade—my curiosity tipped into something close to amusement. In his hands, it seemed to gain a kind of ceremonial importance, as though he were weighing its meaning in the grand tapestry of our day. Then, with an air of casual experimentation, he brought it to his nose.

I raised an eyebrow, halfway between bemusement and the dawning suspicion that this was about to go spectacularly wrong. Sure enough, the feather’s lightness betrayed him; it quivered on the breath he drew in and then, with alarming swiftness, nearly disappeared up his nostril. What followed was pure slapstick—a rapid-fire barrage of sneezes that bent him double and sent shockwaves through our little makeshift farmyard.

The chickens, already jittery from their change in fortune, erupted into panicked motion, wings thrashing and claws scrabbling against the dirt. Even Vincent, seemingly unflappable in his goatish way, let out a sharp, indignant bleat and stamped once as if registering a formal complaint. Dust and feathers rose in the air like a miniature storm, the chaos oddly infectious.

A laugh bubbled up from my chest before I could stop it, breaking through the lingering edge of our earlier tension. For a moment, it felt like the scene had been plucked straight from some absurd countryside farce—only we were living it.

"I'll bring the car back," I promised, my voice warm with lingering amusement, before slipping into the driver’s seat. The door closed with a soft thunk, sealing me in with the faint scent of hay and the hum of the engine—my small, enclosed sanctuary from the pandemonium outside.

The engine’s steady hum rose beneath me, a mechanical heartbeat that soothed even as it urged me forward and through the portal.

With a smooth turn, I rejoined the Barrier Highway, its long, unbroken stretch unfolding like a lifeline through the empty expanse. Out here, the horizon seemed to exist only to remind you how far you still had to go.

"Broken Hill, one hundred and ninety-nine," the road sign announced in bold, unwavering letters. It wasn’t just information—it was a challenge. My foot pressed down on the accelerator, the gentle increase in speed an unspoken promise to myself: keep going.

Almost without thinking, my hand found the stereo controls, the smooth dial cool beneath my fingertips. A twist, a click, and the car filled with the familiar tones of Taylor Swift—bright, confident, unapologetic. The music poured into the quiet space, filling it with a kind of warmth that had nothing to do with the heater. Each note, each lyric, felt like an anchor to a version of myself untouched by goats, chickens, or shadow panthers—a reminder that somewhere within the madness of today, I still owned this small sanctuary of normality.