The Bin and the Burden

“I can cross worlds with a key of light, but I still can’t outmanoeuvre Glenorchy Council’s rubbish collection schedule.”

Not expecting that they would fit, but figuring it was worth a shot anyway, I hoisted the garbage bags over my shoulder.

Their plastic stretched and crackled in protest, awkward loads that shifted with each step as I trudged out the front door. The Clivilian dust still clung to my shoes, ochre smudges against the weathered concrete of the front path—evidence of my double life, if anyone had cared to look closely enough to notice.

The wheelie bins sat unassumingly beneath the kitchen window, sentinels of suburbia basking in the indifferent light of the winter sun. They were ordinary to the point of insult: green hulks with peeling numbers and faint scuffs from years of rough handling. Yet here they were, guardians of the system I was still tethered to, as immovable in their schedule as the turning of planets.

I had crossed into another dimension that morning. I had watched my partner and my brother come to terms with their permanent exile from Earth. I had packed suitcases and ferried supplies and navigated emotional minefields that would have shattered lesser men.

And now I was wrestling with rubbish bins.

"At least one of them should fit," I murmured to myself, a flimsy blend of hope and resignation pushing me on.

I heaved the smaller of the two bags onto the mound inside, pressing down with the stubbornness of a man trying to solve an equation by brute force. My weight bore into it, the plastic groaning, the contents squishing reluctantly into shape. Something in there squelched in a way that suggested I didn't want to know what it was.

For a moment, it seemed I had won.

Then the lid rebelled, refusing to close completely, held ajar by the obstinacy of modern waste. Still, the bag was in—a partial triumph, the sort of hollow victory life hands out just to keep you moving. The lid jutted up at an angle, a stubborn salute to my incompetence, but at least the bag wasn't visible from the street. Small mercies.

I stepped back, releasing a sigh that seemed to carry the frustration of more than this single act. It was absurd how such small failures could sting more than cosmic dilemmas. I could navigate the politics of keeping Jamie from murdering me, but I couldn't navigate a wheelie bin.

"Crap."

The word slipped out before I could censor it.

The dawning realisation struck like farce—the collection was still a week away. A week! The ridiculousness of it all left me staring at the bin as if it had personally insulted me.

Here I was, straddling dimensions, carrying suitcases across realities, orchestrating survival in an alien world—yet still a prisoner to Glenorchy Council's waste collection schedule. There was probably a metaphor in there somewhere, something about the inescapability of mundane obligations, but I was too irritated to appreciate it.

The irony was almost comedic.

Perhaps we really would have to leave the rubbish in Clivilius, hidden away from the judgement of neighbours who would tut at overflowing bins. The thought was at once disappointing and faintly amusing—imagine pioneering a new world, only to turn it into a cosmic tip. The first mark humanity would leave on that pristine landscape: garbage bags full of plastic packaging and discarded food scraps.

Here lies the great Clivilian civilisation, I imagined future archaeologists writing. They came, they built, they left their rubbish everywhere.

Some legacy.

With reluctance heavier than the bag itself, I shouldered the second, bulkier one back inside.

Its weight dragged at my arm as though resenting the failure. Hauling it through the hallway, I pushed open the back bedroom door with a hip and tossed the sack into the far corner. It landed with a graceless thump, slumping into shadow like an unwelcome lodger.

"It's not ideal, but it will do for now," I conceded silently.

The words rang hollow in the empty room, the air already faintly sour with its burden. Pulling the door closed, I felt the gesture seal more than a room—I was locking away proof of how little control I really had. For all my plans, for all my careful calculations, I couldn't even manage household waste disposal. The universe, it seemed, had a fondness for deflating grandiose notions with petty practicalities.

Before embarking on my return to Clivilius, I let my gaze sweep the house, searching for anything overlooked—anything that might shift from trivial to vital in the crossing of worlds.

My hands found their way to a stack of old textbooks, their spines creased, pages annotated with the scrawl of my younger self. Fragments of days when knowledge had seemed like the purest pursuit, when understanding the world had felt like enough. I lifted them, feeling the dust tickle my nose, and wondered how useful they would really be.

Part of me knew it was impulse—hoarding the ghosts of who I had been. The boy who had devoured books like oxygen, who had believed that answers lived between covers if only you read enough of them. That boy felt very far away now, separated not just by years but by everything that had happened since.

But another part whispered of logic: words and diagrams could yet become blueprints for survival, for innovation in a place where we had nothing else to fall back on.

Knowledge was never wasted. That much, at least, the boy I had been had gotten right.

The candles came next.

They were scattered throughout the house, half-forgotten sentinels of light tucked into corners and drawers. Some squat, some elegant, each with wax melted down in irregular tiers from evenings I barely remembered. A vanilla one from the bathroom, still fragrant. A burgundy pillar that had sat on the mantelpiece for years, more decorative than functional. A cluster of tea lights in a dusty box beneath the bathroom sink.

I gathered them quickly, smiling dryly at the thought that while others might bring technology or tools, I was arming myself with flames on sticks. Yet here, stripped of electricity and certainty, such primitive light could feel like civilisation itself. Fire had been the first gift humanity had claimed from the universe—the thing that separated us from the animals, that allowed us to cook and see and warm ourselves through the long dark nights.

In Clivilius, where the darkness was absolute and smothering, these modest candles might mean the difference between despair and hope.

The fire lighter slid into my pocket last, a modern contrivance to match the old ways.

It was light, efficient, and reassuringly practical. It also satisfied the strategist in me: fire was warmth, protection, the possibility of control over a landscape that still felt too vast to tame. One small click, and I could summon flame. One small click, and I could push back the dark.

Each item, humble on its own, became something else entirely once placed together.

A curious arsenal. A totemic collection that balanced impulse with foresight. In the frame of our colonisation mission, they were no longer mundane household clutter but small beacons, symbols of human resilience. They spoke of the stubbornness to make do, to bend the ordinary into weapons against the unknown.

I arranged them at my feet for a moment, just looking at them, a dry smile twitching at my lips.

The absurdity of it wasn't lost on me. Candles, textbooks, a lighter—treasures plucked from suburbia to pierce the veil of an alien world. If anyone had walked in on me then, they might have mistaken me for a man preparing for a long blackout rather than a frontier.

But I alone knew the duality—what seemed ridiculous in one light became vital in another.

And perhaps that was the lesson lurking beneath all of this, beneath the garbage bags and the council schedules and the mundane frustrations of ordinary life. Nothing was ever just one thing. A candle was a candle until the darkness fell, and then it was survival. A textbook was a textbook until knowledge became scarce, and then it was treasure. A man was a man until circumstances demanded otherwise, and then...

Well. Then he became whatever he needed to become.

I gathered my mismatched supplies and headed for the study, for the Portal, for the next crossing into the unknown.