The Manifest Weight

“You never know how heavy paper is until it comes with blood on it—and a future you didn’t choose.”

Curiosity propelled me, quiet but insistent, like the pull of a half-heard name in a crowd. I drifted around the front of the truck. As I reached the passenger side, the door betrayed me—announcing my presence with a prolonged, petulant squeak that echoed far louder than necessary.

Luke’s head jerked up like a startled deer, his hand half-buried in a pile of crumpled receipts and faded takeaway napkins. His eyes widened, clearly not expecting company. He looked like someone who’d been caught rifling through a stranger’s bathroom cabinet—not guilty, exactly, but undeniably cornered.

"What are you looking for?" I asked, leaning against the edge of the cab, one arm braced against the doorframe. The metal was sun-warmed beneath my skin, sticky with that faint industrial tang of diesel and sweat. I peered in as Luke resumed his frantic excavation of the vehicle's interior, his focus sharpened to a narrow point.

"The delivery manifest," he said, his voice clipped, but not unkind. Determined, with a side order of barely-contained irritation.

That stopped me. The delivery manifest? My brow arched almost of its own accord. In the grand scheme of things—Portal keys, dead bodies, vanishing cushions—that seemed about as relevant as a shopping list at a crime scene.

Still, he clearly wanted it.

I watched him reach across to the glove compartment, his movements methodical, shoulders tense beneath the soft stretch of his T-shirt. It struck me that he was being careful in a way men usually weren’t unless they were either hiding something or terrified of damaging the illusion of control.

The compartment yawned open, reluctantly, revealing its grimy treasures: a scratched-up pair of sunglasses that had seen brighter days, a battered box of band-aids—half-empty, the corners of the plasters curled from age—and a trio of condoms, still sealed, looking smug.

“An eclectic emergency kit,” I murmured inwardly. Cuts, glare, and casual regret.

The band-aids suggested he expected to bleed. The condoms suggested he hoped not to do it alone.

"Shit," Luke muttered, barely audible, though the grit in his tone cut through the thickening silence.

I took that as my cue. “What for?” I asked, voice light, bordering on idle. But the tension in my jaw betrayed the weight behind the question.

He didn’t answer. Or maybe he didn’t hear me. Or maybe ignoring me was just easier. Luke’s hands kept moving, sifting through folded pages and wrinkled delivery slips with the haste of someone trying to outrun a clock only he could hear. Each paper met the same fate—opened, glanced at, dismissed. The rejections landed in a growing pile at his feet, fluttering like exhausted butterflies.

I stayed there, unmoving, watching him dismantle order in pursuit of something I didn’t yet understand. And all the while, that old, familiar itch unfurled in my chest—the one that warned me when something wasn't adding up.

And this? This was most definitely not adding up.

Compelled by equal parts suspicion and sheer bloody-mindedness, I crouched down and retrieved the papers Luke had so casually flung aside. They were still warm from his hands—a pointless observation, but somehow it made them feel more personal, like letters discarded in haste rather than documents of supposed importance.

I unfolded each one with care, my fingers moving deliberately, as if reverence might coax meaning from mediocrity. Courier receipts, weighbridge dockets, some old invoice annotated in scrawl that was halfway between medical shorthand and toddler scribble. Nothing stood out. Nothing whispered secrets or lit up in my mind like a clue on the cusp of revelation. Each paper might as well have come with a blank stare and a shrug.

Whatever revelation Luke was chasing, it clearly wasn’t printed on these.

I felt the disappointment settle low in my chest—flat, dull, mildly insulting. “Well?” I said at last, my tone sharp enough to slice through the tension that had thickened in the cab like steam on a winter windscreen. I didn’t bother to disguise the edge in my voice. The whole business of being kept in the dark was wearing thin, and I had little patience left for cryptic nonsense.

Luke didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he slammed the glovebox shut with a sharp, plastic snap that felt a little too final—like a punctuation mark he wanted me to read loud and clear.

I straightened as he turned to face me. His expression had that mix of charm and resolve I’d seen before—when he was about to suggest something ludicrous and dress it up as genius. His face was close, too close, and I caught the faint scent of eucalyptus and old leather clinging to his shirt. He smiled then—a curve of the lips that was meant to soothe but missed the mark.

"You and your sister are going on a road trip," he said, as if announcing a picnic.

I blinked. For a moment, all I could do was stare at him, willing the words to rearrange themselves into something less absurd. A road trip? Now?

I drew in a sharp breath—half gasp, half incredulous snort—and felt my jaw tighten. Somewhere in the background, reality shuffled its feet awkwardly, unsure whether to laugh or intervene.

My eyes flicked outside, where Gladys was currently bent over, inspecting a flax plant like it had insulted her hydrangeas. She was prodding the leaves with the cautious intensity of someone trying to determine whether the plant was sentient or just badly behaved.

A sigh slipped from me before I could help it—less exasperated than weary. The kind of sigh that belonged to long queues and small print.

"Please don't make me take Gladys," I said, turning back to Luke with a look that I hoped conveyed equal parts desperation and reason. “Please.”

It was a plea, yes—but not a weak one. More like a whispered protest issued by someone who could already see the chaos gathering on the horizon and wanted, just once, to be given a map.

But then Luke’s face shifted. The smirk evaporated, drawn back like a curtain to reveal something colder underneath. His jaw set—not tense, but deliberate—and he met my gaze with a steadiness that told me we’d crossed the threshold from mischief to consequence.

"But we need that manifest," he said, the words plain and weighted, as if he were announcing a death toll.

There it was. No space for debate. No wiggle room. Just the steel-plated edge of necessity, sharp and unapologetic.

Before I could respond, I felt something soft and warm press against my thigh. Gladys’s head, inexplicably, forcing its way between me and the open door like a bloody Labrador with boundary issues. Her voice, emerging from somewhere around my hipbone, carried the same blend of directness and dramatic timing that had haunted me since childhood.

"But why?"

The question startled me—not because it was unreasonable, but because she was suddenly there, pressed into the physical space like an unexpected guest at a wake.

My hands reacted on instinct, bracing gently against the crown of her head in a vain attempt to guide her backward. She responded by pushing forward with the resolve of someone who believed her presence was not only welcome, but essential. I sighed, the sound drawn out like I was exhaling an entire relationship dynamic.

Of course she wasn’t going to move. Gladys didn’t yield. She loitered.

I rolled my eyes so hard they may have briefly viewed the backs of my sockets, then let my arms drop in defeat. What was the point? She was in now. May as well let the scene unfold.

Luke, admirably unflustered, explained: "The company are going to report the driver and the truck missing. There's nothing we can do about that. But we can at least make it look like he went missing after he finished his deliveries. The police shouldn't have any reason to suspect us then."

There was a grim elegance to it—the kind of plan you didn’t want to admire but couldn’t help noticing had a certain... efficiency. It was damage control dressed in logistics, simple enough to be brilliant, chilling enough to feel real.

"Oh," Gladys murmured, drawing out the syllable like it had just bloomed in her mind. “I see. Good call.”

I watched Luke turn to me then, his expression steady, unreadable. Not asking for agreement—just looking for confirmation that I was still on the ride. Still tethered to the same doomed logic.

I shook my head. A small movement, almost imperceptible. No.

I didn’t say it aloud. I didn’t need to. The word clung to my lips like smoke, mouthed in silence but no less urgent. A final flicker of resistance, thrown like a match against inevitability.

Luke shrugged. That was all. Not rude. Not dismissive. Just... inevitable. The shrug of a man who had already done the maths and didn’t particularly care what the rest of us thought about the sum.

Then, without ceremony, he slipped out of the truck and vanished from view—leaving behind the silence, the cold, and the slowly settling weight of the plan we were now all complicit in.

And there I sat, half twisted in the cab, Gladys still wedged awkwardly against my thigh, the air thick with petrol fumes and shared guilt.

Brilliant.

"Ooh, condoms," Gladys chirped, her tone bright and entirely at odds with the emotional sinkhole we were currently navigating.

I turned just enough to see her holding one of the little foil packets between thumb and forefinger, tilting it in the sunlight as though it were some kind of novelty sweet. Her expression hovered somewhere between fascination and amusement, the way a child might inspect a beetle before deciding whether it was friend or foe.

Of course she’d picked it up.

I closed my eyes for half a second, letting the image burn away. The absurdity of it all—Portals, corpses, cover-ups, and now a roadside PSA on safe sex courtesy of my sister—settled on my chest like a weighted blanket stitched from existential dread.

I sighed. Not the breezy, dismissive kind, but the kind that drags itself out from beneath your ribs like a reluctant tenant being evicted. My limbs felt heavy, fogged with that dull ache that comes from having too many thoughts stacked on top of each other like an unstable Jenga tower.

Then came the grunt—loud, inelegant, and wholly sincere. I shoved Gladys away with the kind of push one reserves for small dogs trying to climb into your lap during a panic attack. Not violent, not cruel—just firm. Boundaried. Necessary.

She squawked in protest but didn’t resist, tottering backwards into her own personal orbit of confusion and distraction. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t. I needed space—not just physical, but mental, emotional, spiritual. A cathedral’s worth of it.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here we were, knee-deep in secrets and decomposition, trying to MacGyver our way through a plan that sat just shy of a felony—and yet somehow, this moment had splintered off into comedy. Tragicomedy, perhaps, if one were feeling generous.

But that was the thing about trauma: it never came clean. It arrived wearing absurdity like a disguise, shoving grief and horror into the same cupboard as laughter and condoms. And in that strange, suspended instant, I realised that every step we took from here would be taken in shoes already caked with moral ambiguity. Choices had consequences. And those consequences had cousins.

I rubbed at my temple, willing my thoughts to untangle. Somewhere outside, the world continued unbothered—birds called, tyres hummed on asphalt, a dog barked three doors down. Normality had the gall to persist.

And here we were. A girl with a condom. A truck with a secret. A plan teetering on the edge of plausibility.

Perfect.

"Beatrix." Luke’s voice shot out from behind the truck—urgent, strained, the kind of tone people use when they’re about to ask something they know you’ll hate.

I flinched. My name, stripped of inflection and loaded with purpose, carved through the thick air like a scalpel. No time for pleasantries. No room to pretend we were still people having a weird day. This was darker territory.

"Yeah," I called back, my voice flatter than I intended, my feet already dragging towards him, each step slower than the last. I didn’t want to know what was coming. But some awful part of me already did.

He didn’t mince words.

"I need you to help me roll him."

I stopped cold.

The words didn’t land—they detonated. A visceral recoil rippled through my body, like a muscle spasm of the soul. My stomach clenched. My skin went cold. Everything in me screamed no before I even had the chance to form the thought.

"Roll him!" The words came out of me in a jagged burst, shriller than I liked. “Hell no. I ain't touching him.” The syllables dropped like stones. I couldn’t believe I was saying them. Couldn’t believe I had to.

The idea of it—flesh once animate, now slack and soulless—was too much. The wrongness of crossing that line, from witness to participant, froze my blood. It wasn’t squeamishness. It was something older, deeper. Reverence, maybe. Or revulsion. They’re close cousins.

"Beatrix, please," Luke said, and the word please snagged at something in me.

His voice cracked—not broken, but bending under weight. Desperate. And worse, reasonable. "I need to check his back pockets."

Practical. Sensible. Efficient. It didn’t matter. My insides had staged a mutiny, and no amount of logic was going to convince them this was fine.

"Uh-uh," I muttered, shaking my head like a protestor trying to ward off a cult recruiter. My breath was shallow now, my hands damp and useless at my sides. I could smell it again—the thick, organic rot of it all—clinging to the air like mildew in a sealed tomb.

Then: "Beatrix."

Gladys. Of course.

Her voice snuck in around the edge of the truck like smoke through a crack, and then her head followed, popping into view like a puppet show no one asked for. Her sudden appearance startled us both. I think even Luke flinched.

"What?" I snapped, sharper than I meant to be, but not by much. Her timing was impeccable—as always—and my nerves were worn too thin to weather another round of moral tug-of-war.

"Help him. I don't want to go to jail," she said, and her voice cracked—truly cracked—for the first time that day.

The words weren’t dramatic. They were raw. And beneath the sob was something that sounded suspiciously like truth.

I closed my eyes and exhaled, slow and shaky. My fists clenched, then released, then clenched again. I could feel the pulse in my jaw, the pressure building behind my eyes like an oncoming storm. Rage. Disgust. Fear. All braided tight, knotted against the hollow in my chest that used to house certainty.

This wasn’t supposed to be me.

This wasn’t supposed to be us.

"Fine," I spat, the syllable torn from somewhere low and ungraceful. I felt the burn of it in my throat. An agreement made not from compassion, not even from fear—just necessity. Grim, blunt-edged necessity.

The moment I said it, something in me shifted. Not broke. Just bent further than it had before.

And we still hadn’t reached the worst of it.

I crouched beside Luke, the cold metal of the truck biting into my knees, cold and indifferent. My hand flew instinctively to my mouth—not out of horror exactly, but as a last-ditch barrier between me and the rising tide of nausea. As if I could physically hold back the reality of what was about to happen. As if covering my lips might also stop the rest of me from participating.

Curiosity—my usual lodestar, the thing that had led me into antique shops and locked rooms and occasionally very bad decisions—had evaporated. In its place: dread, thick and tangible. A weight pressing into the hollows of my chest.

Dead bodies are rather gross, I thought, with the detached finality of someone reading aloud from an internal textbook titled Things You Can’t Un-See. The clinical phrasing didn’t help. If anything, it made it worse. Cold facts, colder flesh.

"You ready?" Luke’s voice was even, but it had a tautness beneath it, like a rope pulled just shy of snapping.

I shook my head before I could think. A sharp, involuntary movement—like a child refusing medicine. No. My body already knew what my brain was still arguing with.

"On three, I need you to grab onto his waist and pull him towards us," Luke said. He was trying to keep it matter-of-fact. Not bossy, not pleading. Just calm. Like we were rearranging furniture instead of disturbing a corpse.

Another shake of the head, even harder this time. No. No, no. The blood—dark and soaked into the denim, spreading like something alive—was too much. It broke through whatever fragile compartment I’d been using to keep this clinical. Rational. Tolerable.

I looked at the fabric and imagined the warmth leaving it. Wondered how long it took for skin to lose the ability to fight touch. Wondered why I was thinking about that at all.

"It just needs to be a few seconds," Luke said. "Just long enough for me to feel inside his pocket."

Seconds. I could do seconds, couldn’t I? But it wasn’t the time that frightened me. It was the intimacy of it. The proximity. The knowledge that in touching him, even for a moment, I was crossing into something irreversible.

He wasn’t a concept anymore. He was flesh and gravity and silence.

Luke shifted beside me. I felt the moment tighten, like the air had curled in on itself.

"One. Two. Three. Roll!"

The words snapped through the air like a whipcrack, louder than they needed to be—maybe to startle me into motion. Maybe to drown out the voice in my head still screaming don’t do it.

But I did.

Because sometimes you roll the body.

And sometimes the body rolls you.

A grimace carved its way across my face—sharp, involuntary—as my body betrayed me and obeyed Luke’s count. Adrenaline surged, sour and electric in my veins, overriding the screaming logic in my brain. My hands moved without permission, clamping onto the driver’s waist like they belonged to someone else. Someone capable.

I pulled.

Hard.

There was resistance, like trying to shift wet sand—or a memory you didn’t ask to remember—and then a sickening squelch. It echoed inside the metal cavity of the truck, bounced off the walls like a grotesque slapstick sound effect straight from a horror film. It told me everything I didn’t want to know.

"Aargh!" The cry ripped from my throat, primal and unfiltered. Not a scream, not a shout—just the raw sound of a boundary being crossed.

My foot slipped. Gravity claimed me in an instant, dragging me down in a graceless sprawl. My arse hit the metal floor with a jolt that rattled my spine, a dull, reverberating thud that rang out louder in my bones than my ears.

And worse—my hands, still stupidly locked onto those soaked jeans, brought the body with me. It came down like luggage on a chute. Heavy. Indifferent.

Luke, poor bastard, didn’t stand a chance. He hadn’t anticipated my full-bodied descent into chaos and couldn’t get out of the way in time.

The corpse rolled clean over—flopping like dead weight, because of course it was—and landed squarely at Luke’s feet. Momentum took him next, sending him sideways with a meaty thump. A fine mist of blood arced into the air, catching the light in a delicate, horrifying spray. Almost beautiful, if you could detach from what it was. I couldn’t.

"Shit, Beatrix!" Luke snapped, part exclamation, part exorcism. His voice cracked with shock, edged with frustration, and I couldn’t blame him. We were both now unwilling players in a tableau that reeked of failure, copper, and something more permanent.

My heart was a fist punching against my ribs, frantic and directionless. Get out, get out, get out.

I scrambled away, hands slipping against the grooved floor of the truck, knees burning as I crawled like something hunted. I didn’t stop until I reached the opposite side, my back pressed hard against the wall. I could still feel it—the weight of him in my grip, the pull of the fabric, the sound, the smell.

And on top of it all, the shameful truth: I did that. I helped.

The air was thick with heat and horror. I curled my fingers against my thighs, trying not to retch.

There were lines you didn’t come back from. I’d just somersaulted over one.

Gladys’s grip slipped—wineglass meeting concrete in a sharp, crystalline explosion that punctuated the scene with perfect, ghastly precision. Shards skittered in every direction, tiny razors glinting in the morning light. The wine splattered like blood against the concrete, pooling into something far too symbolic for comfort.

"Get it off me!" she shrieked, her voice cracked and raw, as though the words were being torn from her throat. Her hands clawed at her face, frantic, like something invisible was burrowing beneath her skin.

It wasn’t just fear. It was revulsion. Deep, primal, animal. The kind that couldn’t be reasoned with.

"Gladys! Shut up!" My whisper cut through the noise, harsh and urgent. It wasn’t cruelty—it was self-preservation. Fear twisted my voice tight, like wire pulled taut. "Someone will hear you."

We were too exposed. Too loud. Too visible. And in suburbia, panic has a way of drawing curtains back.

"I think it's too late for that, Beatrix," Luke said, voice level but hollow. He didn’t raise it. He didn’t need to. The weight in his tone did the heavy lifting. "We've already made too much noise."

The truth of it landed like a stone in my gut.

And still she wailed. "Get it off! Get it off!" Her hands moved in blind chaos across her cheeks, nails raking at skin that wasn’t marked by blood so much as by memory now. A phantom stain, impossible to scrub clean.

I moved without thinking—pushed by instinct, or maybe by the echo of every time I’d ever calmed her as kids when she'd scraped a knee or fallen from grace in front of strangers. The familiarity was sickening.

Crossing back to her, I reached out, brushing her hands aside with care that belied the fury in my bloodstream. I took the back of my sleeve and wiped her cheek, gently, as if I could erase the whole mess by tending to this one smear.

"It's all gone," I murmured, my voice low and uncharacteristically tender. I hated myself a little for how convincing it sounded.

It wasn’t. Not really. Nothing was gone. Everything was here, seeping into us. Just beneath the surface.

But lies are sometimes the only anaesthetic available.

Meanwhile, Luke hadn’t wavered. Chaos crackled around us—shattered glass, blood spray, human panic—but his focus remained steady, carved from that strange, quiet resilience he always summoned in moments like this. He leaned across the body with clinical precision, one knee planted firmly for balance, hands moving with the kind of deliberateness that suggested both care and revulsion.

I watched, barely blinking. My breath came shallow, like I didn’t want to disturb the air around him in case the moment shattered. His fingers dipped into the right back pocket—slow, cautious, like he expected the dead to flinch. And then… they stilled.

He withdrew something.

Just one piece of paper.

The sight of it felt absurdly anticlimactic. One creased rectangle pulled from the wreckage, as if this were a stage play and the climax hinged not on shouting or violence, but a document. But I knew better. That scrap held weight.

"Is that it?" I asked, voice low, hoarse. The sound barely registered, but the intensity behind it was volcanic. I found myself gravitating towards him, instinctively drawn to the gravity of that page like it could anchor me.

Luke’s exhale broke the spell. A long, slow release that bled some of the tension from the air like steam from a pressure valve.

"Yeah," he said, voice rough with relief. “We got it.”

We got it.

"Thank God," I breathed, and for once, I meant it—not as habit, not as sarcasm, but as the closest thing I could muster to a prayer. It wasn’t just about the manifest anymore. It was about winning something—however small—in a day that had only offered us rot and ruin. One tiny sliver of order in a world currently fraying at every edge.

He handed it to me without ceremony. Just folded it with care and placed it in my open hand, like a surgeon passing off a scalpel.

It weighed more than it should have.

Thicker than paper. Denser than ink.

It was evidence, yes—but it was also leverage, currency, a placeholder for a future we might still get to bargain with. And in that moment, as blood dried on my sleeve and glass sparkled on the ground behind us, I held it like a relic.

A proof that, despite everything, we weren’t completely powerless.

Not yet.

"Gladys, get your arse into the truck," I snapped, jumping down from the back with a thud that jarred up through my ankles. The manifest fluttered in my grip like it was trying to escape—not that I’d have blamed it. My voice came out sharper than usual, clipped and braced with authority I didn’t feel but had no choice but to fake. We were way past diplomacy.

Every second we lingered here felt like playing hopscotch on a landmine.

"But... but... the glass," Gladys faltered, her eyes locked on the crimson-smeared shards glittering across the concrete like cursed confetti. Of course. In a moment dripping with consequence, she chose to worry about bloody wineglass fragments.

"Forget about the glass," Luke cut in, calm but insistent. "I'll clean it up."

His willingness to mop up the debris—literal and otherwise—was oddly grounding. A silent promise, tucked into a throwaway line. That he’d cover us. That we still had roles to play.

"Come on, Gladys. We have to go," I said, this time reaching for her arm. My fingers curled around the fabric of her jumper, giving her a light tug, not quite forceful but clear. Move or be moved.

She stalled, as if her feet had suddenly been bolted to the driveway. Every second of hesitation scratched against my nerves like grit in an open wound.

"Come on," I said again, firmer now, and bumped her lightly with my hip. It was the kind of nudge you give someone you know intimately—an odd blend of affection and command. Get on with it.

Finally, something shifted. Gladys’s eyes flicked to the manifest in my hand. Her chin lifted—barely—but I saw it. That spark of determination, rare and inconvenient.

"I'll hold it," she announced, her voice suddenly sure.

Before I could react, she reached out and swiped the paper clean from my fingers with the reflexes of a pickpocket.

"Ahh! Gladys!" I hissed, stepping back in reflex, narrowly dodging her retaliatory nudge with the finesse of someone well-practised in the art of sibling brinkmanship.

It was absurd. Infuriating. And weirdly familiar.

A flash of the past—fighting over cassette tapes, stolen clothes, unspoken envy. Except this time the stakes were higher, and the consequences didn’t come with grounding or slammed doors, but prison sentences.

The manifest wasn’t just paper. It was leverage. It was survival. And now it was in her hands.

I met her eyes for a beat too long. We were still on the same side, technically—but the lines were starting to blur.