4338.205 · July 24, 2018 AD
What the Portal Accepts
The tent rises. The truce holds—barely. Jamie and Paul wrestle with canvas and each other, building shelter from materials they can't open and cooperation neither wanted. When bodies make demands dignity can't accommodate, survival strips them to essentials. But watching Luke carry garbage bags back through the portal ignites something Jamie had nearly abandoned: if rubbish can cross between worlds, what else might follow?
Some truces are built from exhaustion rather than forgiveness.
Jamie's violence still hangs in the air when the tent assembly begins—an impossible task requiring cooperation from two men who can barely look at each other. The canvas fights them. The instructions mock them. And their bodies, indifferent to dimensional catastrophe, make demands that reduce grown men to children learning shame for the first time.
Luke comes and goes freely, ferrying supplies through a barrier that treats Jamie like contamination. A suitcase arrives carrying clothes, memories, and one green thong that stirs ghosts of intimacy long since buried. News arrives too: Duke knows something is wrong. The dog waits by the door for a human who won't return.
But it's the garbage bags that change everything. Luke gathers their rubbish—cardboard, plastic, the ordinary detritus of survival—and carries it through the portal. The bags cross. Objects cross. Things that aren't human can pass between worlds while Jamie remains trapped.
The discovery lands like a match in dry grass. If rubbish can emigrate to another dimension, perhaps escape isn't as impossible as Clive declared.
Perhaps a message could cross too.
