Bogged in Two Worlds

"Nothing says ‘fresh start in an alien dimension’ quite like discovering you smell worse than a delivery truck in summer and your only clean option is your estranged father’s spare shirt."

I sat up, and felt a bead of sweat break loose and trace a line down my forehead.

The tent had turned into an oven. Whatever passed for a sun in this place had been hammering down on the canvas all morning, turning the little space I’d been recovering in into something close to the inside of a delivery truck left parked in the midday heat.

Time to get out of here.

The thought took me by surprise. A day ago, getting out of the tent had seemed about as likely as folding a thousand paper cranes with two broken hands. But now my body was restless, itching to move, to do anything other than lie on a mattress counting the seams in the canvas overhead.

I lifted an arm and sniffed, and immediately regretted it, my face screwing up at what came off me.

Bloody hell.

I smelled like a gym locker that had been left to ferment. Worse, maybe. The combination of lagoon water, resurrection sweat, and two days of unwashed existence had created something genuinely offensive.

Mum would be horrified. She was fastidious about hygiene—had drilled it into me since I was old enough to hold a washcloth. Always shower after work, Joel. No one wants to sit next to someone who smells like their job.

I glanced around the tent. No sign of Paul, and no sign of my belongings.

So much for clean clothes by the end of the day.

So much for my own wardrobe. Luke was still on Earth, apparently, doing whatever it was Luke did over there, while I sat here marinating in myself.

With nothing of my own to reach for, I reached, reluctantly, for Jamie’s.

The pile sat where he’d left them—a spare shirt, trousers, basic stuff. Nothing fancy. The kind of practical clothes you’d pack if you knew you were going somewhere without shopping centres.

Pulling them on, I couldn’t help noticing how differently the two of us were put together.

They hung loose on me, a size too big through the shoulders and long in the arm. But there was something in the wearing of my father’s clothes that settled over me, warm and strange—a closeness to him I’d never once had in nineteen years.

Wearing your dad’s shirt. Kids did that, didn’t they? Borrowed their father’s clothes, swam in oversized jumpers, felt safe in fabric that smelled like someone who was supposed to protect them.

I’d never had that. Never worn anything of my father’s. Never known what his clothes smelled like.

Until now.

The shirt smelled like dust and sweat and something else I couldn’t identify. Not unpleasant. Just… Jamie. A scent I was only beginning to learn.

Dressed, even in clothes two sizes too big, I felt more like a person than I had in days—enough of one, anyway, to face whatever was out there past the canvas.

Duke and Henri had cottoned on. My two constant companions positioned themselves at my side, tails going, as if they’d read my mind about venturing out.

Duke’s ears had perked up the moment I’d started moving with purpose. Henri, more cautious, watched from his bed with an expression that seemed to say: Are you sure about this?

No, mate. Not really. But I’m doing it anyway.

I pushed the flap aside, and the sunlight came pouring in so hard I had to squint against it, the warmth of it landing on me all at once.

For a moment, I couldn’t see anything—just blazing white that made my eyes water and my head throb. The darkness of the tent had spoiled me, made me forget how bright this world could be.

The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue.

Not Tasmania blue. Not the pale, cloud-streaked sky I’d grown up under. This was deeper. Richer. The kind of blue you saw in photographs of Mediterranean beaches, the kind that seemed almost artificial in its intensity.

I stopped, shut my eyes, tipped my head back, and just let the sun pour over my face.

The heat sank into my skin, and it was a different thing entirely out here in the open—cleaner, somehow, than the thick, stale heat that had been building in the tent.

Vitamin D, I thought absurdly. Getting my vitamin D.

Mum was always on about that. You spend too much time inside, Joel. Go get some sun. She’d be pleased, probably, if she could see me now. Standing in the sunlight of an alien world, wearing a stranger’s clothes, freshly resurrected from death.

Maybe leave out some of those details.

"It’s so nice to feel the sun again," I murmured, to no one but myself.

The warmth, the light, the open air. Small things. But small things had got very large lately.

One step at a time. One bean at a time. One moment of sunshine at a time.

Something furry brushed against my leg and yanked me clean out of it.

I flinched—couldn’t help it. After days of limited sensory input, unexpected touch still startled me.

I turned, and found a golden retriever grinning up at me, panting, its tail going so fast it was a blur.

Where the hell did you come from?

The dog was gorgeous. Classic golden, the kind you saw in dog food commercials and family photographs. Clean coat, bright eyes, tongue lolling out in that dopey way retrievers had.

"Lois, down!" Glenda’s voice carried across the sand as she came towards us.

But I was already crouching down to say hello before she could get to us.

It was a risky move—my legs still weren’t entirely to be trusted—but I managed it, and got my arms round her, my fingers sinking into fur that was soft and clean in a way I very much wasn’t.

She smells better than I do. That’s embarrassing.

She went in for something more enthusiastic and a good deal slobberier, and I pulled back, laughing at her.

The laugh surprised me. Actual laughter. The sound came out rough, damaged by my throat’s condition, but it was real. I was laughing at a dog’s attempt to lick my face.

Still alive enough to laugh. That’s something.

"Seems she likes you," Glenda said, with a broad smile.

I gave her one back; hers was the sort that was hard not to catch.

Jamie had come up behind her, and when I looked at him there was something on his face I hadn’t seen there before—pleased, and unable to hide it, and aimed squarely at me. It warmed me more than the sun had.

Pride. He’s proud of me.

For what? Standing up? Petting a dog? Surviving another morning?

It didn’t matter. That open, unguarded pride was something I’d never once seen directed at me. Not from a father. Not from the man who was supposed to have that role.

Duke, ever cautious, approached Lois with a careful mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

He circled around us, sniffing the air, his movements slow and deliberate. The little Shih Tzu was conducting a thorough investigation, treating this new canine arrival with the same suspicion he might apply to an unexpected package on a delivery route.

Lois, thrown by the inspection, sprang backwards into a play-bow, tail still going.

She thinks he wants to play. He thinks she might be a threat. Classic miscommunication.

Henri, for his part, wanted nothing to do with any of it. Tail tucked, he made a quick dash back for the safety of the tent and vanished inside.

Smart dog. When in doubt, retreat to familiar territory.

Lois, meanwhile, bounded around the pair of us, a bundle of pure joy that asked nothing of anyone.

Dogs didn’t care about inter-dimensional travel or resurrection or mysterious voices claiming ownership of your soul. Dogs cared about other dogs, and belly rubs, and whether there might be food involved.

Simpler priorities. Better priorities, maybe.

Paul came striding down the last slope into camp, and something he was saying about needing a road caught my attention.

A road. They need a road.

The camp, I was realising, was less ‘established settlement’ and more ‘people dumped in the middle of nowhere trying to figure things out.’ There was no infrastructure. No roads, no buildings, no water supply beyond the lagoon that had brought me back from death.

Just tents and dust and people making it up as they went along.

Paul tossed a set of keys, and they jingled through the air; Glenda caught them without looking.

He crouched to make a fuss of Lois, clearly smitten. "Ooh, you’re a gorgeous girl," he cooed, scratching her behind the ears.

Everyone loves Lois. Can’t blame them.

Glenda held the keys up, turning them over, half-disbelieving. "My car’s here?"

Car?

The word hit me strangely. Cars belonged to Earth. To roads and traffic lights and petrol stations. The idea that someone had brought a car here—through the Portal, presumably—seemed almost absurd.

"Yeah," Paul said, not looking up from Lois. "It got bogged just over the hill."

Of course it did.

This place was dust and sand and soft ground that would swallow anything with wheels. I’d seen enough bogged trucks in my delivery days to recognise a losing battle when I heard about one.

The camp—its handful of tents, its dead campfire, all of it tucked into the folds of dust and rock—suddenly looked far more alone out here than I’d understood from inside my tent.

Jamie had told me next to nothing about where "here" actually was, and I felt the questions starting to stack up.

Where exactly are we? How big is this world? Are there other people out there, beyond these dunes?

Questions I hadn’t thought to ask while lying on my back counting canvas seams. Questions that suddenly seemed important.

"We definitely need a road," Kain chimed in with a laugh.

I placed him now—Jamie’s nephew, Kain. The construction apprentice, athletic, easy in himself. There was something about his cheerfulness that made the whole camp feel a notch more normal.

"I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you," Paul said, all animated face and busy hands—which was its own small entertainment. "You wanna be the one to collect the stuff in it or dig it out of the dust?"

Fair point.

Digging a car out of soft ground was brutal work. I’d helped with bogged delivery trucks twice—both times ending up covered in mud, exhausted, and questioning my career choices.

Glenda huffed, exasperated, and started off, Lois and Duke trailing after her.

"Honestly. This camp is like living with a bunch of children sometimes."

"I don’t think she’s got any children," Jamie joked, as he, Paul and Kain started to follow her.

"I heard that!" Glenda shot back, her voice carrying over the distance as she marched on.

I chuckled, softly, at the pair of them.

There was a whole small world here, with its own quirks and its own snags, and even the ordinary back-and-forth of it was a hundred times more interesting than the ceiling I’d spent the last few days memorising.

They’re a family, I realised. A weird, dysfunctional, thrown-together family. Like the ones you get at workplaces when you spend too much time together.

The little group crested the first dune and shrank to specks against all that sand, and I hung back, reluctant.

Go with them? Stay here?

My body wanted to rest. My mind wanted to see. The two impulses pulled in opposite directions like magnetic poles.

I turned back towards the tent, slow, dragging my feet about it.

The fine, warm sand shifted under each step, a constant reminder of the desert stretching out all around.

The sand was different from beach sand. Finer. Almost powdery. It got between my toes, clung to my skin, seemed to infiltrate everything.

Mars, I thought again. This is what Mars must be like. Red dust everywhere, getting into everything, no escape from it.

As I got close, the dark mouth of the tent seemed to yawn open, ready to swallow me back up.

I stopped dead. I couldn’t do it.

I can’t. Not yet. I can’t go back in there and lie down and stare at nothing while everyone else is out doing things.

My body still throbbed with a dull, all-over ache. But there was something steadying in the clean clothes against my skin, and even the hot desert air was better than the stale thickness waiting inside.

Jamie’s clothes. Not mine. But better than nothing.

I poked my head in through the flap, my eyes adjusting to the dim, filtered light.

Inside, Henri lay sprawled in his small bed, a picture of contentment. He let out a deep, satisfied grunt that carried in the small space, and it pulled a wry smile out of me.

You’ve got the right idea, mate. Stay here where it’s cool. Don’t follow the humans on their adventures.

"If you insist," I whispered to him, lighter than I’d felt a minute ago.

Go. See the bogged car. Be part of something.

Henri dropped his furry head back onto his paws, trusting the world to leave him be, and I backed out of the tent with something like purpose in me.

Outside, the soft, sun-warmed dust gave under my bare feet.

I followed the trail Glenda and the others had left, a line of footprints pressed into the sand like a story I could read.

Each set of prints told something about its owner. Glenda’s neat and purposeful. Kain’s slightly splayed. Paul’s large and deep, the prints of someone who moved with confidence.

Tracking. Like the Aboriginal guides in documentaries. Reading the land.

I kept it slow and steady, careful not to push a body that was still barely holding together. The memory of my last fall was still fresh, and I had no interest whatsoever in another jarring tumble down a slope.

One step at a time. Test each foothold. Don’t rush.

The dunes rose and fell around me like frozen waves, their crests sharp against the endless blue sky.

I came over a small rise, and there it all was. Just as Paul had described it, hands and all.

In the middle of a flurry of activity sat a charcoal BMW.

A BMW. In another dimension. Of course.

Whatever sleek, expensive thing it had once been, it now wore a fine coat of ochre dust, the desert already setting about claiming it. It sat dead still, its rear wheels sunk deep and hopeless into the sand.

That’s not coming out without serious effort.

I’d seen this before. Delivery trucks stuck in paddocks after taking wrong turns. The desperate spinning of wheels that only dug you deeper. The eventual acceptance that you’d need a tow, or a lot of shovels, or both.

We’ve all got problems here. At least this one has a solution. Dig, push, problem solved. If only everything was that straightforward.

"Joel!" Jamie’s voice cut across the open air, surprise and concern tangled up in it, and he came hurrying towards me.

His shape sharpened out of the shimmer of the dunes with each stride.

Here we go. The overprotective father routine.

"What are you doing here?"

The question carried weight. Not accusation, exactly, but something close to it. The tone of a parent who’d told a child to stay in bed and found them climbing trees.

What came out of me was barely a whisper, a croak, every word a fight against the dry scratch that had taken up residence in my throat.

"Help," I managed, barely audible.

Jamie’s eyes went wide, his movements suddenly frantic.

"You need help?" he asked, panic climbing into his voice.

He started waving Glenda over, big hurried gestures.

No, no, no. That’s not what I meant.

It was hard not to smile at how fast he’d got there, even if the whole thing had me quietly wincing.

I gave my head a small shake, said it again—"Help"—and pointed at the bogged car.

I want to help. Not get help. Different things.

I wanted to give him more than that, a proper sentence, but my throat gave a warning scrape that told me exactly how far it was prepared to be pushed.

One word at a time. Make each one count.

The relief came over Jamie’s face, though the worry didn’t leave it. He put his hands on his hips.

"I don’t think that’s a good idea. You should be resting," he said, and his hands came off his hips and onto my shoulders, gently but firmly turning me back towards the tent.

Of course. Back to the mattress. Back to counting canvas seams and listening to voices in my head.

That was when Glenda stepped in, brushing Jamie’s hands off my shoulders with a brisk sort of grace.

"Here, take this," she said, thrusting a large, fluffy pillow into my hands.

A pillow?

"As long as you are careful, I think some movement will be beneficial."

Thank you, Glenda. Someone who understands.

Jamie turned back to me, forehead creased up with worry. "Are you sure you can manage?" he asked, and the depth of the concern was right there in it.

I just nodded—a thank you to Glenda, and a quiet plea to Jamie to ease off.

It’s not that I don’t appreciate having a father’s attention.

He wasn’t nothing to me—he couldn’t be, not now. But there was still all this unfamiliarity between us, a distance neither of us knew how to walk across.

He’s trying. He’s trying to be a father. He just doesn’t know how, and I don’t know how to be a son. Not his son, anyway.

"This must mean that Luke has spoken with Pierre!" Glenda’s voice broke across the still air, bright with sudden realisation.

She set a small instrument case down on the bonnet of the car, handling it with a care that told you it mattered.

Pierre?

A small, cold worry clenched in my chest: I hadn’t even noticed her step away and come back with the thing.

Are my senses still sub-par?

I’d missed her leaving. Missed her coming back. The world was happening around me and I was only catching half of it, like watching a film with scenes cut out at random.

"Your husband?" Jamie asked, stepping in closer, polite and curious.

Husband. Of course. Glenda has a life back on Earth. A husband named Pierre. A home. A career. All of it left behind.

"Yes," Glenda said, her voice going soft as she eased the case open. "I miss him terribly already."

A frown pulled at me, because her saying it dragged Mum straight to the front of my mind.

Mum.

She would be very worried by now.

Glenda, missing her Pierre back on Earth. Me, with Mum on the other side of a door neither of us could open.

Three days. Maybe four. She’ll have called the depot by now. Called the police. Called everyone she can think of.

"How does your violin imply that?" Jamie’s question pulled me back to the present.

He looked genuinely puzzled, brows knitting together.

Violin. Right. Focus, Joel.

Glenda’s face turned serious. "I highly doubt that Luke would have known to bring me my violin," she said, matter-of-fact.

Fair point. Unless you tell someone about your prized possessions, they don’t know to pack them.

"You’d be surprised," Jamie shot back, a hint of playful challenge in it.

Glenda settled the violin back into its case with the careful hands of someone handling something precious. The latch clicked shut, loud in all that stillness. "Where’s Kain?" she asked, her eyes going to the horizon, looking for him.

"He went to the Drop Zone to see…" Jamie started, but his voice trailed off, and anyway my mind had already slipped its moorings and drifted off somewhere darker.

Drop Zone. What’s the Drop Zone? Where things arrive from Earth?

But the question faded before I could pursue it.

Because there she was again, vivid and unsettling—Mum.

Sleepless nights. Her face wet with it. And behind all that, the money, closing in with every shift I didn’t turn up for.

The rent. The power bill. The food.

I was the main income. Mum’s few shifts barely covered half of what we needed to survive, and my courier wages made up the difference.

Without me, she was in trouble.

And it hit me, standing there in the sand: whatever I’d been through these last few days, hers was only getting started.

I’ve been lying on a mattress worrying about my throat while she’s probably sitting in the dark because the power’s been cut off.

The thought was unbearable.

There must be something I can do to help her.

Luke can travel between worlds. He’s bringing clothes. Could he bring money? Could he pay her rent? Could he—

The thoughts spiralled, each one more desperate than the last.

I made myself stop. Made myself push the whole helpless, spinning lot of it aside and look at what was actually in front of me.

Help with the car. Be useful. One thing at a time.

Wanting to move, wanting something to put between me and my own head, I waved the pillow at the group and croaked the word out again. "Help."

It landed at once. The chatter stopped, and every face turned to me.

Yeah, I’m still here. Still wanting to contribute. Still capable of carrying a pillow, at least.

"Right. Of course," Jamie said, a small, understanding smile tugging at one corner of his mouth.

He ducked his head into the back seat and started pulling things out.

Arms loaded up with Glenda’s belongings, the three of us set off back towards camp.

Every step was a deliberate act, a negotiation between wanting to be useful and a body that had very little left to give.

The pillow wasn’t heavy. But my arms felt like they were carrying lead weights, and my legs protested each step like they were wading through treacle.

Pathetic. Can’t even carry a pillow without getting tired.

But I was doing it. Moving. Contributing. Being part of something.

The desert stretched away on every side, shifting sand and soft colour, entirely indifferent to the small struggles and small victories of the three of us crossing it.

The colours were beautiful, in their way. Ochre and rust and amber, blending into each other like watercolours on wet paper. If I’d had my phone, I might have taken a picture. Sent it to Mum.

Look where I ended up. Alien sunset. Wish you were here.

But my phone was back on Earth, probably still sitting in the truck, battery dead, full of messages I’d never read.

The camp appeared over the final rise, its handful of tents looking almost welcoming against the vast emptiness.

Not home. Not yet. Maybe not ever.