Wheelbarrow

A wheelbarrow awaited the couple in the carpark. They filled the tray with their bags and led by torchlight winded their way through the forest. The corrugated cabin sat in the center of the clearing. Aside from it was a sole blue gum and a fire pit.

The couple slid their bags under the bed. The man turned on the heater. He took out the box of groceries they had brought. He salted eggplant, chopped mushrooms, mixed mirin and soy in a saucer. He boiled soba noodles on the stove while the woman showered. She came out of the bathroom with a face mask on. It was the color of coagulated blood.

They ate to the sound of field recordings on cassette tape. After dinner, the man took a bag of kindling from behind the cabin and started the fire. Smoke sidled up to the branches of the blue gum. A bat lifted off.

The woman joined him outside with a duffel bag in her hand. The man added larger logs to the fire while she unzipped the bag, unspooled rope, and fastened a series of knots: lark’s heads, Prusik’s, cross hitches. She clipped carabiners to the snarls and tied them around the tree.

The man took off his clothes. He knelt on a patch of decomposing leaves between the tree and the fire. He closed his eyes and listened to distant echolocations. The woman crouched to meet him. She moved through each part of his body, tying limbs to limbs and his arms behind his back. She hooked him to the ropes that circled the tree and pulled on loose thread that was fed through one of the carabiners until the man’s feet were dangling in the air. He exhaled a muffled moan that made small ghosts in the air as she raised him higher and higher, his body curving into a stiff parabola. The fire illuminated his exposed skin. His penis reddened in the heat.

The woman went to bed with a book. She sipped ginger tea and nursed a hot water bottle while reading about the consolations of philosophy, finding no consolations at all. Before turning off the light, she wiped condensation from the window to view her husband suspended between moon and embers, the internal strictures of his body yielding to those she had imposed.

In the morning, she woke to a vista. The amorphous black copse revealed its iniquities in the half light. She drank coffee on the cabin steps surrounded by shards of frost. An echidna waddled near her feet, unfazed by the human intrusions, its soft body occluded by spikes. She photographed the creature in its habitat—the image she would later share with her friends as evidence of their night away—and then turned to take the photo she would keep to herself: her husband’s limp but not lifeless body in suspension.

The woman tidied the kitchen, packed their bags, and brought her husband down. She wrapped his body in cashmere blankets and folded him into the wheelbarrow. Halfway through the drive home, he began to stir, revived by the heat coming out of the ducts. But when he tried to speak, his voice slurred. His teeth chattered. His nose ran. He braced at every sudden movement. His body was rubbed raw from the jute.

The couple’s home was perched on a corner block, the city outstretched ahead, the forest visible in the east. The woman pulled into their driveway, flanked on both sides by cream stones and cacti. She pressed the button that opened their garage and, once inside, the button that raised all the windows. Sunlight illuminated the parquet floors. All eighteen rooms were austere, spotless, sterile. Except for that which had been their son’s room. His posters were still blu-tacked to the wall. The floor was strewn with school uniforms, with trash, with cum socks gone moldy. His phantom pubescent scent lingered like incense around an altar.

This is where the woman led her husband, where he curled up under the duvet and shut his eyes. Once he had slept some, she brought him water and food on a tray. She sat beside him as he ate. When he was done she brushed his hair, humming homespun melodies as she looked into his ice-clear eyes, searching for some sort of surfeit in the void.