Mutualism
1.
The first Europeans to see a platypus thought it was a joke. They jabbed at the stitched skin with knives, certain some convict taxidermist had glued a duck’s bill to an otter. Two centuries on, the Hobart City Council has a cartoon platypus smiling up from a sign that says: PLEASE KEEP DOGS ON LEADS. PLATYPUS LIVE HERE. The sign is bolted to a guardrail tagged with FUCK AURORA alongside a crude dick. I stand there with a keep-cup and your discharge summary folded in my pocket. The joke is how everyone believes a sign will be enough to protect the strangest thing in the water.
2.
In lecture I draw arrows between boxes. Termites & fungi. Wattle & rhizobia. Win-win, I say. The Metro to the Royal takes forty minutes without traffic. I ride the lift to the spinal ward and empty your catheter bag into a stainless-steel toilet. Mutualism has trouble under fluorescent tubes.
3.
We met at eleven, behind a locked door with frosted glass that said: “Unit B – Youth Justice Centre.” Intake called it “secure care.” We called it juvie. Four beds to a room, orange blankets, bolted-down furniture smelling of disinfectant and Milo. The officers liked us; we weren’t “real crims”—no aggravated burglaries, no arson. Our real crime was what the caseworker wrote in biro in the margin: no safe placement available.
4.
Behind the razor wire a strip of creek reached only our ears. At night, lying on our bunks, we swore we could pick out the glide of water over rock under the clang of the gates and the humming Coke machine in the rec room. “There’s platypus down there,” you whispered once, as the night staff’s torch beam moved along the bars. We had no evidence, only the shape of your certainty.
5.
The Youth Justice Centre had its own Pam. She worked in the kitchen, wrists like saplings, calves thick and bent. She wore a hairnet we made fun of and a pair of white shoes we called moonboots. Pam didn’t speak much. She moved trays, scrubbed pots. When the officers yelled her name, she flinched. We didn’t know if she was shy or simple or both. We did know she couldn’t lodge a complaint that would get us hauled into Case Conference.
6.
This one afternoon: the TV broken, the officers in a foul mood, all of us rattling in the rec room. Somebody started in on Pam. “Moonboots!” one of the older girls yelled as she came in with a trolley. “Hey moonboots, show us your space jump.” The chant caught on. You joined in. So did I. Moonboots, moonboots. Her hands shook so hard that a mug rattled off and smashed on the lino. We laughed like we’d done something clever. No one hit her. No one had to. The sound did the work. She picked up the pieces. We watched her do it.
7.
I used to think the Home made me who I am. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe we were always going to be the kind of kids who listened for rivers under concrete and named each other’s pain after animals. Maybe that’s just what you get when you churn poverty, colonialism, and mental illness together over two generations and wait.
8.
The first time I see an actual platypus I’m thirty-seven and holding your wheelchair brakes on the rivulet path at dawn. Mist clings to the sedges; my breath ghosts in the air. We wait and wait and then, there: a small brown back curves through the surface, a slick head, the absurd bill, then the tail flick as it dives. You grip the rims of your chair hard enough to whiten your knuckles. “Told you,” you say. Platypus live here.
9.
Your injury is coded in three letters and a number: “ASIA B.” In the Royal’s registry, that means incomplete paraplegia, some sensation preserved below the lesion. In your file, the consultant has drawn your spine in biro and shaded in T12. Centrelink sends you a lime-green card with “DSP” stamped on it. The card is exactly the color of those jelly cups they hand out with Panadol.
10.
When you try to describe what it feels like, what they call “neuropathic pain,” you always reach for fauna and weather. “Ants under the skin in steel caps,” you say. “Lightning in my shins. Bushfire in my lower back.” The physio asks, “On a scale of zero to ten?” You look at me, who cannot look at you. Neither of us answers.
11.
The Royal Hobart’s spinal ward has its own climate. It smells of chlorhexidine, sweat, stale biscuits. The air runs thick with alarms and the sigh of mattresses inflating and deflating under fragile hips. Above your bed a laminated sign lists: RISK: Falls, Pressure Injury, Autonomic Dysreflexia. Your body on the paper is a risk matrix; in the bed it is a committee of protesting parts.
12.
Neither of you speaks during morning care. The nurse pulls the curtain. She checks what needs checking. She rolls you, wipes you, re-covers you. Eighteen minutes of hands, skin, the sounds of fabric and water. When she’s done she writes in the chart. “ADLs completed with assistance x1.” As if the body is a task. As if a task can be completed.
13.
A platypus bill can pick up the electrical discharge of a yabby hiding in gravel. Your thigh can’t tell my hand from the sheet. Some days your shoulder feels fire from a breeze. Your nervous system’s mapping has gone from topographic to impressionist.
14.
At home, without staff watching, we are sloppier and more honest. Transfers involve swearing and improvisation. We have a code now: “Koala” when I’m hanging off you too tight, “Platypus” when my hand has drifted somewhere we haven’t negotiated. The first time I misjudge the angle and you end up half on the recliner, half off, legs spasming in air, we freeze. You look at me, wild-eyed, and say, “Well. This is very fucking mutual.”
15.
We build a sex life that has nothing to do with penetration and everything to do with consent and calibration. The stick travels from the kitchen bench to the bed. Not as prop, but as gauge. I run the beveled point down your shin, watching your face for the flinch that signals a listening nerve. Then up the inside of your thigh. Less arousal and more mapping. You watch me watching you. The wood is warm from my hand. “Left a bit,” you say, eyes closed. “There.”
16.
Your bowels become a third party in our arrangement. They have their own timetable, their own moods. When we have to do digital stimulation—two words whose decorum I will always find obscene—I glove up and sit you forward and try to think of anything but my index finger learning the knots of your rectum. “This is like doing soil cores,” I say once, on autopilot. You bark a laugh. “That’s going in the book,” you say.
17.
We both know night is worse. Fewer staff, more beeps. The first time your blood pressure spikes and your face goes florid and you say, “Something’s wrong,” the night nurse offers Panadol and a pat. By the time the registrar arrives, your heart is punching, sweat pouring. They lower the head of the bed, unkink the catheter, peel off your compression stockings. Numbers on the monitor slide back from the dangerous end. They call it an “episode.” We add a new line to the private glossary: “AD,” shorthand for the time your own machinery almost cooked you from the inside.
18.
There’s no checkbox in the taxonomy for what we had. Something between commensalism and bleeding. “Extractivism” is one word. “Love” is another, some days.
19.
The NDIS planner comes to your flat with a laptop and a stack of paper. She wears a branded polo and practiced empathy. She asks you to rate how your disability affects “mobility,” “selfcare,” “social participation.” You answer in your usual tone. “My social participation is mostly waiting on hold,” you say. She smiles, types, ticks boxes. Later the plan arrives with less funding for “personal care” and more for “capacity building.” We both laugh until your leg spasms and the laugh turns sideways.
20.
Rakali are not on anyone’s tea towel. No one donates to “Save the Water Rat.” Their mutualism with our rubbish is grudging, opportunistic, exactly like ours with most of the species we pretend to love. Knowing it’s their teeth in the wood doesn’t make me feel any less ridiculous when my hand reaches for it. It just makes the ridiculousness more accurate.
21.
We write a contract on your kitchen whiteboard one afternoon. Two columns: WHAT YOU OWE ME / WHAT I OWE YOU. Under yours I put: “Not making me a metaphor.” Under mine you write: “Telling you when you’re being a dick.” At the bottom, you add: “Mutual right to call bullshit.”
22.
“Promise me something,” you say one afternoon, mid-spasm, the Tigers losing on TV. I say, “What.” You say, “If you write about this, don’t tidy it up. Don’t make it an uplift story.”
23.
It happens overnight, when I’m not there. A massive autonomic dysreflexia episode in your sleep. BP through the roof, heart rate a jackhammer. The night nurse misses the first signs, thinks you’re just restless. By the time they realize, unkink the catheter, drop the head of the bed, something in your head has already blown.
24.
The neurologist explains that your spinal cord injury put you at higher risk of this kind of catastrophic miscommunication. “The system can’t regulate itself properly,” he says. “Sometimes it overshoots.” He draws the same diagram the physio once drew, only this time it ends in a little starburst in the head. I look at that pen star and think of the creek behind Unit B, the bit we never saw, and how one day they must have covered it.
25.
They turn the machine down slow. No one yanks a plug. Your chest rises and falls in smaller movements until it doesn’t. The monitor keeps drawing little hills for a while, then forgets how.
26.
Centrelink sends a letter addressed to you two weeks later. “We are sorry to hear that your circumstances have changed,” it says. They ask for your date of death. There is a box to tick: “Yes, I have read and understood this letter.” I tick it for you.
27.
If I strip my metaphors back to the calcium, what’s left is this: the stick softened, took on water, let go of its lignin. It splintered into fibers too small to see, became substrate for algae, for biofilm, for bacteria. It lodged in a yabbie’s gut, in the gravel under someone’s sneaker, in the stomach lining of a carp that will be pulled out by an old man with nicotine fingers. It went into everything and meant nothing you can hold.
28.
The stick was never yours. Or mine. Or the platypus’s. It was a piece of a hakea or a silver wattle the council planted upstream with grant money and called “riparian revegetation.” A water rat used it, once, for its own opaque project. I interrupted that by picking it up. Then I interrupted my life for a while by letting it stand in for everything that hurt. Now the creek has it back.
29.
Child question: where does the person go when they die? Adult answer: nowhere. Cells break, proteins unhook, bacteria get busy. The patterns in other people’s nervous systems—the ones that took you into account—keep firing for a while. Then they stop.
30.
At the Royal, they called the bed you died in “Bed 4.” After you, Bed 4 had other occupants: a motorbike crash, a stroke, a septic hip. The chart with your surname on it was shredded according to protocol. The mattress was wiped down. The pump hummed under different bones. Mutualism, in the hospital’s accounting, is just throughput.
31.
I dream about the Home more often now that you’re not here to fact check me. In some dreams the creek behind Unit B is open, crowded with platypuses and water rats and fish we never had. In others it’s concreted, a black pipe humming under the rec room. In one, Pam walks out of the kitchen, moonboots squeaking, and sits on my bunk. “So,” she says, “how’s your mutualism going?” I wake up laughing and then have to get out of bed to throw up.
32.
Your file from Youth Justice, the printout I FOI’d and kept in a red folder, still lives on the top shelf of my wardrobe, under an old doona cover. Sometimes I take it down and read the case notes. “Client was observed having difficulty regulating affect.” “Client responded well to structured routines.” Nowhere does it say: “Client taught another client how to breathe through a panic attack by making fun of the officer’s moustache.” Archives are mutualisms too; what they keep alive is what the institution wants to remember.
33.
In the end, the stick is just lignocellulose. The platypus just a mammal with a bill. You are just a human whose nervous system broke under pressure. I am just another one whose didn’t. Yet. None of that alters the chemical fact: my hand reaches for two cartons of milk every time. Full cream, lactose-free. The body keeps its accounts.
34.
What we had was not a metaphor. It was a series of acts. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
— I held your piss bag while you peed into it.
— You held my throat in your hand once when I couldn’t swallow the word Home.
— We watched a small brown animal break the surface of a filthy creek at dawn and both said, at the same time, “There.” As if we’d proved something. We had.
35.
On a winter morning, I see a platypus surface near the “PLATYPUS LIVE HERE” sign. It floats for a second, fur beaded with water, bill like wet suede. Then it flicks its tail and goes under. No one else on the path notices. You would have noticed. You’re not here to notice. I watch the rings spread, catch the light, disappear.
36.
Platypus live here. The sign is correct and insufficient. People live here. We lived here. We don’t anymore. The water keeps moving.
By Rajiv Kumra
R. Kumra was the winner of the 2026 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. Inhale was first written on receipt paper and napkins in the break room of a New Jersey warehouse, then retyped into a secondhand laptop missing the letter Q. He did not own a website. He did not teach. He lived with his mother, who never read his work but told everyone at Jummah her son was a writer. She was correct.
Website: inhale.ink