In the world

A night hawk circled them at dusk on the plains, singing an alarm.
They sat down to eat the last of their food. "Ah, how absolutely fucking lovely!" As he licked the inside of the tube of condensed milk that he'd cut open with a pocket knife.
They arced up their mobile phones to send text messages.
Sorry I wont be home tonight sorry darl/son/sweet/mum/boss. Sorry.



Heading for the copper-logged car park, trying to stay on the high country and not descend into the tea-tree swamp at night with its hormonal frogs and tiger snakes, the lovers' feet shying away from the swampy wet and stumbling into a forest that grew deeper and darker as the moon and the mountain became hidden from them.
"Which way is east?"
"Where to the car park?"
His phone had run out of charge and a cloud hung over the latest Earth pic on hers. And neither of them had downloaded the compass app.
She saw a flash of the moon. "That way!"
"Mate, that's west. We should be going that way." He pointed to somewhere interminable.

It was the sweet-smelling flowers at shoulder height and it was the dark and the two of them were so, so lost when she said,  "It smells just like the leatherwood flowers under the Karris."
Then she saw the stolid, blonde trunk of a Karri tree rearing up and heaving its branches through the stars. Sweet flowers and the mushroomy scent of rotting logs. Both of them were shocked from their three day trek through the scrub by the sight of the most eastern Karri forest in the world.

After another hour of crashing through undergrowth, he said, "Let's stop. Let's just stop for the night. Can we stop before one of us breaks an ankle. Let's sleep here. Under this rock. Let's stop here

and sleep."