FFM The Postie
The generator outside the pub coughs, and I watch the exhaust stain the already mournful sky.
Another diesel day in Desert Edge.
Another day of rationing the last of the town's patience along with the last of the town's water.
I'm Josie, twenty-three, blonde hair pulled back in a practical ponytail that does nothing to stop the red dust from coating my neck.
Behind the bar at the Desert Edge Hotel—the only pub for three hundred kilometres in any direction—I count the remaining bottles of spirits like I'm counting days.
Thirty-seven Jim Beam. Twelve Smirnoff. Three bottles of the good tequila that Mick the publican has been saving for something he calls "the end times."
The end times came three months ago when the mine officially closed. The end times came when the last of the management houses got loaded onto flatbeds and trucked south to Port Hedland.
The end times came when the mine's power company sent their final disconnection notice, and we realised that "indefinite" actually meant "two weeks from Tuesday."
I wipe the bar with a cloth that's more rust than fabric and watch Janna stack chairs from last night's final crowd. Twelve people.
Twelve people in a pub built for two hundred. The mine workers are gone. The families are gone. The school closed six months ago, the medical clinic three months after that. Now it's just us—the holdouts, the stubborn, the ones with nowhere else to go or nowhere else we want to be.
Janna catches me watching and grins, her dark hair falling across her face in that way that makes her look like she's perpetually emerging from somewhere more interesting than here.
The tart misses her Friday night shags out the back of the pub.
She's wearing her usual uniform—black tank top, denim shorts, boots that have walked more kilometres of red dirt than most people see in a lifetime.
The tank top strains against her chest in a way that I've stopped pretending not to notice. The bitch has tit to spare. Quality natural melons.
"What?" she asks, reading something in my expression.
"Nothing." I look back at the bottles. "Thinking about Billy."
"Last postie Billy?"
"Last postie Billy," I confirm. "Last mail run tomorrow. Then he's off to Kalgoorlie or Perth or wherever posties go when there's no more post to deliver."
Janna stops stacking chairs. She leans against the table she's just cleared, and I watch her weight shift to one hip, the casual geometry of her body doing something complicated to my breathing.
We've been friends since forever, since our fathers worked the same drill crew and our mothers drank the same cheap wine in the same fibro houses that are now being dismantled around us.
"We should do something," she says.
"Like what?"
"Like send him off proper."
She pushes off the table and walks to the bar, close enough that I can smell the dust in her hair, the faint sweetness of the coconut sunscreen she wears even when the sky is dull with generator smoke.
"Like give him something to remember Desert Edge by."
I know what she's suggesting before she says it. I know because I've seen the way she looks at men—not often, not indiscriminately, but with a focused hunger that makes her seem suddenly dangerous.
I've seen the way she looked at Billy last week when he came in for his final counter lunch, his postal uniform still carrying the heat of the forty-degree run from the depot.
"He's not bad," I say, which is Desert Edge code for "he's actually quite attractive if you squint."
"Not bad at all." Janna leans her elbows on the bar, bringing her face level with mine. Her eyes are brown, almost black in this light, and they hold mine with the intensity she usually reserves for arguments about music or whose turn it is to clean the cool room.
"And it's the end of something, Josie. The actual end. Last postie. Last mail. Nearly last of anything."
I think about the demountable houses being trucked out, the skeletal frames left behind like ribcages in the red dirt. I think about the water tank we're filling from the bore, the way Mick checks the generator fuel levels every two hours like he's checking a pulse. I think about the future, which has suddenly become very small and very immediate.
"Okay," I say.
"Okay?"
"Okay. We do something. We give Billy a send-off." I let my hand rest on the bar near hers, close enough that our pinky fingers almost touch. "What did you have in mind?"
Janna's smile spreads slow and certain. "The dead letter office."
"The what?"
"Parcel office. Where they keep the stuff that can't be delivered. Billy showed me once—there's a whole room in the back, air-conditioned, soundproofed. For the valuable parcels. What no one cares about in a dead town"
She leans closer, her voice dropping to a whisper that still somehow fills the empty pub. "He has the keys until tomorrow. Last night with the keys, Josie. Last night with a government building and nobody to answer to."
I feel something shift in my chest, a loosening of the knot that's been there since the closure announcement. The illicit thrill of it—the abandoned office, the forbidden space, the sheer pointlessness of pleasure in a dying town—makes my skin feel suddenly alive.
"We need drinks," I say.
"We need tequila," Janna corrects.
We find Billy at the caravan park, sitting on the step of his government-issue mobile home with a beer that's already sweating in the evening heat.
He's thirty, maybe thirty-two, with the weathered skin of someone who's spent a decade driving unsealed roads and the surprising softness of someone who still believes in the importance of mail delivery.
"Josie. Janna." He nods to each of us in turn, and I watch his eyes track the bottles we're carrying—the good tequila, three limes, salt in a plastic bag. "What's the occasion?"
"The end of the world," Janna says, settling onto the step beside him without invitation.
Her thigh presses against his, and I watch him notice, watch his hand tighten on his beer can. "Or the end of Desert Edge, which is basically the same thing."
"Fair enough." He looks at me, standing in the red dust with my shadow stretching long behind me. "You two planning to drink all that yourselves?"
"We were hoping you'd help," I say, and I make sure my voice carries exactly what I'm offering. I've learned, in twenty-three years in a town of three hundred, how to say things without saying them.
How to make an invitation that can be interpreted as innocent right up until the moment it isn't.
Billy's place is small—bed, table, mini-fridge, the accumulated minimalism of someone who's always known this was temporary.
We sit on the floor because there aren't enough chairs, and Janna produces a deck of cards from her shorts pocket with the flourish of someone who's been planning this.
"Strip poker," she announces.
"That's not how poker works," Billy says, but he's already pulling his wallet from his back pocket, already dealing with the efficiency of someone who learned cards in mine camps and roadhouses.
"It is tonight." Janna catches my eye, and I see the challenge in it, the dare that's been building between us since we were teenagers stealing cigarettes from her mother's purse.
"Loser removes one item. Winner's choice which item."
The first hand goes to Billy, and he studies us with theatrical consideration before pointing at my boots. "Those look heavy."
I pull them off, feeling the cool of the floor through my socks, feeling suddenly younger and more exposed than the situation warrants. The second hand goes to Janna, and she chooses Billy's shirt, watching with undisguised appreciation as he peels the cotton from his shoulders.
He's lean, wiry, with the scattered bush scars of a life spent outdoors and the tan lines of someone who always wears sleeves.
By the fourth hand, I'm in my tank top and underwear, Janna's in her bra and shorts, and Billy's down to his jeans. The tequila has made a warm pool in my stomach, and the generator hum from the pub across the road has become part of the rhythm, the pulse of this last night.
"I fold," Billy says, on the fifth hand, and Janna's smile is pure triumph.
"Jeans," she commands.
He stands, unbuttons, and I watch the fabric slide down his hips with the attention I usually reserve for important things. His underwear is plain, practical, government-issue in spirit if not in fact. But the shape beneath it—the curve and weight of him already responding to the situation—makes my mouth go dry.
"Your turn," he says to me, and I realise I've been staring.
I lose the next hand to Janna, and she chooses my tank top with the deliberation of someone who's been waiting for this. The air-conditioned cool hits my skin, and I feel my nipples tighten against the fabric of my bra, feel Billy's eyes track the movement with the hunger I've been hoping for.
"Last hand," Janna says, and deals with the seriousness of a ceremony.
I win. I look at Billy in his underwear, at Janna in her bra, and I make my choice with the certainty of someone who knows exactly what she wants.
"Everything," I say. "Both of you. Everything."
It's darker; the only street in the town is empty.
The strip. Cute curved schlong. Cute shaved pussy and free swing tits.
Bugger this, I strip off too.
"Grab the drinks, let's go to the post office."
We bolt as a threesome in our birthday suits up the deserted street.
The night is warm, the stars already emerging in their impossible profusion, the Milky Way a river of light that makes the darkness around it seem deeper by contrast.
Janna runs between us, her fingers brushing mine, then Billy's, creating a circuit of possibility that makes my skin feel charged.
I can smell the tequila on her breath when she turns to say something about the constellations, can smell the dust and diesel that clings to all of us, the particular perfume of Desert Edge in its final days.
Billy unlocks the parcel office fast.
A reception area with counters, a sorting room visible through glass, and the promised back room with its heavy door and climate control hum. The dead letter office. The place where things go when they can't reach their destination.
"Valuables storage," Billy says, pushing the door open to reveal a space the size of a bedroom, lined with metal shelving and empty now except for a few forgotten parcels.
"Temperature-controlled. Soundproofed. For the important stuff."
Janna steps inside first, her bare feet silent on the linoleum. She turns in a slow circle, taking in the space, and when she faces us again, her expression has changed—focused, hungry, completely present in a way that makes my breath catch.
"Lock the door," she says.
Billy does. The click of the mechanism seems loud in the small space, a finality that makes this real. We're here. We're doing this."
Janna reaches for me first, her hand finding the back of my neck with the familiarity of years. She pulls me close, and I feel her breath against my lips, warm and tequila-sweet, before she kisses me with the thoroughness of someone who's been thinking about this longer than I've been admitting.
I've kissed Janna before, at eighteen, at various points in the haze of mine camp parties and New Year's Eves.
But this is different. This is intentional. This is the two of us choosing each other in a space that's been chosen for exactly this purpose.
Her tongue moves against mine, and I feel her hand slide down my back, over the curve of my hip, pulling me against her. The contact of skin—her generous boobs on my smaller tits, her thigh between my legs, pressing into my mound—sends a jolt through me that makes me gasp into her mouth.
"Fuck," Billy says, and I remember he's there, remember that this was always meant to be three.
Janna pulls back, her lips swollen, her eyes dark with want. She looks at Billy, then at me, and I see the question in her expression—the check-in, the confirmation that we're still in this together.
I reach for him. My hand finds his chest, the surprising heat of him, and I feel his heartbeat quicken under my palm. He's watching us with the dazed expression of someone who's stumbled into a fantasy, and I decide to make it real for him.
"Come here," I say, and pull him into the space between us.
Janna the bitch is already tugging his pecker.
The three of us find the floor. Limbs tangle. Hands grope. Holes are willingly trespassed. Someone has a finger in my starfish. Another two are spreading my pussy.
I watch them kiss around me—Janna taking charge, her fingers in his hair, her body language all command—and feel the twist of arousal that comes from seeing her want someone else, from knowing that her want includes me in its architecture.
"Touch her," Janna says to him, breaking the kiss to direct.
"She likes it rough."
The bitch, she jags a second finger in my tailpipe.
She's right. I do.
Billy's hand moves to my breast with new confidence, his thumb rough against my nipple, and I arch into the contact with a sound that surprises me.
Janna's mouth finds my other breast, her tongue circling, teasing, and I have the sudden overwhelming sensation of being consumed from both directions, of being the centre of something larger than myself.
"More," I manage, and they give it to me.
Billy's mouth replaces his hand, sucking hard enough to make me cry out, while Janna's teeth graze my collarbone, my shoulder, the sensitive hollow of my throat.
Their hands meet at my waist. Both push into my navel. The filthy pair insert a finger each in my soaking fanny. One stretches up, one stretches down.
"Oohh! Aahh!" I'm one happy girl.
"Look at you," Janna whispers, and I know she means all of me—spread out on the floor of the dead letter office, flushed and wanting and completely present in this moment that will never happen again.
She moves down my body with the confidence of someone who knows my responses better than I do herself.
Her mouth finds my inner thigh, and I feel her breath hot against my skin, feel the deliberate delay as she makes me wait, makes me want.
I hear her gather a spitball in her mouth before she launches it over my pink crinkled flaps.
Pptt! Pptt!
A double glob launch.
I feel the hit. I feel the tacky. The dribble and channelling around my folds and down to my arse.
Billy kisses me, his mouth tasting of tequila and surprise, his hand finding my breast again with more certainty now.
I kiss him back with the urgency of someone who's been waiting for this without knowing she was waiting, and when Janna's tongue finally finds my clit, I break the kiss with a gasp that sounds like her name.
"Fuck, yes," I breathe, and feel her smile against me.
My private bud arches, arches, chases Janna's tongue as it pats and dabs. Pats and dabs. Rapid fire. Her tongue twists and curls in every flesh cranny I possess.
She works me with the expertise of long practice, her tongue circling, pressing, finding exactly the rhythm I need.
Billy watches, his hand still moving on my breast, his expression caught between awe and arousal.
I reach for him and stroke him with the same rhythm Janna's using on me.
Maybe, more. I tug, rub, and pull.
He's beautiful—lean hips, dark hair, the curve of him straining toward my hand. I pull him closer, guide him to my mouth, and taste him as Janna's tongue pushes me higher. The sensation of being filled at both ends, of giving and receiving in equal measure, sends sparks through my vision.
"God, Josie," Billy groans, his hand finding my hair, his hips moving with careful restraint. "Fuck, your mouth—"
I take his pecker deeper, letting him feel the back of my throat, the constriction that makes him shudder. Janna's fingers join her tongue, pushing inside me, curling to find the spot that makes my thighs tremble.
I'm surrounded by them—Janna's mouth on my cunt, Billy's cock in my throat—and the intensity of it builds like pressure in a sealed container, like something that has to break.
"Come for me," Janna says, her voice vibrating against my most sensitive flesh.
"Come for us, Josie. Let us feel it."
"Hnnghh!"
The orgasm crashes through me with the force of a summer storm, sudden and overwhelming and completely beyond my control.
My body arches off the floor, my grip on Billy tightens, and I make sounds around him that are pure need, pure release.
Fuck knows how I don't gag on his meat.
I suck him harder. Ridiculously harder.
They don't stop. Janna keeps working me through it, her tongue gentler now but insistent, drawing out the aftershocks until I'm trembling, until my hand on
Billy shoots his wad in my mouth.
The jerk. The jerk. Filling my mouth. Dribbling down my throat and chin.
Billy goes slack, and he pulls back with a groan of completed desire.
"My turn," Janna says, and rises from between my thighs with her chin wet and her expression triumphant.
She kisses Billy, letting him taste me on her lips, and I watch them with the languid satisfaction of someone who's been thoroughly undone.
But I'm not finished. I want more. I want everything this night can give us before the generators fail and the water stops and Desert Edge becomes just another ghost town on the map.
I find my feet, my legs shaky but functional, and move behind Janna. I let my hands slide around to cup her breasts, feel her inhale sharply as I roll her nipples between my fingers.
"Josie—"
"You wanted this," I remind her, my voice rough from use.
"You started this. I'm finishing it."
I push her forward, guide her to her hands and knees, and watch Billy's expression as he realises what I'm offering.
Janna's hips are slim, her ass pale in the fluorescent light.
"Both of us," I say to Billy. "I want to watch you lick her arse while I make her pussy scream."
He doesn't need more invitation than that. He positions himself behind her, and I watch him spit in her gaped ring.
His thumb gets to work smearing her rills.
I stay close, my fingers finding her clit, working her in tight circles as Billy begins his tongue work.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Janna chants, and I don't know if she's talking to him or to me or to the situation itself.
She's double-tongued the minx. Billy in her starfish. Me in her pussy.
I can feel Janna's pleasure building in the tension of her thighs, the quickening of her breath.
"Prod deeper," I tell him, and he obeys, sinking his tongue tip into her with the desperation of someone who knows this is temporary, who knows that tomorrow he'll be driving south on the Great Northern Highway and this will be just memory.
I tongue fuck the bitch at the same time. In her sweet hole. My tip sticking in as far as I can reach.
"Aahh!" Orrghh!"
Janna comes with a cry that seems too loud for the soundproofed room, her body shaking, her arse muscles clamping down on Billy's tongue in a rhythm I can see in the strain of his expression.
Fuck this. Janna's done. But I straddle Billy. I face sit the guy. One final memorable hurrah!
Janna recovers enough to join us, her mouth finding my breast.
"Look at you," she whispers, the same words she used on me, and I understand now what she meant.
Look at me—taking what I want, giving what I want, completely alive in this dead space.
The town's water may be gone.
But I give a farewell squirt.
I drench Billy's face.
Nothing then but a tangle of limbs and sweat and satisfied breath, on the floor of the dead letter office.
The air conditioning hums around us, indifferent to what we've done, and somewhere in the distance a generator continues its faint diesel song.
Fuck it!
Our clothes are at Billy's.
We cavort naked down the main street, nudie under the stars.