Catherine Zeidler
All day we look for lava but there is none. We are on our hands and knees with little flashlights clipped to baseball hats, sniffing for remnants of fire and groping the cavern walls for stored heat. We dig our fingers into millions of cold black notches; we shove our flashlights into thousands of little tunnels, straining our eyes to find the black ends of them. At mid-day the sun fills the hole above us and we sit and picnic and settle into stillness. We lean slowly to our elbows, and then to our backs and we lie against the rock, stretching our surface areas and waiting for trembles. We wait and settle further and reach for each others’ fingertips; we can feel our breath and weight and bones but there are no trembles. It is utterly still. Then out of the stillness there is a flutter and a flurry and bats swoop down from a nook in the black rock above and dig into our knapsacks and steal apples. While they eat them red scraps of skin rain down on us but this is the only red we see all day. It is all black. So many shades of black.
After lunch, we sit and watch the sun creep from bright into dark and we wait.
So this is an un-active volcano, he says.
It’s awfully inactive.
Why would anyone come here?
They don’t seem to.
How did we get here?
We came by bike. We woke one morning and dumped all our things into the river. Then we got on our bikes and waved at friends and family as we rode away. We waved the way children wave at animals—our eyes big, our minds blank, we held our palms vertically and shook them, thumbs to pinkies. We rode over bridges and through mountains and across the sea and up and down and in circles until the land began to flatten and unify and populate. We turned left. Soon we were alone again and travelling toward a black bump on the horizon.
It feels like a dream.
Did you see all the black? How many shades?
I lost count.
It was impossible to keep track.
We are sitting parallel, legs outstretched, leaning back on our hands, watching the sunlight creep out of our circle of sky, mentally preparing for the long cold dark night.
So we are adults now, he says.
I think we must be.
I was really hoping for lava.
There is nothing to do but drink beers and stare up into the black and so that is what we do.
Why did we come here, I ask him.
It’s not that bad. I don’t know.
It’s terrible. What were we thinking?
I don’t think we were.
We should think more.
Do you want to climb out?
Now that we’re here, maybe we should stay a bit.
It’d be cowardice to leave now.
We lay there until the light returns. The light here is incredible.