Waiting on Mount Katla

On all three separate occasions the eruption of Mount Eyafjallajökull has preceded that of Mount Katla. Eruptions from the Angry Sister are explosive and often catastrophic to the Icelandic countryside. Basaltic volcanoes must melt the ice above, and three major glaciers have breached the rim of Katla’s caldera. Rivers of molten rock and rivers of water are released at once, the heat of the blast pluming the ejecta into a cloud large enough and dark enough to give the old world a year without summer. The history of the world is not a misunderstanding. It’s worse than that.

When she was twelve, Sophie’s big sister Vivan wanted to be a volcanologist. It seemed the inevitable dialectic progression of Sophie’s life that this would be so when her father returned home, quiet, late at night, as usual and drank one beer. Then another. You’re fucking pathetic! Sophie screamed when he began correcting her math homework, refusing to explain the quadratic equation before she learned to write chi properly, and smoldered out of the room past the figure of Vivian, silent, dancing. He drank another one, she just knew it, after she had gone to bed, and Vivian was crying in the bed next to hers. Sophie knew her face to be flushed and puffy in the dark, the tears flowing from her green eyes, no words, not yet. In Iceland the release of glacial outbursts is called jökulhlaups. In Red Bluff, California Vivian called it Andaenala, a word in a language only she spoke. It meant the wrath of the void, but her sister hadn’t told her yet. Vivian filled her composition notebook with her own private iconography, the portrait of the smith-god Myena-Hallea who forged weapons out of fire for heroes and lived alone, and the extensive catalog of igneous rocks Sophie had found in Mr. Woodward’s unplanted field that all looked the same.

Sophie only told her father about what was below the skin of Vivian’s world once, outside the second and more popular Baptist church one Sunday morning, and the hair on her arms stood raised from the scaled, cold surface uncovered by her Sunday best. She remembered all the data her sister had mined from the underworld, and it confused her, and she thought of it all the time, and she thought about it over and over and over again. Her father suggested that Vivian’s information derived from the esoteric principle that ruled seeds of heavenly virtues he had planted inside of her. In April, President Grimsson warned the press that the time for Katla to erupt is coming close: we have prepared. And Sophie thought again of obsidian glass, the tears, the caution and calculations you learn to perform when you sleep next to the threat of Holocene-era dissolution, of glass-rich ash diversions in the Jet Stream, of walls between twin beds and other rooms, thin as ice between sisters.

Courage. It must be courage. She must call it courage.