Rowan Wilson

Yellowstone

It was terrible, knowing, as she did, about the way pressure lived under the skin of the world. About the beautiful places pocked and pitted with sinks of trapped heat. 

She already knew more than most about how Earth's violence waited to be called up like a lonely thing. Her old secret, which she had never told anyone, was that it was she who made the floods that broke the dam, and sank three streets in town last year because, after two straight weeks of the sun's abrasions, she wanted it to rain, and it did, straight away, more than she meant. But this new secret was unsolicited. She had understood that when you want it to rain, you have to be ok with people going under. Yellowstone came on her before she could agree to the terms. 

And was it still a secret, technically, if you came by it in a room full of people? She decided yes, because she was the only one it stuck to, and that was why there was something wrong with her.

Miss Lin was the one who told her. Miss Lin taught geography to Year Seven twice a week. She was kind and very pretty. She came over to her desk and explained things quietly, so no one would notice when she got stuck. On the Ordnance Survey maps, she showed her how the ridges in the land were drawn with lines buckled together. When Miss Lin was gone, she traced the places on the map where the lines gathered close, and she thought, I will go there, and I'll look down, and see everything. 

This term, Miss Lin was telling them how the world was made, how it hung together. Everything moved more than they knew: continents mashed against each other, the ground of the sea slid into gaps and melted. Everything they could see was being carried over a hot mineral slush. Already, this made her uneasy. It didn't mean anything for there to be, say, the shopping center, or Germany, if every year they were slipping further and further out of place. And if it was true, the maps she loved with their dense skeins of lines were useless, were always already relics out by millimeters the minute they were printed. Every day she came to class prepared to learn some horrible new thing. But she kept coming, both because she had to, and because she loved Miss Lin, which was the harder compulsion.

It was Tuesday, first period, and she was listening very hard because she thought it might trick Miss Lin into looking at her. Miss Lin said she wanted to tell them about a volcano. A cloud shuttered across and light hit against the back wall of the classroom. Colors hardened. This was why she liked rainy weather—rain made everything soft, like taking your glasses off. 

“This volcano,” Miss Lin said, “could change how Earth looks.” She told them its name was Yellowstone, and it was called a “super-volcano,” and its magma was kept underground in a chamber that went miles deep. On a map of America, it sat squat at the intersection of three square states. Everything was bigger in the USA—you could fold England tens of times along its length like an accordion, and there were giant mutant trees in California—so it made sense that their volcanoes would be super-sized too. “SUPER!” was an American thing to call a crock of boiling rock. Often she liked thinking about big stuff, like dinosaurs or the ocean, because they made her brain feel minor and smooth and older somehow, shrunk back into a cave at the start of matter. 

If the super-volcano exploded, it would make a super-eruption. You could see it from space: plume, flash, the sky packed solid with ash. Mountains heaped under new mountains. Miss Lin showed them an animation up on the screen—The Yellowstone Caldera Through Time. In the video, the caldera was a big yellow sun trapped in dirt. Three times it pulsed, and the picture came apart. Each pulse was an eruption. The subterranean sun was moving, slowly, like a tumor roving under skin. Now it moved east, away from the faceless middle states toward familiar things—New York, its TV skyline. Except, Miss Lin explained, that it wasn't. In fact, America was moving on top of it. The continental plate ground over westward so that Yellowstone seemed to change its address. 

America, a huge national transient, shuffling into the sea. And Yellowstone fixed underneath, eating it up. This felt too big, suddenly, to hold in her head.

Yellowstone moved on a bigger time than our time. Some day, our time and Yellowstone time would converge, and it would be the end of most things. When someone asked, Miss Lin said, “Well, some scientists say today or tomorrow. In a thousand years, maybe, but maybe tomorrow.” Miss Lin said some scientists thought Yellowstone was overdue. She pictured it pregnant and groaning, its big belly wedged in the ground, carrying its horrible lava baby. 

Overdue. Which meant that every minute was a minute in which Yellowstone either erupted or didn't. You could locate no instant that didn't contain the option. She felt time pulled taut in the air next to her ear, shuddering under the weight. And she hadn't known. And she knew now.

Her brain was cramped, itching. She felt the surround of her skull, ungiving, felt its sterile whiteness. The heaviness of bone that comes with fever. She wondered if her head could get so hot it would burst open like fruit.

Miss Lin kept talking, about depressions and extrusions and Old Faithful, and she said to herself out of the scatter of her thoughts, why do they call it that, what's that, why faith? She was in pieces. No one tells you what's braced under the world. 

At the end of class, everyone was leaving, and no one looked different, and she thought, maybe they didn't hear it. Maybe she was only talking to me. She asked Nabila, who spoke to her sometimes out of proximity, if the Yellowstone thing wasn't crazy. Nabila said it was and went to French. 

On the school computers at lunch, she looked up the populations of the cities nearest Yellowstone. She registered them. She felt nothing in particular. It was information. She forgot the numbers as soon as she closed the window.  

Then she looked up pictures of the land that coiled around the caldera. It was one of the loveliest places she'd ever seen. The river was so green and so full it hurt to look at. Where it cut through the cliffs the rock swelled around it like a split lip. There were never any people in the pictures, even though she knew it was a National Park, and there must be people there all the time. She felt bad then, thinking about the crack-up, all the trees gouged out of their roots, the lakes evaporated, the hills surprised into nothing. Bison and wolves and mountain goats pouring over the plains, their skins shucked off them in the heat before they knew to stop running. 

On the way home, it was the same, head jangling, pictures of fields slick with fire. She walked along pavements holding her little sister's hand and she thought—there is rock deep under, and it is not smooth; there are spurs and clefts and hollows and everything on top is just paste. Everything she could see was so thin. One stone underground would shift, and it would all twitch and scatter like reflections in water. The streets would not be streets, would not even be called streets. There would be no one with mouths to name them. What scared her was not what she was seeing, as much as how easy it was to see it, now that she knew.   

Yellowstone set in like rot. Weeks passed; she couldn't get rid of it. Come May her mother, frightened of the volcano theme, took her to see a psychiatrist. She hadn't wanted to explain any of it at home, but it was hard to talk about other things without it rising onto her tongue. It was a muscle spasm. It wasn't her choice. Besides, she thought, shouldn't she be warning people to live differently? Shouldn't she be talking about necessities? Shouldn't she be showing everyone what was the real-est thing? Her mother thought no, and that was why they were sat waiting in the cleanest hallway she'd ever seen picking over magazines for architects.

The psychiatrist was the biggest thing in his office where everything was made for children. He sat on a low chair with his long thin scaffolding legs sprawled out. He stepped over the dolls and the abacuses and the little plastic animals like a giant fallen down the plant to Jack's house. He made her shake his hand. 

“Hello,” he said, “I'm Dr. Lipska. You're here to talk to me about the volcano.”

Dr. Lipska knew all about Yellowstone. He had an interest in geology, he said. He had been to places in America where you could stand at the top of a cliff and look out and see, actually see, the rock get older the further down you looked. 

“I imagine you know,” he said, “that lots of volcanologists aren't concerned about Yellowstone at all. I am sure you have read that many think Yellowstone could be ‘overdue’—he did the quotes vigorously with his hands—for another hundred thousand years. More, even.” She nodded. “So why does it concern you particularly?”

“It doesn't concern me.”

“But you think about it.”

“Yes.”

“How do you think about it?”

What was she supposed to say? That Yellowstone was Pac-Man, all along the roads in her head, eating up her other thoughts in big gulps? That she couldn't remember how to think about anything else? That she was worried she would think about it so much she wouldn't have room even to remember herself, and she would wake up one day, prepubescent and senile, not knowing her sister's face and pointing with loose hands at seismic activity graphs?

“I think about it a lot,” she said. 

Dr. Lipska said that the natural world didn't mean anything by itself. It was, he said, a flat green sheet onto which we paste our thoughts. “For example, I have a tree I pass on my walk to work to which I ascribe friendly attributes. It bends low and makes shade, and I think children could climb it easily. I think of it as approachable, and as having good intentions towards me. I know this isn't real, but I like believing it.” Similarly, he said, Yellowstone had no malice of its own. She was the only person putting badness into it.  

She didn't understand. She didn't think Yellowstone was bad or that it meant to hurt her. It was the intentlessness of it that made her crazy. It didn't have volcano thoughts or volcano wants, and still, it could ruin all this, every nice tweed sofa owned by every psychiatrist in England and the world. How do you think about something that won't think about you back? How can you do it without getting less real? 

It was too big to explain, so she nodded, yes, yes, she thought Yellowstone was vicious. He nodded back. He said it was important to understand where the malice she was projecting came from. “Do you ever feel angry?” he said. “Do you ever think about hurting yourself or others?”

She flinched on the way home, feeling the earth through the floor of the car. She didn't go back to Dr. Lipska.

Yellowstone bedded deeper down. Her dreams were awful and the surfaces in them had no grass, no leaves, nothing to keep you from getting lost. She thought about packing bags with everything she needed and going north. She thought about standing in the sun and waiting all her life for the blow. She thought, often, about the moon. On clear nights every month or so she could see the mottling on its surface, and everyone else could see it too—it looked like something fungal, sickly-white swell mushrooming out of the dark. If you walked on the moon, you would have to never take your eyes off the ground. What she knew—and no one else knew, except maybe Miss Lin—is if you peeled away every school, every office block, every orchard on Earth, you would find the same half-rotted core. The same alien, treacherous clump of rock. 

It was hot that summer. Hot enough to imagine burning. She woke up with mosquitoes smashed against her face. The air shimmering like broken glass. You couldn't move for catastrophe.

Knowing what she knew got so bad that she could hardly bear to step outside. It was hard to believe that the ground was factual, that it wouldn't squish down under her feet like cake. She was dizzy all the time. She stopped going to school. She stayed in her bedroom and pretended the house was floating. Her room was at the top of the stairs, so high that if she made the effort she could feel herself suspended, the jewel of a pendant, swinging in air. Air, she knew, got less the higher up you went. There would be more room to breathe the less of it there was. When she lay on the floor and looked up at the window, all she could see was sky. 

Some weeks into her confinement, her mother asked Miss Lin to come and speak to her. She thought it would be strange, having a teacher in her room, but when Miss Lin came up the stairs, it felt only as unreal as everything else. 

Miss Lin moved around her room awkwardly, turning between the walls the way old people do when they forget why they are where they are. In the end, she took a seat on the chair she kept under the window for looking at the sky. She didn't ask her how she was or tell her about school. She spoke all at once.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. The truth is there are millions of strange things underground and I don't think about them a lot. I talk about them in class, but they don't interest me. I think they're senseless. I like thinking about things people make. I'm interested in cities, and people moving about in them. People turning lights on at night is beautiful to me, and volcanoes are ugly, so I ignore them, and they stop being real. Does that make sense?”

She didn't know. She had never ignored anything in her life. 

Miss Lin turned away from her and looked out the window. “I was scared of so many things when I was eleven. I don't even remember them all. It might not be the same for you. Maybe you'll remember everything.”

She wanted to explain that she wasn't scared, not really. Or rather, not scared of the event. She wanted to tell Miss Lin about how the worst times were when she wanted it to happen. This was not because she was angry or crazy. She wanted everyone to know how it was. She wanted the ground to move in sympathy. She wanted things to correspond. On the thin, frangible membrane of the planet where everyone lived, it was awful. People had knives and bad food and genetic diseases of the blood, and the reason she had to walk her sister to school was that she had told them a man had been following her home every day for a month. And Yellowstone squatted underneath and made nothing change. For the very worst things to happen and the ground not to move was unfeeling, was a mistake.

But she looked at Miss Lin, her face small and sharp and clear like the bits of polished agate she loved in museum gift shops, and she knew that she was trying to be good. Miss Lin was doing a kind thing. What she wanted to make Miss Lin understand was not kind. So she told her nothing, and she asked, “What were you scared of?”

“Oh,” Miss Lin said. “Everything. I had nightmares. Our house breaking apart. Getting pulled along behind a car…”

When Miss Lin was gone, she felt lonely. A big cathedral loneliness. It was colder outside. The sky was clean, like after rain, though it had been dry for weeks. She thought, I wish I wanted to go outside. 

She went to the window and looked down. A swinging, pitching feeling in her stomach, her eyes disused to the drop. Across the road, there was an ash tree. The wind caught in its head. Leaves flashing over each other like a school of green fish. Trees knew what moved through the earth, and still, they heaved themselves up to the air. Senseless, Miss Lin said, senseless. Its whole, aboveground life.

She let time fall past her. She tried to think as little as possible. Her mother brought her dinner, and she ate it numbly. When she fell asleep, she dreamed of a high lonesome planet, herself perfectly still on a beach watching it grow out of the sea. Mountains blooming and crumpling back down into the water. That fast-forward seeing particular to dreams. The same progress, over and over: species, caves, settlements, reservoirs, federations. All the way down to Miss Lin's house, Miss Lin's breaking-apart house, built tall by a man and a woman who looked very much like her. Miss Lin growing up inside it, and then the house folding back down into dust. Everything rose and sank like breath. She knew all along that if she didn't keep entirely still and quiet, she would stop seeing it—knew that she was only barely allowed to watch. In the morning when she woke up, she couldn't remember if she had been scared or not.

In the end, there was no sudden break with the idea. In the end, the thoughts fell away one by one when the new school year began, and everyone was relieved. Many people had told her—would continue to tell her, all her life—that you had to talk about bad feelings to make them go away, and she was sure this was true for other people, but she had simply crunched them all up in her own private head. She wore the platform shoes her mother had bought to make more of a gap between her and the ground, and she stopped feeling stirrings under her feet. She worked hard to catch up on all the things she had missed learning, and none of them did anything to her. She had a new geography teacher, who told them that cities in India and China and Brazil were outgrowing themselves, stacking apartment blocks so tall you couldn't see to the top, which was also because of pollution. He was ok. He made them do collages.   

She waited. Years occurred; real things happened in them. She moved house and was kissed and saw good movies, and she watched on the news when places she didn't live were leveled. People talked more about the trouble that lived under the earth, mines and minerals and the sea swelling up over the coasts as if it was boiling. She knew these things, and they frightened her the average amount. Yellowstone was something she told people she wanted to fall in love with her, so they'd feel closer to her, or bad for the interesting child she had been. Sometimes, they traded her something similar, a story or a bad dream that had startled their young brains out of the common circuits. Spontaneous pregnancy, serial killers, the Dyatlov Pass incident. The woman she would marry spent her thirteenth year convinced her dad was going to kill her. She wrote spells to stop it in her diary, small enough that only she could read. Maybe every girl had one, only some forgot. Or didn't care to remember. 

And if she still stepped uneasily over gaps in the pavement, ugly places where the seam showed and the eye dropped down, it didn't mean anything. It was vestigial, an old lodged scrap she carried around like an appendix. When, in the middle of her life, the Yellowstone Caldera erupted at last, she saw as much of it as anyone else.

Rowan Wilson is a writer, medieval literature researcher, and amateur geologist currently living in Bonn, Germany. Their debut novel manuscript, Can These Bones, has been nominated for the 2022 PFD Queer Fiction Prize. They have never seen Yellowstone but have sworn to get there at least once before they die. Find them on Twitter @ineptdotjpeg.