Now

My therapist says I need a healthier way to process my anger, so I purchase a personal volcano online. Outer insulation. Apartment scale. Sweet pick, the seller writes, and I feel my anger putting a heat-resistant glove on. My personal volcano fits nicely between the ficus and the window overlooking my ex’s house. Each morning, I feed my personal volcano with the sounds of foot traffic, with email notifications, with dirty-looking clouds. By noon it glows like a small hostile peach. Pedestrians love it. Visitors inquire about it. They hold their hands over the crater and say things like, Wow, is this safe, I had no clue it would feel this great. I am doing very well, thanks for asking. My pebbles are arthritic, my lava is artisanal. My therapist asks me to rate my anger from one to ten since I purchased the volcano, and I tell her that it depends whether the volcano is dormant or not on any given day. She says the goal is not to outsource our feelings to a landform. Easy for her to say. She has a face like a retired planet. One evening the volcano erupts in the middle of a dinner with my parents. Nothing major, just a light spray of molten dressing across our salads. My father wipes ash from his glasses and says he knew it would come to this. He blames my English degree for it. I know my mother likes the volcano, though. She says at least it’s active. Later, alone at home, I kneel beside the cooling cone. I realize we both have ashen mouths. We both have made a long-gone feeling the centerpiece of our lives.

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Sarp Sozdinler is a writer from Philadelphia and Amsterdam. His stories and poems have been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf, HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, and Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He edits the literary journal The Bulb Region​. He can be found online @sarpsozdinler or at www.sarpsozdinler.com.