Our sister went to help the people who came out of the volcano. She told us she was going to leave at the 4th of July picnic, while we sat around eating corn, our hands fatty with butter, silk in our teeth. Going where? our mother said. Our sister named a country, a small place far from upstate New York. An island in a string of islands. One of those old places with angry mountains. One of those angry mountains erupted, and out came people who had been living inside of it. The day it happened, our sister told us and I didn’t believe it. Then, we turned on the news and there they were: the people who erupted out of the volcano. They were all stunned-looking, scorched and dusty. The air filled with debris. The volcano people milled around and hugged each other.
Our sister told us, as she held the most beautiful ear of corn in her hands, that she wanted to help the people from the volcano, because the news said they didn’t know how to live in the world, and the people who lived on the island were overwhelmed by this sudden influx of human beings. Our sister was already part of an organization, the kind that goes places to help others. Being her sister makes one feel they aren’t doing their part. She believes you can actually make a difference in the world, and the rest of us know for a fact this isn’t true. All of us went to the airport to see her off. When our sister arrived on the island, after a plane ride, another plane, a bus, and another small, terrifying plane, there was chaos. The organization had found a single boarding house for them to stay in. They went there first, but didn’t stay long.
Our sister was already exhausted, but out she went with the rest of the organization. They borrowed a van from someone in the village and filled it with supplies, but the supplies were not the point. The volcano came into view and it was like a god had come and taken a scoop out of a mountain with an ice cream scooper. Smoke somehow still lingered, the air filled with particulate matter. Glitter, our sister thought. She put a mask over her face.
The first of the volcano people came to speak to her. Unfortunately, she didn’t understand his language, and when she spoke, he seemed not to hear her or care.
The volcano people had no clothes, so the nearby villagers clothed them. The organization gave them jeans. Our sister wrote to us: They will not settle. All day they wander around, and all night they walk the streets and the wreckage at the foot of the volcano. Last night, I stood at the window and watched a group of them break apart. One went here, one went there, one stood outside the boarding house and just looked. When we can get them all in the same place, we try to make them understand that they have no choice but to adjust to the way things are. I hate that! Why should they adjust? But they also can’t wander around forever, not being a part of things. Because they really aren’t a part of things. They’re all still in the volcano in their minds.
For some reason, our brother laughed at that line, and made it into a song. They’re all still in the volcano in their minds, he sang, with his eyes shut tight. I dreamed about the people walking around all day and all through the night, and I didn’t think it was funny at all. I wrote our sister an email in the morning. I told her that the volcano people were in my thoughts, as if they were ill or had died.
One morning, our sister woke to a strange quiet. At the window, she looked out at the mist. Palm trees towered. In the distance: a smoldering. She noticed on the street a few human forms. Still. Collapsed on their sides, fetal. She hurried out of the boarding house to investigate. They were not asleep, but cast in hardened ash. The bodies of the volcano people, she assumed, like sculptures carved out of the stuff of the mountain. Behind her, on the plot of land in front of the house, a figure stood. She had completely missed it on her way out because it was dark grey, nearly black. The volcano person who had come to stare at the boarding house, now also a statue of ash and stone. Our sister ran into the boarding house to wake everyone.
On the news, we saw the footage. They were here and now they’re gone. In two weeks, no one will be talking about it, our mother said.
Our sister did not come home. The day of the transformation, she and the other members of the organization helped to lift the volcano people. Agents from the local government decided that they were the property of the island nation. Hardly anyone spoke. They found child-sized ones. They found all kinds. Our sister, covered in grey powder from head to toe, cried alone in her room at the end of the day. She traced shapes in the ash on her arms. She would not sleep. In the night, she left the boarding house and found herself walking to the eruption site, the foot of the ancient volcano. The air was still hot and full of energy, rumbling underfoot, lava glowing somewhere in front of her. Our sister was always poetic and kind of romantic, so we can’t say exactly what she was thinking while she stood looking at that big cradle of the earth. She imagined herself perhaps falling into it, disappearing forever, and we would never hear word about it. No email, letters, nothing. Oh, how people come and go.
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Richard Mirabella is a writer and civil servant living in upstate New York. He is the author of the novel Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for gay fiction.