Sakurajima-iro by Samuel Barnhart

When we were kids, Sadoko always joked that I was nothing but knees and elbows. Getting them scraped, constantly covered in bandages. I didn’t think it was funny, but young girls take everything seriously. Looking back now I could laugh. And I would have if my eyes and throat weren’t burning, if I wasn’t struggling to breathe through the hot ash swirling in the night sky. If Sadoko wasn’t chasing me with an already bloody knife up a volcano that had just erupted, I would’ve laughed and never stopped.

“Masoka!”

I crawled up the side of Sakurajima on my knees and elbows. Everything I touched ached with heat. The ground was still soft in some places, hard as glass in others. I heard Sadoko following me, her knife whistling in the air if I slowed. At any moment she could end this, yet she chose not to.

“Listen to me, Masoka!”

Even if the air hadn’t been clotted with ash, it was still too dark to see. No moon to guide me, only the steady sensation of crawling upward. Away from the boiling sea that’d cook me alive if I stumbled and fell. Away from Kagoshima, our homes and our families and half a million other people buried under tons of molten rock.

I saw it happen. Lava streaming down through the streets, given an unearthly glow from the setting sun. People running, cars skidding. I felt it happen, had clung to the highest of Sakurajima’s three peaks, helplessly watched the entire city vanish beneath a tide of lava. The lowest peak was where the eruption started. Where Sadoko was. And I had started carefully down the shuddering volcano to see if she was okay.

“Masoka. No more games.” Now I felt her hand on my collar, the edge of Sadoko’s knife against the back of my neck. Warm on warm, nothing but dark, angry heat up here. She started walking, dragged me by the collar. I stumbled, scraping already scraped knees and elbows. Bouncing up the volcano in such an awkward position made it impossible to do anything but follow.

The heat and darkness got worse the closer we came to Sakurajima’s lowest peak. I was gasping the entire time, dying for a single mouthful of fresh air. How Sadoko could breathe so easily, I’ll never know.

I had climbed halfway down the volcano, the lava only just beginning to cool when I found Sadoko standing there, paying no attention to the eruption. She was gazing up at the sky, watching clouds of ash spread over it. I had called her name. She turned to look at me and when I saw what she’d done, saw the bloody knife, the truth hit me harder than an eruption ever could.

I had run, fell, and ran even faster for the highest peak once more. Daring to look back even as the darkness of ash tore the light from the stars, I saw Sadoko pursuing me, still clutching her knife. My lungs drawing smoke, there was no way to outrun her forever. Eventually I’d realized she was steadily driving me toward the lowest peak.

“Do you remember?” I wheezed as Sadoko pulled me now. “Remember you used to tease me about my knees and elbows?”

“I remember what you said about my eyes.”

We were no longer young girls back then, but teenagers, almost adults. Both of us were fascinated with Sakurajima, towering over Kagoshima. It hadn’t erupted seriously in centuries, but Sadoko and I still waved to it every day on the way to school. Our way of pacifying it.

We’d been sleep-deprived and hyperactive from working all night on the school festival. Had snuck away to the base of Sakurajima, stood barefoot in the bay. Holding hands, we gazed reverently at it. With my other hand I had scooped up some of the round, red-brown volcanic rocks sitting in the water. I held them out to Sadoko with all the sincerity a high school girl in love with a volcano could offer.

“Exactly the color of your eyes,” I had told her.

Suddenly, light surrounded me, physically painful after enduring so much darkness. Sadoko dragged me until we were right there at Sakurajima’s mouth. I looked hundreds of feet down into a hell of swirling, bubbling molten rock. Above us the sky was nothing but smoke.

Sadoko’s face came down next to mine. “You knew the secret all along. You showed me those rocks after the school festival and waited for me to make the connection.” She threw her knife into the volcano and we watched it boil away. “Thank you for showing me the power I possessed, Masoka.”

“But I didn’t know! I had no idea you’d go to these lengths.” My voice cracked and I coughed so hard it felt like I was dying. “Why would you do this, why would you make Sakurajima erupt?”

Sadoko’s stare had the fearless, inarguable intensity of a god. Her eyes the color of Sakurajima were gone now. She’d dug them out with her knife and replaced them with a pair of round volcanic rocks from the bay.

“To prove I could. That we could.”

Sadoko took my hand, softer than I would’ve expected and pulled us over the edge. A scream from one of us, possibly both. Darkness and light twisted as we fell, before the moment everything inside me exploded with heat.

After that we joined Sakurajima. Became part of it in a way I never would’ve imagined, and only Sadoko was daring enough to try. Of course there’s no way of knowing what happened to Kagoshima afterwards, though it has probably endured. Humans really are remarkably persistent. All the three of us could see was the ash eventually disperse, and give way to a gentle, full-moon sky.

—

Samuel Barnhart writes and slices bagels in South Florida. His work has appeared all over the Internet, occasionally in print, and at least once on stage. He occasionally blogs at sambarnhart.tumblr.com, where there are suspiciously few active volcanoes.