Fundamentals of Physical Geology

this is a short story i wrote for my undergraduate creative writing class! it is about a girl who turns into a rock. here it is:

There once was a girl named Heather whose heart flowed as fast and hot as lava. She poured in massive waves from the catastrophe her life had thus been, leaving nothing but further charring in her wake. Trying to hold onto anything in her life was like touching a hot stove: dangerous, fleeting, leaving a blister. Yet she was never fast enough to escape the clouds of ash and smoke that followed from her.

That was until the day that Heather’s lava ran dry. She looked back, for the first time in her short life, to find that the eruption from which she was born was nothing but a dot on the landscape. The sky, incredibly, was as open and blue as the back of a whale. All the hellfire now was coming from her and her alone. It was time, it seemed, for her to settle down.

So, after years of self-destruction, Heather had slowly and surely built herself a home out of the chaos. The remainder of her magma protested, thrashing, fighting against the newness of getting older. Yet she persisted. Now she had birds to watch through her window, clothes to mend, night classes to study for, and a real friend, Mallory, who helped her see beauty in everything around her. She found herself decelerating long enough for time to catch up with her. And she’d wanted it to – she found she wanted to go slow enough to watch life as it passed by. She had this newfound ease on her mind when she’d climbed up to her creaky attic guest room that morning to sort through old boxes of trinkets and memories, hoping to enjoy each moment of a quiet Saturday. And when she found herself up there, keeping still in the chilly, bright air, the lava finally cooled to solid rock.

Her name was Heather, and she was stone.

Warm, sunlit dust sprinkled onto the shoulders of the statue. A twangy tune reverberated from two floors below, reminding her of a time of turning volume dials, doorknobs and whisks, opening windows and cabinets and books — a mirage of minuscule movements that she’d taken for granted. She’d come up here for something, some time ago, but her limbs had turned to rock and lime. The attic was her lonesome museum. 

Heather longed for the song downstairs. To dance in its presence, in tune with the air rather than entombed by it. She could imagine the harpists’ nimble fingers plucking each string in quick succession, the drum of her stomach as she called out her lyrics. Her own hands had cemented. Her wrists were as rigid as a plank of wood. Once a girl, and now her tomb.

The noise was driving Heather mad. She’d been enjoying her musician work through her soft melodies, but layer upon layer had been superimposed to the point where all she could hear from the first-floor radio was the odd note or beat, and with every coat of sound she felt a bit of her sanity wither away. 

First had been the TV static – not egregious on its own, but an annoyance in that it muffled the already quiet reverberations she was trying to focus on. Her brother must have forgotten to turn it off before he left for work. Not like she could go fix it now. Then her tinnitus flared, the ringing in her right ear coming in loud and clear. A construction site started whirring away outside, two doors down, adding a second floor to a mid-century bungalow. The clanging of metal, rock, wood, and dirt rang in dissonance with the beeping and screaming machines, each clamouring for her attention. There was no rhythm to it, no beauty, only pragmatics, and Heather wanted to cry and hear her song but there was no water left in her porous body. Just move, just go, what is stopping you? The wind outside picked up, whistling through the drafty windows, filling her ears even further. She could hardly hear any of her tune anymore, lost as it was to the racket. A single line from it, her favourite, echoed as a memory through her mind: There’s a big black spider hanging over my door, can’t go anywhere, anymore… and she could take an easy breath for a moment. 

She decided to mentally conjure her friend to distract from her burial under the waves of sound – even if she were there, though, Heather didn’t think she could speak a thing anyway. She imagined her and Mallory picking out produce, heading home laughing and chatting, in hysterics while heating up soup and bread for dinner. Sitting around the table gossiping about people they’d gone to school with. Through the deafening roar of reality, she found a quiet refuge with her friend. She thought about a future sunny day where they could go to a museum and see a new restaurant, or go paint a clay plate, or lie side by side on the hand-me-down carpet enjoying the other’s presence. Light rushing in through open windows, wind chimes tinkling, Mallory’s laugh, the ability to smile – hold on to that thought, don’t let it go, hold on, play it over and over – there’s a big black spider hanging over my door – 

It took all her focus, as the sound got worse and hurt her deeper and deeper, to keep the oasis in her mind from blurring and falling away from her. On and on she went, unable to divert anything to think of anything new: Mallory’s laugh – there’s a big black spider hanging over my door – wind chimes – Mallory’s laugh – there’s a big black spider –

The strain of it pierced through her, shattering her rocky core. The fantasy overused like a paper crumpled and smoothed out and rubbed and worn, the friction like a carpet burn blazing in her mind. She was sick of it. Each forced repetition became more unbearable, warping a good thing in her mind, a big black spider, weathering her away like sandpaper. The wind of the attic was blowing through like a tornado, sucking the breath out of her calcified lungs. It blew boxes open and shelved items astray. Books, ceramics, glass, and metal rapped against her, chipping at her sanded, eroded, broken body. Her perspective warped as her body shrunk and sank closer to the ground, the whip of the sand only contributing to the roar, snapping her eyes away from the hole in the wall at which she’d been staring.

The hurricane stopped, parting for her to hear a gorgeous sweep of the harp. It was enough to sob in relief. And she did, or at least her version of it. In that destroyed attic, Heather had deteriorated down to a collection of pebbles. They rolled against one another in the leftover, mournful breeze. She may still be rock, but she was light enough to be blown bit by bit by the air. Slowly and painstakingly, the wind carried her way across the dust-filled room, under strewn blankets and broken plant pots, to the ladder from which she’d came. And down she fell.

The collection of smoothened pebbles rang like notes on a fractured music box as Heather collided down the ladder, bouncing off the second-floor landing and down the stairs. Each rung smashing against her was theoretically painful, but it had been so long since she had felt anything but sharp dust and bullying winds. The worn wood, the rough carpet, the polished railing: it was substance. She was real. She was here, now, in a moment in time that was anchored by familiar feelings and objects. She was free. If she had arms, they would be reached out in splendour. Yet with each bound forwards she splintered out into smaller and smaller pieces like glass, leaving tiny residues of herself in the cracks of the floor and holes in the wallpaper. By the time she rolled down to the foyer, there were no pieces of significance left together. A million tiny fragments, unable to form a whole being, lingered in the air and the bones of the house. Scattered around, unable to put on the illusion of unity, it was like no pieces of her existed at all. Heather had disintegrated to dust in the air.

Mallory stepped through the door with a box of grocery store cookies and a bottle of sangria. Even if she wasn’t physically here, beside her, it didn’t mean Heather wasn’t around, and Mallory felt her presence as something akin to a ghost. She slipped her shoes off and her slippers on, meandering through the house she was so familiar with. It couldn’t take care of itself, and Heather’s brother surely wasn’t, so Mallory had a habit of coming over to listen to records and tidy up on Sunday afternoons. The whole place felt like Heather; although she knew Heather wouldn’t have let it become this dusty. Mallory didn’t even understand where it was all coming from. It tracked on her slippers out of nowhere, and every week there was a cloud when she dusted the DVD player. Lately, it had somehow even gotten inside the disc inserts, which Mallory didn’t even know was physically possible in such a short amount of time. But she was a scientist at heart and decided that this week she would start trying to collect of it as much as possible for research purposes. Since the dust collection seemed to like the DVD player so much, she placed it in a little ceramic bowl next to it. By the end of her cleaning, a tiny pile had made a home right in the centre of it. Whenever she saw Heather next, as she felt certain that she would, it would make a fun little story about improving her ventilation system. 

Heather, from her state of dust, could hear Mallory singing along to one of their favourite albums. They’d each bought a copy of this one at a music festival last summer. She felt the reverberations of the speaker bouncing each little particle of her disintegrated being, shaking her in her little dish. She’d never been so close, so overpowered by music before. It was frightening, and such a jarring way of coming back into consciousness that Heather momentarily considered tipping her bowl and scattering herself back into oblivion again. 

The next track was particularly intense, and Mallory apparently wanted to be fully immersed, cranking the volume to a level that Heather doubted the neighbours would be alright with. The booming bass bore down on her, attacking with punch after punch. It was enough that Heather could imagine what it must have been like for her flowery container to be fired in its kiln – the heat coming in almost liquified waves, a fiery, feverish tsunami. She tried not to dwell on the image, and instead congratulate herself on coming back together enough to think again, but that hellish tomb kept reappearing, imploring her to be engulfed by it. Fuck, I can’t hear the music anymore. Has it stopped? Is it happening again? Each piece of her rough sand scratched against herself in the dish, crowding in closer and closer together, as her vision went red and black and red and black and the pressure was pummelling her so badly she couldn’t breathe. Yet – at the same time – as she faced this, as she awoke to the pain of her reality and the situation that she found herself in, and let it pass through her, it started bringing those pieces of her back together. She’d enjoyed being quiet, and timeless, and floating above existence rather than alongside it and now she was being forced back in. The heat and the pressure kept going and going, like there was no end to be had. Is this what Mallory’s samples felt like in the autoclave?

Eventually, the feeling ebbed, and Heather found herself reground on her kitchen floor, her back against the counter, the music now a whispered lullaby above her head. Once scattered dust, and now reformed by time, heat, and pressure, to a human once again. Tears came streaming, like her leaky bathroom tap, carving a canyon down her face and neck. She moved one finger, and then one on the other hand, and then all of them, and then her toes and elbows and even her shoulders. They responded without hesitancy, without scratching or erosion or pain or force. And when she opened her eyes, the whole world seemed tinted a different shade. Mallory held out a hand for her, gliding her up as gracefully as water. Heather felt, finally, that when she spoke, her voice would comply.

“I missed you. How’ve you been?”

Newsom, Joanna. Have One on Me. Drag City, 2010.

thank you for reading!