Saturday Sample: Cryptodome by Darci Bysouth

My sister started smoking at the end of March. Openly smoking, that is; she’d been charming cigarettes off the boys since she shrugged on her first bra at the age of twelve. My mother and I watched her from the kitchen window while we washed the dinner dishes. Louette stood under the streetlight with her kitten heels spiking snow and her thin leather jacket left undone. The smoke rolled off her and plumed to the moon. Her hand rose lazily to her mouth and the red ember flashed like a hazard light, her hand drifted down and the sparks scattered from her fingers. That hand would still be warm when I passed her the dish towel later, and I would see her footprints in the snow the next morning, melted there amongst the fallen ash and frozen hard by the night’s ice.

“Look at her,” my mother said, “smouldering away like she knows what it’s all about. Just like me at the same age, and would you look at how that turned out. Christ. Look at her.”

You looked at her, you stared openly in the street or the mall or the school cafeteria, for you could not take your eyes off Louette. She’d flow into your awareness with her hips rolling and eyes arcing and dark hair glowing red where it caught the light. Her mouth would slowly curl into a smile, and you’d feel the air sucked out of your lungs. She’d pool into the middle of the room and the heat would collect there, or she’d quietly slip to the edge of things and pull your eyes with her. Breathless, restless, waiting for something to happen, you’d look at her. Her voice came out deep and smoky and you’d swear you were hearing some profound secret, even if she’d only stopped to ask the time.

“Don’t you start up like her,” my mom said with her hands shoved deep in scalding dish water, “you’re supposed to be the smart one. You still going to do that volcano?”

 I nodded. The science fair was in June and the top contestant would go to the provincial finals in Vancouver. I’d planned to set up a colour wheel and talk about light spectrums; I’d already had the discs cut out and painted, and spun the patterns to a blinding white in front of my more easily impressed friends. Then the little earthquakes rattled through Washington state, shaking up the Ameri cans just over the border and tearing a crack in their prettiest mountain. The smoke spewed straight up in a delicate stream and my science teacher passed me a book on Pompeii. He said there could be an eruption, a real catastrophic event right here in our lifetime.

“Topical, this volcano,” he said, “a real topical topic, Marie.” His eyes glinted green as he leaned towards me, and I caught the fresh smell of his aftershave. My face burned red. Mr Robson was the youngest and most popular teacher in school, and he was good with words. I practiced all my best one liners for him in private, mouthing them to the mirror while the bathwater ran. “Mr Robson’s hot,” said Louette, her eyes half lidded and her hand twisting hair, “don’t you think so, Marie? Too old for you, though.” She laughed and reached for her cigarettes.

 Smoking wasn’t the only thing Louette had started. My mother would tell us to go to bed at a decent hour, then half kiss half swat us before leaving for her shift at the all night truck stop. The door would slam behind her. I’d pack my homework away at ten and prop myself up on pillow to watch Louette. She sat in front of the vanity mirror and stroked the glossy red onto her lips, dipping brush into little pot and curving the colour around her mouth. “Are you going out with Stan?” I asked, that first time. “Are you going to the lake?” Louette flashed me a look before misting her hair with drugstore scent and shrugging on Stan’s hockey jacket. I would hear the front door murmur open and shut as I drifted to sleep. Some time after midnight, a trail of stale smoke and tinny beer would waft through our bedroom and I’d wake to muffled creaks and curses. The white of the hockey jacket bobbed and glowed where it caught the light.

“What’s it like?” I whispered while she undressed in the dark. The hockey jacket hit the floor with a thunk. “Who knows?” she said with her smoky laugh. “He says we should wait until we’re married. Which means we park the car and look at the water for a while. Then we do everything but and I tell him to stop when he wants more.” She laughed again, and I sensed something red hot churning under her words.

Louette had been going out with Stan for two years. Stan played goalie for the Laketown Flames and the pucks slid off him like rain off a mountain side. He was serious about Louette and he had given her a ring. It wasn’t a diamond. Engaged to be engaged, Louette announced to the gathering girls while drifting the cubic zirconia in front of their faces. The diamond would come later, once Stan had graduated high school and was working full time in his dad’s auto repair shop. The hockey team teased Louette and slapped Stan on the back, and everyone said they made a great couple. Stan would nod, craggy faced and solid, with his big hand clamping Louette to him.

 Stan had helped me paint the colour discs for my science project, back when I was still doing light spectrums. Hockey season had ended and he had some free time. He sat with his knees wedged underneath the kitchen table and his elbows spread square, and applied delicate strokes of colour to cardboard. I could do three wheels to his one. He never tired of sticking the discs on the motorised nail and spinning them to something else.

“Cool,” he said, “how it’s so solid one minute, just blocks of green, red and blue. Then you turn it around and it’s nothing but white. Like a faceful of ice after a totally gruesome body check.”

 “Volcanoes?” he asked. “Smoke and danger, total destruction. Yeah I guess I can see why you’d want that. But this colour wheel, now that’s just a real amazing thing, isn’t it?”

Stan helped me shape the paper-mache cone of my volcano anyway. He built up the layers on a chicken-wire frame, he advised on structure and dry times. He stuck little trees from his train set at the base of the volcano and added a tin foil lake. A plastic deer was plonked on hill side. “For drama,” he said, “when that volcano blows, it’ll take victims.” Then Louette wound herself around him to whisper in his ear and I knew she was asking him if they could drive out to the lake. She was in a good mood today, all bubble and froth after a week of sullen silence. Stan smiled at me and unstuck his knees from under the table. There was the sound of his Camaro starting up in shotgun blasts, and I was left scraping cold paste from newspaper.

The winter turned to spring. The snowdrifts yellowed and softened and the first of the pussy willows showed their cloudy fluff. The sky rippled between clear blue and swollen gray, and Louette stormed around with her face drawn tight and twitchy and her fingers itching towards her pack of cigarettes. She went out in bare arms and stood under street light with her skin glowing hot.

I plucked up my nerve and asked Mr Robson for ad vice on my topical topic. He told me to keep a journal, to watch the news and read the papers. Mount St Helens was making headlines. March 27th – I copied – There is a swarm of earthquakes, one of them registering five point one on the Richter scale and carving out a crater before bringing an avalanche. Then comes an ash column, sent seven thousand feet into the air and falling within a twelve mile radius. A second crater appears March 29th. There is visible flame, and static electricity sends out lightning bolts two miles long. Now, in early April, there are at least five earthquakes a day and the governor declares a state of emergency.

 My mother’s ulcer acted up one night, and she re turned early from her shift to catch Louette sneaking through the front door. “Why should he pay for milk when he can get the cow for free?” she asked with one hand on the kitchen counter and the other clutching her gut. Louette stared at her with her black eyes smoking and her cheeks flushed scarlet, but said nothing. My mother filled a glass with water and dropped two tablets into it. They fizzed and frothed while we watched. “You’re on the narrow road to not much,” said my mother as she shuffled to her bedroom. “Believe me girl, I know.”

Louette was grounded for the entire month of April and I was made her guardian. She made a point of smoking inside and leaving her butts in the plant pots. Stan came over to apologise, standing in the kitchen with his big hands hanging and his face wobbling, and waited until my mother told him to go away. Louette brought her biology text book home from school and sat cross-legged on her bed, drawing a spiralling cycle on blank paper. Photosynthesis, she wrote with the dot on the letter ‘i’ made into a smiling sun. I told her it looked dumb and she told me to mind my own business. She helped me paint my volcano, dipping a brush into red and dragging it down the side of the mountain.

“You ever think about this place?” she said. “About where we live?”

“It’s okay,” I said, concentrating on gluing down the trees.

“We live in a goddamn trailer park,” said Louette, “a trailer park in a shithole town and it’s not okay.”

 The volcano sat between us, glistening with paint, and I could see how the newsprint had smudged gray under neath, how the entire structure looked shabby and malformed despite our work.

“I’m going to get out of here,” said Louette softly. She pinched the paintbrush between her fingers and its end glowed ember red.

Louette helped me wrap the volcano in a black plastic garbage bag so we could carry it to school. I sat at our vanity table and snuck the brush into her lip-gloss, smearing on the colour while my heart beat fast. We delivered the volcano to the science room and Mr Robson stood up when we came in. “Louette,” he said, “how’s that dark cycle going?” Louette smiled as he lifted the bag off us, and his green gaze wavered from her eyes to her lips. I stood silent while they talked, conscious of the lip gloss sticking to my mouth like glue.

April 21st – I wrote in my journal that night – Mount St Helens continues to cause concern. Scientists have noticed harmonic tremors on their instruments. They think the magma under the mountain is on the move.

 Stan was allowed to visit and Louette was allowed to stand in the front yard with him. The Camaro pulled up with its engine blatting and my mother called down the hall. Louette sat perfectly still with her eyes gone dark. Stan’s voice stammered at the door and Louette gave me a small tight smile before she grabbed her cigarettes and sauntered away. She didn’t glance in the mirror before she went; her lips were left unshined and her hair hung lifeless.

Stan seemed as rock solid as always on the surface, but I saw the changes. He sat at our kitchen table and tried to talk to me. I poured him a cola and waited. “Some thing’s changed,” he said, watching the bubbles fizz and rise. “Louette’s all different.” His face worked then, his mouth twisted and his forehead bulged and I was terrified he might burst into tears.

“It’s just school,” I said quickly with my mind casting around for details. “Final exams and all, you know? Especially biology. She can never remember the difference between light and dark reactions. Mr Robson is helping her.”

 Mr Robson was helping both of us, in the hours after school ended and the building emptied, and before the janitor cleared his throat at the doorway. Mr Robson always smiled when we appeared in front of him. He handed me a tin of baking soda and a little glass flask of vinegar and told me to mix the two together. The foam frothed over test-tube edge and Louette laughed in throaty surprise. “An acid and base reaction,” said Mr Robson, “elemental chemistry.” His green eyes glinted as they slid from me to Louette. I sat at the high laboratory table and experimented with proportions of bicarbonate and vinegar and red food colouring, recording my observations in my volcano journal. The mixture needed to erupt perfectly on the day of science fair; it would have to bubble up the test tube hidden in the paper-mache dome and pour down the sides, suggesting fiery magma to my awestruck audience. I watched Mr Robson lean over Louette and guide her pencil around his drawing of the dark cycle, and I remembered how he smelled up close, as fresh and mossy as the forest after rain. Louette turned towards him and her eyes widened a little, and I thought she’d probably noticed this very same thing.

April 30th. The United States Geological Survey re ports that one side of the mountain is bulging. This is from the pressure of the magma building inside. Two hundred and seventy feet of rock shifted now, and more pushed out every day.

May came and Louette’s detainment lifted. Stan showed up the door with a big loose grin and his car keys jangling, telling us how pretty the lake looked with sun on the water. Louette told him she was studying. I watched his face change shape, the muscles underneath his skin shifting and setting to stoic silence. “Later, maybe?” she whispered, and his face softened. I was woken again in the early hours by the bedroom door creaking open. It was too warm now for the hockey jacket, but Louette’s skin glowed white where she’d bared it. She sat quietly on the edge of her bed and I turned towards her. The usual smoky vapour drifted from her but something had changed; she smelled of some other thing both sweet and sharp. I thought of leaves unfurling and mossy rock and fallen rain, I sensed the colour green twisting through the dark and winding tight around my guts.

“Go back to sleep,” Louette whispered, sitting perfectly still, “you’re dreaming this.”

May 7th. The eruptions have started again. They are small. You can’t see the magma boiling away underneath the lid of solid rock. This is called a cryptodome. Crypto means hidden.

 Mount St Helens was in the news regularly now. It had become a familiar face, and it showed up in the comic strips smiling and blowing puffy clouds into blue sky. The tourists ate hot dogs and pointed their cameras at the ash plume, the cabin owners snuck into the danger zone to pile porch chairs and log bed frames into the backs of their pickup trucks. The geologists spoke to reporters about rate of intrusion and resulting instability while the volcanolo gists thrust dark and jagged seismic graphs at the newspapers.

“Don’t be fooled,” they said. “The entire north face could slide, and if that happens we’ll have a full scale catastrophe on our hands.” Louette seemed to sleepwalk through those days, slow and barely there, like so

me of her fire had gone out. She mumbled and drifted around the place, half dressed and half awake and always with a cigarette dangling from her fingers. It smouldered and dropped ash on the carpet, but she seemed to need the weight of it there in her hand. Night would come and something would spark in her eyes, and I got used to the empty bed on her side of the room.

Stan dropped by on the Friday before it happened. I was home alone. Louette had said she would be late as she wanted to finish off something at school.

“Where is she?” Stan asked. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms hanging empty and his chest caving inwards, but with his face oddly swollen. I could feel that awful tightness on my own face when I answered.

“With Mr Robson,” I said, as if it were nothing. I looked at Stan and he looked at me, and the rage passed between us both. I heard the Camaro throw gravel as it spun away and I had to sit down for the shaking in my knees.

Saturday was quiet. Mount St Helens had ceased all visible activity and been taken off the news, the tourists had gone home and the cabin owners were officially allowed to collect their belongings. Louette drifted through the rooms, picking up things and putting them down again.

 “Stan?” she said when I asked. “No, I never saw Stan. I should call him, I guess.” She looked at the phone and picked up her cigarettes instead.

May 18th was Mother’s Day. Louette and I had volun teered at the Strawberry Brunch held in the school cafeteria every year. Mr Robson was supervising the kids and kitchen workers. Our mother slipped in at seven just as she always did after a night shift, and told us she’d be along after a few hours of sleep.

 By twenty minutes past eight, I was setting places on the pink-clothed cafeteria tables and Louette was slicing strawberries into a bowl. Mr Robson hummed as he propped test-tubes of coloured water and carnations at each table, and neither he nor Louette looked at one another. The kitchen workers bustled back and forth with baking powder biscuits and bowls of whipped cream, and the student volunteers laughed and gossiped.

At eight thirty there was a displacement of air. Nothing more than that, no explosion or sonic boom or blast of smoke, just a sudden quiet that made me set down my stack of plates and look up.

Stan stood in the cafeteria doorway with shotgun hanging from his hands. His eyes bulged and glared in his swollen face, like they were about to pop from some incredible force within, and he was panting. The noise of this echoed through the room, bouncing off twelve grader with her hands clutched to her throat to hockey captain caught mid-cower to kitchen worker staring over her pot of steaming water. Louette had half risen from her seat with her hands stained red from strawberries, but Stan was not looking at her. He raised the gun.

Mr Robson’s hands shook and the carnations trembled in their crimson water. I saw how the colour had seeped into their delicate folds, tracing the red there like veins, and I swallowed hard.

“It was nothing,” he whispered. “Nothing. It meant nothing to me.”

 Several things happened all at once then. Stan moved faster than I would have ever thought possible, breaking from doorway and towards Mr Robson with steps like stumbling boulders, the shotgun wedged to his shoulder. “No no no” said someone and “please” said another and there was the gurgling cough of the hockey captain retching. The kitchen worker dropped her pot of hot water and it splashed and steamed and Mr Robson cried out. Stan moved fast but Louette moved faster, lifting the bowl of strawberries high and throwing it full force into Stan’s face.

Eight thirty two. I remember how my eyes drifted from bleeding carnations to blank dinner plates to numbered clock face, instinctively thinking to record the time. I watched the second hand tremble and freeze and take an eon to click forward.

Stan wheeled back and smacked against the wall, slid ing down it almost gracefully. The bowl bounced beside him and the mashed berries and red juice dripped from his face, spreading across cafeteria floor. His face crumpled and collapsed and he began to weep. The shotgun hung balanced across his skewed knees for a moment before it clattered to the tiles. Someone moaned, then there was absolute silence.

Louette stood facing Stan with her hair come undone and her sweater pulled off one shoulder. We looked at her, we stared until her image wavered and blurred and burnt itself into our eyes. Louette stood still while the air around her roiled and sparked, and we could not take our eyes off her.

“The ring,” someone said. “She’s not wearing his ring.”

 My eyes slid from Louette’s bare finger to the glint of gold lying next to strawberry stained knife, and my hand went out before I could stop it. The ring, his ring; the whisper went around the room like a wave and I knew I’d not been seen.

“Pathetic,” said Louette then. I saw how her eyes swerved to Mr Robson and stayed there, I saw how Mr Robson looked away. Louette laughed, short and sharp and caustic as ground glass. She turned on her heel and walked out.

I found her outside dragging deep on a cigarette. “I should quit this shit,” she said, “I don’t even like the taste.”

We missed the eruption of St Helen’s that day. It is all there in the records, however, with times and miles and other measurements carefully noted. At eight thirty two a.m., a five point one earthquake sheared off the side of the mountain and sent it hurtling down river valley at one hundred and fifty five miles per hour. The resulting landslide displaced the contents of an entire lake, splashing its water six hundred feet up and hillside and knocking down the surrounding forest. The magma boiling inside the cryptodome for so long found itself exposed to the air, and it reacted instantly, exploding massive amounts of rock debris, volcanic gas, ash and pumice. The landslide was quick, but the pyroclastic flow was quicker; it overtook the slide at speeds of six hundred and eighty miles per hour and even broke the sound barrier. It vaporised everything in an eight mile radius and its superheated clouds blasted the foliage off trees many miles beyond that. Fifty seven people were killed: most of them asphyxiated but others burnt or buried. It is all there in the records, the truth of the matter noted in numbers.

We missed the eruption, but they had started showing the footage on the television by the time we got home from the police station. The smoke billowed a dirty gray and I handed Louette her ring. Her fist closed around it but she did not put it back onto her finger. We watched the ash spew and Louette let me hold her hand. I noted that it seemed small and cold in mine.

The eruption sent an ash column twelve miles up and the air currents swirled it down again, covering thousands of miles in a caustic blanket and blacking out the noonday sun. The mudslides grated across bridges and the acid rain washed the evergreen off the state signs. The ash flew across the border and we watched our clear blue sky darken by degrees. There was a fine gray dust covering the tops of the cars by the next morning. No one went to school, even though it was a Monday.

The police let Stan go after a few days of questioning. His father paid the fines and was given back his gun. Stan was expelled from school and forbidden from graduating that year. None of us saw him for weeks and the rumours swirled and spread, dirtying the mouth with their taste. Some of that gossip grazed Louette, but she brushed it off.

 My volcano journal lay unopened and I stopped going to science class. A garbage bag showed up on our doorstep the week before the science fair, with a note attached. I took the paper-mache volcano out of the black plastic and left the unread note in its place.

 I was not surprised to see the science fair hall steaming with a dozen homemade volcanoes, all in various states of frothy eruption. The kid with the colour wheel spun his plates to white while the room filled with the bitter stench of vinegar. The judge pinned a blue ribbon to his stall and I was not surprised by this either.

The ash fell down and got swept up, and eventually dispersed to farther places. It was decided that Louette carried no blame for what happened. No one recalled Mr Robson’s words but everyone remembered the strawberries bursting from bowl, and how Louette had stood so strong and resolute afterwards. A relationship outgrown, they said, an engagement ring handed back and a young man left broken hearted. It was only natural, for Louette was beautiful. And working surprisingly hard at her studies these days. Hadn’t she been getting extra help with her biology before the volcano blew? The younger girls began showing up to school with dishevelled hair and their sweaters hanging off their shoulders. Louette brushed that off too and circled job vacancies at the back of the city newspapers.

Mount St Helens erupted a few more times and the news circled the globe. The ash fell as far away as Oklahoma and we all got used to the taste of it at the back of our throats. It snowed black that winter and Stan drove to the lake with his father’s shotgun into the passenger seat of his Camaro. Mr Robson’s skill with words was recalled, and he spoke on behalf of school at the funeral. He didn’t mention the volcano, he talked about flowers in the field instead. I saw the crimson veins of those carnations and had to choke back the bile. Louette called to say she’d seen the snow on the news and was it really as black as that? She was working as a medical reception ist in wealthier part of Vancouver by then, and dating a doctor.

My sister married a cardiologist and he made her quit smoking when she turned forty. Mount St Helens still vents steam and ash once in a while, and Louette phones me every time. “Turn on the TV,” she’ll say, “you don’t want to miss it.”

I can hear the restlessness in her voice, that sense of breathy excitement that still draws people to her. I know how her hands will hum with heat while her fingers flutter and tap, searching for a long ago cigarette to light and suck to red hot ember. My sister talks of her pretty children while I tell her about my research, and we never mention the mornings we wake with the taste of ash still in our mouths.

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About the author: 

Darci Bysouth grew up in the ranchlands of British Columbia and remembers the eruption of Mount St Helens. She took a literature degree many years ago and is currently studying creative writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her stories have won the Lorian Hemingway prize, shortlisted in the Bridport and Fish competitions, been published in the Bristol Anthology, and appear online in the Spilling Ink Review and the Cutthroat Literary Journal. She has just finished her first novel.