The Seam of the World

Polly came down out of a low grey sky and found a country that looked newly made. There were no soft green hills here, only black rock, bright moss, and thin ribbons of steam rising straight up from the ground, as if the earth were quietly breathing. Her red head and bright green body were the most colourful things for many kilometres, and her small round black-rim glasses fogged in the cool, damp air. This was Iceland, and Polly had never seen anywhere like it.

The whole island is a kind of happy accident. Iceland sits on top of a giant crack that runs along the floor of the ocean, a place where two of the great plates that carry the world are slowly pulling apart. It also sits over a hot spot, where heat rises from deep inside the planet. Fire from below, cold sea all around. That is the secret hiding under everything she would see this week.

She flew to a long valley where the split is easy to see, a deep green crack with tall rock walls on either side. The strange thing is what those two walls are. One side belongs to North America. The other side belongs to Europe. Polly hopped from one wall to the other and crossed between two continents in a single afternoon. The gap grows a little wider every year, about as fast as your fingernails grow.

By evening the steam had turned soft pink in the last light. Long ago, people used to gather in this very valley to make their laws, calling out across the same crack that was slowly tearing their island in two. Polly tucked herself into a mossy ledge, listened to the ground tick and settle beneath her, and understood that here the land itself is never quite finished.