New Land

A word ran across the island that morning, passed from bird to bird: the ground had opened in the south. Polly flew toward a faint orange glow on the horizon and arrived to find the earth split along a long, glowing crack. Out of it rose fountains of liquid rock, bright as melted sunlight, throwing sparks into the grey sky. The heat reached her from far off, so she kept a careful distance, her bright green body lit orange and her round black-rim glasses full of fire.

This was the secret from her first day, made visible. Right here the two great plates were pulling apart, and the gap was filling from below with fresh rock from deep inside the planet. The people here call this new ground, and they mean it exactly. Melted rock is the planet turning itself inside out, and Iceland is one of the only places on Earth where you can watch new land being born in an afternoon.

Where the melted rock slowed and cooled, it turned to black stone, rough and sharp and steaming faintly. Nothing grows on it at first. In time a soft grey-green moss arrives, the first living thing brave enough to try, but it grows so slowly that a single careless footprint can last for many years. That is why the people here ask visitors, gently but firmly, never to step on the moss.

Polly found a safe ridge well upwind and stayed until dark. The fountains pulsed like a slow heartbeat, and the new rock glowed and faded, glowed and faded. She was watching her own first day come true, the island quietly making more of itself, one bright crack at a time.