Magma

// Sadie Shorr-Parks

Time tapped forward as constant as a dial-tone.

The spaces of notyou have been filled, I wrote.
It’s funny isn’t it, how even a short story can have a long ending? And we were always mostly ending.
Now I know that.

But at the start, drunk on farm rooftops, we looked about as endless as the highway that stretched like hot taffy out of Harrisonburg.
We didn’t know that one false step meant falling.

I read that the energy from the big bang still heats the earth.
Five billion years have passed.
Rocks and mountains have appeared and dissolved again like ice into whiskey.
And the core of the planet is still molten from its creation. even when its rind is laced with dew.

I’ve picked the last parts of you out of me like porcupine quills, I added, one particularly dewy day. Inside my core was burning.