Setting: An Exercise

Sulfur taints the air at first breath. A thousand decaying things. The ground is dry and yellow, cracked and caked with mineral deposits, covered with the solid, round clusters of animal scat. It is a hellscape. Mud pots belch and splash off the edges of the boardwalk. Gray-brown mud hot enough to boil. The sun blazes down on the bare crowns of our heads. I envy by brothers their white-blond buzz-cuts. My dark hair saturates with sun, hot as fire. My palm recoils at the slightest touch. Believe it or not, I belong here. Where the sky seems inflated; where the buffalo roam. Fumaroles wheeze steam from the angry bowels of the earth. I imagine the superheated rocks far beneath the crust, glowing like coals. This is where Hades might break through, the world's weakest point, if he wanted to make an appearance. If there was something he wanted to steal. Though I'm no Persephone, I stick the boardwalk. It snakes across this dry plain, splitting off to run a circle around a hot spring, then returning again. At Morning Glory we stop to marvel at the rings of color--ochre to tangerine to scarlet to emerald to turquoise--funneling toward the broad, tranquil center. Clouds of steam rise and waft across the boardwalk. My brothers gag on the stench, lurch down the path coughing and laughing. The smell is as foul and full of rotten eggs as the pool itself is heavenly and full of myth and dreams. I breathe deeply and walk on. I have adapted. I am the right kind of demon for this place. A turquoise bracelet sparks blue and silver at my wrist. We arrive with the crowd at the epicenter of energy. At the top of the hour, the geyser unleashes itself at the sky. A fury. A reminder that beauty is dangerous, yet best unbound. It is the beholders who must take care and stay back, wary of burning, scalding, searing. Death. This is a story older than any of us, the way Old Faithful keeps time. My brothers are on their skinny knees, reaching out to try and touch a yellow-bellied marmot. The creature dives beneath the boardwalk. I draw myself taller, proud of the heat radiating from my black hair, and join the story.