Super-Duper Volcano

Taro had been building a volcano on the bank above the stream for eleven days.

This was not because it was a big volcano. It was about as tall as Blueberri. It was because Taro was building it, and Taro builds the way Taro does everything, which is beautifully, and completely, and at the speed of a thing that is not in a hurry.

Day one, he chose the spot.

Day two, he chose the spot again, slightly to the left.

Days three through seven were mud. Days eight and nine were the moss on the outside, laid on in overlapping pieces like scales, so that from the far bank it looked like a real mountain that had been there for a hundred years and had simply been overlooked.

Day ten was the channels.

Nobody understood the channels. Taro spent an entire day cutting little grooves down the sides with his thumb — winding ones, forked ones, one that went all the way round the back — and when Kiwi asked what they were for, Taro said, "For after," and then did not say anything else for some time, because he was thinking about after.

And every one of those eleven days, his friends came and looked at it.

That was the trouble.

Taro wanted them to see it erupt. One moment, all together, everybody's faces doing the thing faces do. But eleven days is a long time to keep a secret that is standing outdoors, and by day eleven, everyone had watched every single part of it happen. Twice, in Jackfroot's case, because he ran past it a lot.

So on the morning of day eleven, Taro covered the whole volcano over with big leaves.

"There," he said. "Now nobody sees it until it's ready."

"When's it ready?" said Tang.

Taro considered this all the way to the end. It took the better part of a minute.

"Soon," he said.

By the afternoon, the visits had stopped. There is only so long anyone can be excited about a pile of leaves. Cheri went back to her tower. Kiwi went back to a thing he was fixing. Blueberri stayed the longest, sitting on the bank with her chin on her knees, and then even Blueberri had to go.

Which left Tang.

Tang had been holding a jar of fizzy powder for eleven days.

Tang had held that jar through mud, through moss, through an entire day of grooves. Tang had held it while being told soon.

He pulled off the leaves.

"TANG—"

He tipped in the whole jar.

DUMP.

The volcano did not go boom.

It went blurp.

Then it went gurgle.

Then it went FLOOMP, and a slow white mountain of foam came up out of the top and stood there, wobbling gently, going nowhere at all.

Everyone came running. They came from the tower and the treehouse and the burrow and the far side of the bridge, because FLOOMP is a very promising noise, and they arrived all together and looked at it.

Foam. Thick, quiet foam, sitting on a hill.

"...Is that it?" said Jackfroot.

Kiwi's shoulders came down. Cheri opened her mouth to say something about pressure. Tang looked at the empty jar in his hands, and then at Taro, and for once in his life did not have anything to say next.

"Wait," said Taro.

So they waited.

The foam reached the top of the first channel, and went into it.

It came down the side of the volcano in a slow white ribbon, about as fast as a snail with somewhere to be. Halfway down it met a fork, and split, and became two ribbons. One of them went round the back, which nobody had known was possible, and reappeared on the other side, and Jackfroot shouted.

More foam came up. More channels filled. The whole mountain went slowly, quietly white, from the top down, in every direction at once.

It took all afternoon.

They lay on the bank on their fronts, six of them in a row, chins on their arms, watching a volcano erupt at the speed of an afternoon. Tang lay in the middle. Tang, who had never sat still for anything, stayed for the whole thing, right to the end, with his ears going up every time a ribbon reached a fork.

Taro noticed that. Taro notices things.

The last of the foam reached the stream at golden hour, went in, went thin, and was gone.

"Eleven days," said Cheri, in the voice she uses for facts she cannot make behave.

"Mm," said Taro.

Tang sat up. "I'd wait again," he said.

"Good," said Taro, straight away, with no thinking at all.

It was the fastest he had answered anything in his life. Tang noticed, and did not say so.