Hazard

My little boy tells me he wants to live near an active volcano. We act it out each day: the cloud of ash, the explosion of lava and rocks. A mudslide flows down our street where we're so transfixed by the fireworks we forget to run. A helicopter arrives and we cling to a rope—suspended, moving, breathing sculptures of slick gray, and I wonder, what is the allure? The overwhelming power? The narrow escape? Or maybe my son is working out the willy-nilly nature of this world, wanting to hear that I will protect him. I tell my four-year-old he is safe with me, but honestly, we might as well be teetering on a crater's edge because some days all I can hear is the constant bubbling of the news, and all I can see are gray memories of fathers burying sons, and I know my only hope is a child's imagination where variation upon variation of our rescue is found.