“You’ve gotta be kidding me. You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Jess stared inside the glowing cavern, mouth agape. Martin stared at her and the mysterious subtle glow bouncing off of her dirty face. Martin thought about how quickly she got dirty even though they hadn’t been on the island all that long. After a second, Jess gestured in a snappy, almost over exaggerated way towards the inside of the cavern. “Lava! There’s lava!”

The look in her eyes were wide and angry. Martin knew this look, and knew Jess was on her last legs before she’d blow up into a fit of rage. He awkwardly spoke, not wanting to set Jess off in some way, “What do you mean there’s lava?”

“Look! There’s lava in there, or magma, or whatever it is!” Jess pointed and Martin came around to look. Sure enough, bright and orange with spots of dark brown, there was a steady flow of molten rock pooling into a sizable lake in an underground cavern. Martin could feel the heat enveloping his face, like when you’re sitting close to a campfire. “Ok. Yeah. That’s lava, I think. What’s the problem? It’s not like we’re gonna go in there,” said Martin.

“The problem? The problem!” Martin immediately regretted questioning Jess. She always got riled up easy, and it always took an annoying amount of time to get her to calm down. “The problem, Marty, is that we’re stuck on an abandoned island! We have hardly any food from the wreck, our parents are probably losing it back home, and now there’s an active volcano that’s gonna kill us before we get a chance to leave!”

Jess was yelling in Martin’s face, her voice echoing inside the hot cave behind him. Something tickled the back of Martin’s mind: an image of something moving … or pushing? He felt a tension, like a knot in his chest, and it terrified him. Somehow he knew he had to get Jess to calm down, or something bad would happen.

“W-we’re not gonna die,” spoke Martin, the words catching in his throat as he tried to speak softly. “This … this volcano probably isn’t active, I think.”

Jess eyed Martin with a cold calculation, deciding whether Martin was bullshitting or not. “How do you know it won’t blow up,” snapped Jess.

“Uhh, I mean I don’t know for sure,” Martin answered instinctively with the truth. Jess’ shoulders tensed and Martin quickly noticed he needed to recover. “B-b-but I mean like it could be random, but there’s also that cave!”

“What about the cave?” Jess was annoyed.

“Well, if we can see the lava inside, then we would probably be able to tell if it was about to blow up? I mean, wouldn’t the level be, I don’t know, higher?”

There was a silence. Martin was just grasping at straws, but his words seemed to click a different idea into Jess’ mind.

“I guess we can see the lava, and it didn’t look like it was rising …”

As Jess spoke, Martin waited. Martin felt like he was diffusing the world largest bomb, although he didn’t fully know why.

“Let’s keep a close eye on it, just so I know when the volcano is gonna make a move and try and kill us!” Jess threw her hands in the air, turned, and started moving back to the beach, where the wreckage was. Martin breathed a sigh of relief, and began to walk after her.

The two lost siblings walked down the mountainside away from the lava filled cave. Martin was trying to move quickly down the steep rocky surface, when he suddenly felt his leg give way. A loose rock jostled underneath his weight, and his body fell into a painful roll down the mountain. Jess barely had a chance to breathe before Martin had tumbled into her, bringing her into the bludgeoning roll as well.

Jess felt the pain and anger well up in her. Every hit made the yell welling up inside stronger and stronger. She could feel nothing other than a single hateful wish, tearing out of her throat with a shout: “I WISH THIS STUPID ISLAND WOULD DISAPPEAR!!!”

The volcano rumbled, as if to oblige, and with a supernatural quickness the deserted island was engulfed in a sea of fire, death, and rage. Neither the siblings nor the island were ever seen again.