 We are on a beach in Vik. Vik is in Iceland, and the beach is a black beach, and we are under gray skies. The kind of timeless skies of a permanent dusk. Because it is November, and this is Iceland. The white gulls wheel against the wet cliffs. This is where they roost. The black beach is volcanic. Presumably. I mean what I know is that there is a lot of volcanic activity in Iceland, because I have felt the warm water that comes from under the earth. The beach is stones, like little pebbles. It is not sandy beach, in Vik. The stone pebbles are smooth. The thing about the pebbles though, like what is remarkable about these pebbles is not only the fact that ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are jet black, but what is remarkable about these little black presumably volcanic stones is how the are arranged in rows. Not like lines, but like strata. The black stones are arranged in a certain way for reasons I assume a hydrologist could explain, something to do with the balance of variables, mass and velocity, like turbidity stuff. You know, like fluid dynamics. Not simple stuff but explainable stuff, by someone, at least. But you need to know none of this to know that the black stones are arranged in such a way, in strata-lines on the beach in Vik, such that each strata is composed of stones of a similar size. Across the whole beach, maybe volcanic but definitely black rocks in a remarkable composition. I don’t know why it is remarkable, but it is something about order I think. Order, as in the opposite of entropy. And it is the effect of a non-organic process—as in waves, of water. Like how a crystal grows, or a snowflake. That kind of order, so too with these rocks. I wonder if it is always like this in Vik, but my friends are laughing and don’t seem to notice. —AHR Austin, TX Sept 2019 *
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