Out in the Lava Flow

More about Out in the Lava Flow

The painting was called Out in the Lava Flow. His grandmother had done it back when she was in art school—like 20 million years ago, according to family timekeeping. It had lived for forty years at the back of a dusty, smelly garage in a cottage somewhere near Leeds, wedged between a broken lawn chair and a cardboard box of forgotten Christmas ornaments.

She had painted it based on her idea of Hawaii, though she had never been to Hawaii. The closest she’d ever come was probably a windswept afternoon somewhere in Cornwall, standing on a cliff staring at slate-colored waves and imagining tropical heat rising off volcanic stone. She had an imagination that could turn a drizzle into a monsoon and a pebble beach into a field of freshly cooled magma.

When he finally pulled the canvas out of the garage, he felt as if he were disturbing something ancient. The paint, thick and pebbled, looked like it had fossilized into small shimmering scales. Greys, blacks, ochres—an invented geology. Her lava didn’t flow; it dreamed. It hummed with a warmth that didn’t exist in Yorkshire.

He remembered visiting her as a boy, how she’d always said, “One day you’ll see it properly. One day you’ll understand what I was trying to paint.” He thought she’d meant Hawaii. Now he realized she had meant something else entirely—somewhere you carry quietly inside you, a landscape that keeps reshaping itself with the passing years.

He brought the painting home and hung it above his small kitchen table. At night, when the streetlight outside flickered through the curtains, the surface seemed to shift—the black stones swelling like breaths, the brown field of imagined ash rising and settling again. It became a kind of companion, a geological heartbeat ticking behind the days.

Friends asked why he kept it. “It looks like gravel,” one said. Another thought it was an aerial view of a parking lot. He didn’t argue. He only said, “It’s a place my grandmother visited before she was born.”

Because the truth was this: the painting didn’t show Hawaii or Cornwall or any map-place at all. It showed where her mind had gone when the world disappointed her, where she stored colors she couldn’t name, where she hid memories that never quite fit into the family stories.

And in time, he began to recognize pieces of himself in those stones—old arguments cooled into obsidian, forgotten hopes scattered like pumice, days fused together into a single quiet slope.

In that garage she had left it behind, but here, on his wall, the lava finally flowed again.