She is Erupting
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

It may sound crazy, but I answered the phone as her. It was my first femme week of the year, and when I was her, I tried to live her life entirely. Besides, there is something about pulling your phone out of your handbag and daintily sliding a long painted nail across the screen to green, that just keeps her voice on your tongue.

“Hello, this is Dr. Stevenson,” I said. I am still Dr. Stevenson, volcanologist, it is just that in these rare weeks I am Dr. Penelope Stevenson and not Dr. Peter Stevenson. I need these times, like a vampire needs blood. It was a madness, but wonderfully so. There was such joy in those weeks that I lived only for them

I had been to the salon that morning and had my hair set. I am lucky to have so much hair which I keep in a man bun as Peter, with a masculine face of fashionable stubble, but in femme weeks I shave closely and have my hair styled in a way that looks totally feminine. I would have loved to have it colored, but I kept it my natural brown – just a little lacquer to make it shine. My life was still as a man – a life of drudgery when I was not her.

“Dr. Stevenson, my name is Todd Walkington, and I am the Ranger up on Fire Mountain,” the voice said. These words were enough to put me on edge. “Where are you, Doctor? I am driving down and almost at the city. Yours was the name I was given. They are your instruments up on the mountain – right? Things are going off up there. I think something is going to blow. I am coming to get you right now and take you up to have a look. Just tell me where I can find you.”

Despite the fact that I was on call for an emergency just like this, I had never contemplated this exact situation. I suppose that volcanologists tend to think in geological time when a millennium is barely a second, but geothermal activity is not like that. Perhaps I should have known better. But here I was, and I had never met the Ranger up on Fire Mountain. He clearly thought that I was a woman from the voice on the phone, and that was how I was dressed.

“I am actually just going to a function,” I said, looking down at what I was wearing. Even real female scientists don’t usually wear heels, but I suppose it is the nature of compulsive transvestites to dress up. “But you can pick me up on the corner of Giles and Madison. Can you get there?”

“Five minutes,” said Todd. It sounded like he was at the wheel and driving fast, and he must have been. I had only just arrived at the corner when I saw what had to be his vehicle pulled up – a custom-built large 4WD with “Ranger” emblazoned across the hood and doors.

It was the kind of vehicle that a lady cannot easily get into in the fashion I had rehearsed, but I did my best to get my butt in first and tuck the skirt of my dress under my smooth bare legs.

“As you can see, I am not dressed for a hike, but I assume you have access to all the data at your station,” I said. “I should be able to make an assessment from the instruments and decide what we need to do next.”

I could see him looking at me, even as I went through my handbag to check that I had a pen and notepad. I was out to be seen, and that meant taking a private joy from being admired as if I was a woman, but I needed to act as a professional.

“As I told you, I am hardly dressed for field work this afternoon,” I said.

“I am, but I can’t offer you a change of clothing,” said Todd, his foot firmly on the gas pedal.

He was tall rather than heavily built, he was rangy, perhaps as a ranger should be. He was a little unshaven with a strong jaw and a mop of dark curly hair. It always struck me as strange that when I was dressed as Penelope I could admire men, and I did. As Pete I would have described myself as heterosexual. I adored women, and everything about them, even though all my past sexual activities had been failures. I might have joked that my orientation was “science” if I had been somebody who shared my sense of humor. The fact is that science can absorb every moment of time. There is always more that needs to be known and the means to learn should always be near. A devoted scientist might well say that there is no time for sex, no time for love. Science can become everything, if that is easier.

“You said that things are going off up the mountain – what did you mean by that?” I asked.

Well, we have had tremors – plenty over the last few hours, and there is some serious steam coming off the lake at the summit,” he said. “Your thermometer seems to be stuck short of 100 degrees, so not boiling yet.”

“My thermometer is in Celsius, so the water is boiling – probably at around 97 degrees at that altitude. It can’t get any hotter as water, so if it goes further than that it would be something else in the crater, and that would not be good. So, tell me the timing of all of this.”

Even as the road got bumpy and windy I did my best to right up a time frame in the ridiculously small notebook I had. As a matter of habit, I had writing materials, but a lady chooses a size that can fit in her purse without dislodging essentials like lipstick.

I looked up to see that the road was not familiar and remarked upon it.

“The park put in a new road to the station,” he said. “Rather than winding up one slope it goes around the hill and through this natural cutting.”

The natural cutting was a channel cut by past lahars (mudflows from the crater lake) and I could see that it might present a future problem, but I still thought that the signs did not mean imminent activity. Tremors and temperature are matters of degree, whereas the warning system with an alarm direct to my phone was triggered by a permanent shift in the mountain form based on a laser beam between two locations. It was not until we stepped out of his vehicle at the ranger station that the alarm sounded on my cellphone.

“I am guessing that is not good,” said Todd.

“I think she is erupting,” I said. “Let’s get inside to shelter from any ash and whatever else is thrown out, and we need to contact the authorities right now to evacuate in accordance with the disaster plan. You call the police, and I will call the US Geological Survey Emergency Response.”

As we ran, I could see the steam coming off the mountain had turned grey and now billowed into a cloud many times larger than it had been while white. As we got inside, I could see the volcano through the picture windows. It was spectacular but all that glass might be a danger should there be a shock wave. The ash cloud was spreading and darkening the sky.

We made our calls. There was disbelief at first, but the police could now see the volcano erupting and USGS had data coming in from other sources. The signal was starting to break up. The rising cloud was now starting to produce small lightning strikes affecting cellphone signals. The power went off.

“Is there a secure basement area if we need to hunker down?” I asked.

“Do you think that we should make a run for it and get off the mountain,” Todd asked.

“Not on that road,” I said. “I wish the park had asked before they changed the road. I can see the crater lake overflowing from here. That road will now be a flume of boiling mud. It will cook us alive and will probably take the road out.”

“That’s not good,” said Todd, calmly but with a look of concern. “We can head downstairs. There is a crib down there, and we can shutter the windows.”

“It will soon be dark well before sunset,” I said. “Ash will start falling. I can’t see any sign of a big blow that might cause shock waves or pyroclastic surges of hot gases hitting us, so our biggest risk with be an ash cloud causing acid damage to our lungs. We need to seal ourselves up and use wet cloth to keep from breathing in ash particles. You lead the way.”

It was a small room with a bed, kitchenette and table, and a bathroom on one side. It was dark but there was battery powered 12 volt lighting. There was a small fridge, now no longer powered, containing soft drinks and a few cans of beer, and a larger with dry and canned food for at least a week. There was a water cooler and a crate of spare water jars, full.

“If it doesn’t blow, we might get through this,” said Todd. “Are you OK?”

“I don’t think that it will blow,” I said. While volcanoes can do anything, all the signs were that the pressure of the molten magma was being released through ash and steam rising up. As for how I felt, even knowledge based on science did not seem to have completely submerged the Penelope in me. I looked at Todd and I realized that I was starting to tremble, and then I felt my eyes were hot with tears. Would Peter be crying? I guess I will never know. Sudden eruptions don’t happen that often for somebody to experience, even somebody who seeks them out.

He stepped over to me and took me into his arms. He didn’t have to say anything, and he didn’t. He just held me and made me feel safe, even as the ash cloud blocked out the sun and made outside as dark as night. I put my arms around his waist and replied without words, thanking him for recognizing my distress and coming to my rescue.

We both knew what we had to do. We had to wait things out. But somehow, we had found that in doing that, it was better for us to be as close as we were. We were in a small space, with a cold concrete floor and block walls on three sides, and within that there was only one small space of comfort – the bed, which was just large enough for two

He lay down on the bed and made a place for me to recline beside him.

It is hard to describe the way I felt then, but there was a part of me that wanted to dive into his imagined embrace, and then there was the person that I was, knowing just how wrong that would be. I am a scientist, and a rational person. I knew what I was – I was a man with a feminine inner person, who believed myself to be interested in women, not men. But there was something rising in me. It was like the magma in that volcano we sat on, slowly pushing its way up through in extreme heat. It felt as if it might blow me apart if I did not give it some kind of release.

I took the place he offered. I was trembling, and although he did not know this, it was not from fear or cold – neither of those was present – it was the knowledge that I was no longer in control. Volcanos do what volcanos do, and it seemed as if she was erupting.

But he felt that I needed comfort, so he put an arm around me and pulled me closer to him. We just lay like that for a moment, looking up at the ceiling that was barely visible in the darkness. I could feel his warmth and I likde the feeling. I drew a little closer. Then I could feel his body. It was hard muscle, and I liked that feeling too. It was as if I had suddenly discovered that I was not the man I thought I was, and perhaps not even a man at all.

“Do you think this is how the world might end?” he said. “I mean, a cloud of poison gas rolls over the and kills everybody?”

“Volcanoes are isolated features, and while pyroclastic surges can happen, they only effect a limited area,” I said. It was like finding a release in science. I could submerge my inner turmoil in a pool of facts. “Super-volcanoes have erupted in the past and caused serious destruction to the planet in ancient history, but life has found a way to survive those events.”

“Like, the last two people on the planet repopulating it?” he said.

“Well, if we were the last two people, that couldn’t happen,” I said. I have to say that I regretted the words as soon as they had left my throat, as there was sadness there that I had not expected.

“I guessed that might be the case,” he said. “But I think of you only as a woman – a very beautiful one. I am assuming that you have a …partner?”

Was he probing my sexuality? Was this a come-on? I found myself praying that it was.

“I am too immersed in my job,” I said, which seemed very true.

If these were our last minutes on earth, what would you want to do?” he said.

I could not see him, but I wanted to. Where was his face. I reached out and there it was, I stroked a swarthy cheek and found myself running a hand through his curly hair. He reached for me in return with the hand not the one pulling me to him. He found my hair and pulled my face to his. There in the dark, we kissed. It seemed perfect, as if the darkness could allow anybody to be anybody else.

“I think that I would like somebody to make love to me,” I said, replying to his question.

“I want to do that,” he said. And with those words, in a moment that seemed strangely prophetic, the mountain rumbled. “If we live that long,” he added.

“That is just slow movement of molten rock,” I explained. “That is good. It indicates there will be no explosion. That is not our problem in making love, it is just that I don’t have a … point of entry.”

“I am sure you do,” he said, loosening his belt. “I sure hope you do. If you reach down, you will discover that I am more than ready. Do you have lubricant?”

I felt feverish with excitement even before my hand passed his belt buckle and felt his erection. This was an organ that I knew well and yet I was touching it for the first time, because it was somebody else’s. Because it was, it seemed to be the most beautiful thing, compared to my own, lying strangely limp as if understanding that it did not belong on the woman I had become.

“I have hand cream,” I blurted out. “It’s in my handbag. It’s on the table.”

“Let me find it,” he said. He moved down the bed and used the torch on his phone to find the cream, while I shed my dress to lie only in my bra and panties, that were expensive and a shade of powder blue. The bra was filled with gel falsies, and the panties had a gaff under with a G-string that could be easily pulled aside. He took a little look with the torch, just to confirm that all still appeared to be female.

He used the cream to explore me and pushed the makeshift lube a little inside me. For a moment I wondered if it would hurt, but I decided that I wanted this even if it came with agony.

But he was gentle. His hot knob was in his hand working the entrance like knocking on the door, until I opened to receive him. That was how it felt anyway, like discovering that my body had a new organ – a man pussy lurking there all along. And he was inside it, stroking me internally, slowly and gently, as a man might take a virgin, as I was.

There was no pain, even though it seemed that I was stretched to capacity. There was only the joy that a woman must feel, to have the body of another inside them. It somehow seems greater than that dipping an appendage into a cavity. To receive means so much more.

For a person who had devoted themself to the study of eruptions, I was still not ready to receive my own personal one – hot lava from his body into mine, in an explosion of sheer joy.

“Wow,” he said. “Was once enough for you, or can you give me a short break and then do that again?”

“Yes, please,” I said. I had never felt more feminine in my life before that moment.

There were hours of darkness even before night fell, and we did nothing except hug and kiss and make love. I felt like a teenage girl must feel, and I liked the feeling.

And when the sun rose the cloud of ash had gone and the sky was blue and the sun was shining. We stepped out into what looked like snow in that bright light, although the thick layer of ash was light grey in color. I was like Dr. Zhivago after the winter blizzard, with the world made anew in a pure form, for two lovers to gaze in wonder.

In the distance stood Fire Mountain with just a small spire of steam snaking off the top, and any snow that had been near the summit washed away by boiling water or covered by ash that it appeared only black and grey. It seemed more peaceful than I had ever seen it, like a misbehaving child now pretending to be innocent, as if yesterday had never happened.

“Is it over,” Todd asked.

“For the mountain, yes,” I said. “But for me it has just begun.

All eruptions are different, but for my own, it left permanent changes. I could never go back. The landscape had changed forever. A fissure had opened and I wanted to keep it. Todd wanted that too.

The End
3148

© Maryanne Peters 2025