Who's Fault

In the middle California there’s a crack in the earth.
It runs deep down into the crust, striking through rocks and great boulders and layers of primordial clay until finally it reaches the steamy center of magma pools eventually down to the burning core.
Spitting and boiling there is the force and pressure that opposes the universe expanding. One day it will spill over but until then a delicate bargain has been struck between order and chaos and somehow the grass still grows above.
All of us carbon-based life forms, we exist atop invisible valconoes, in our towers of glass and our illusions of wealth. The earth is kind and self-effacing, and most of the time it tolerates us. It even cradles us, feeds us, like a beautiful majestic mother bear.
But she is unpredictable. And one day the cracks in her lovely countenance will crumble open and swallow us up, and only then will we face the charred and scalded face of our mortality. Only then will we taste the fleeting flavor of our triumphs, when it is too late to return and reap anything more from the poor crop we’ve sewn. The land is ravaged and the minerals too few in a once nurturing soil. If we break land, we’ll only find more cracks and be swallowed up all over again.