'Chain Reaction' by Michelle Xu

Tap-tap. The baby goat scrambles its way across scraggly grass, searching for its mother’s warmth. Its frantic leaps dislodge a pebble whose appearance, smoothed by years of trading secrets with the wind, draw the curiosity of an earthworm. The earthworm pulls on a root, whose sibling roots take in a surprised gasp of nitrogen, and after a long link of dominos through white-coat concepts like pressure imbalance, rhyolitic magma, and eruption column, the Yellowstone caldera blows the human civilization sky high, then deep underground.

Seven millenia from now a race of four-footed aliens will rediscover Earth; their X-ray sight-stalks will dissect the moondust landscape like scalpels, and they will catalog the bones of the baby goat; the fragments of the pebble; the tomes on volcanic eruption; but never find a mother’s love; a scholar’s curiosity; nor the stories we whisper to the wind before sleep.