salt flat
My father and my mother were buried in the salt flats. Tossed in the same grave even, seeing as how they shared the same sickness and all. My brother too, when they found him crumpled off a horse. His brain had damn near leaked out of his skull already, and the salt had soaked it up. Not even a stain left.
It’s coming for me now. I can’t leave the church without salt crystals sticking to my eyelids, running underneath my fingernails. It worms itself into the tread of my boots, the fold of the Roman collar, between the buttons and the fabric of the cassock. When I lie awake at night, I repeat the rosary to myself, but I am a man of god, and I know that all of God’s children will meet the fate our Lord has set for them. Mine is in the salt.
Lately, I’ve been hearing it calling. An empty voice as I walk, as I turn my head. The Butcher and the Bartender know it too - he’s been looking at me funny and she’s been overfilling my glasses. There’s no mirror in the church, but I can see clear enough that I carry the pallor of a dead man around.
It’s worse at night. It’s worse at night, when I’m alone in the church. Everyone at the bartender’s brothel is in bed, every horse and fly has settled, and I stumble out in a cassock with half its buttons done. The sky is so big on these nights, full of stars, and the air smells like salt so heavily I feel like I’m breathing it, like my lungs will crystallize and soon, so will the rest of me.
God is up there, in the cosmos. He is, he is, he is, I have been preaching and believing for decades and he must be. On the worst nights I scream straight up, begging him to please not condemn me to this, that I will take any other. Give me Samson, please, or Noah dying of old age, but not Lot’s Wife. I have never been disobedient.
It’s on a night like this I make my game against the salt. It’s up to my knees now, as I clasp hands and recite prayers. I have not been sleeping lately, and I eat very little, always bland. Much of the time I should be doing either is spent here.
Please God, please. I have served you for my life and I will serve you for seven more if I must. The salt is reaching out its hands and I can’t stay there. I will die any other way, please, God, help me.
She is sent to me then. A child, fifteen or sixteen, an answer to my Lord’s prayer. She is in a shift with a candle in hand, asking if I am alright, if I need anything, and I know this is God. I have served him, and he has sent me a lamb to sacrifice on the altar, an offering to ease these gaping teeth.
She follows me inside, sits while I bring her milk and stale bread. She is like a daughter to me, although I cannot remember her very well. I must have done her Christening and her Communion, helped her pick out the name of a Saint. I don’t remember what it was.
Joan, she says, and God is indeed gracious. She is like a child to me, and so I’ve poured laudanum in the milk. It would have been cruel to have not. She is birdlike as I carry her out, bones hollow and light as I lay her down. It is like a bed of snow, though I know she’s never seen such a thing.
Was Abraham not commanded to kill Isaac? Was God not telling me to leave this child in my place, to win a victory against evil? She was asleep when it happened, which is far kinder than Abraham was, and God did not send down any horns to stop me.
There is a fuss in the morning, and then a cry. She is a good and godly child, and her mother believes this until she sees the way the girl is lying, injuries self-inflicted. There is a mourning and there is an anger, but there is also such a blanket of shame over Sunset that after days, it is like she did not live at all. An offering should not have a prior purpose.
But the salt eats through her quickly, calcifies and takes its hold and then realizes this is not what it had asked for. This is not what it had wanted, what it had been promised, and so it pulls back. It allows rot in.
The first sign was the meat. The Butcher sliced open one pig belly, then another, cut the head off a cow, skinned a cat just to see, and it was all the same. A black, damp mold taking over the animal, climbing up from the stomach like bile repurposed. The barn cats stopped catching mice, and the mice stopped being a nuisance.
I started being unable to stomach anything except imported wheat and liquor. Anything else caused black heaves, from deeper than my stomach.
The town was next. Buildings built out of clay and wood, buildings that had stood for decades, buildings that replaced the mess here before swayed and cried like they had heatstroke. The high wood rafters of the brothel developed an odd white speckling, like they had been lost at sea for years.
I couldn’t sleep for days, with the fever hot sweat of the church walls closing in. I’d close my eyes and they would push in close until morning.
Then, the people. Are we not animals? Are we not all creatures, the same under God’s eyes? The animals were choking on mold, and the pianist was unable to bend his fingers anymore. A showgirl, the lamb’s cousin or sister or something unimportant, started coughing one day, and she was gone by the next.
I’d started getting dizzy when I prayed out at night. I walked with a limp, one leg slightly dark and discolored under the cassock as I led Sunday service and preached about plagues.
I did her funeral, her family wearing the same grieving clothes they’d worn the last time. She was oddly tinged and pale, even for the dead, and they’d decided to bury her in the clothes she died in. The beading on her costume had gone white and crystal.
I still go out at night to pray, but it’s less desperate now. I’m able to plead less to God, because I know that he has answered me - I will die one day, but this wretched salt will not drown me. It will not suffocate me, drying me out until I am a husk. It will not complete its collection and I will leave it wanting.
My family is not an evil people. My father built this town, took a horse and two pearl-handled revolvers and cleared the brush of the area until it was a flat, empty expanse of wasteland, built the brothel and the distillery and the butcher’s with his own two hands until it was a town finally worth something. We are not evil people.
The Butcher keeps killing and the Bartender keeps losing girls and the walls of the church press in press in press in further every night. Those of my flock I have not lost to the rot or fleeing stare with wide, believing eyes as I rage at the sinners who have given this divine wrath. The adulterers and the gamblers, the brother girls and those who do not fast during Lent. God is punishing them because he loves them, I say. Repent.
A matter of hours I wake up to a ceiling that is contracting with a heartbeat, that leaks foul black liquid onto my eyes. It stings and it blinds me. I stumble out to the salt and I know I have won. I own the land, yet I do not belong to it, and there is nothing it can do to make it so. My mouthless scream of joy carries, and I hear it echo back to me from the mountain. All of me over all of this, and still I am not owned.
The parishioners remark on my frozen mouth the next day, the snow that holds my lips from ever closing. I smile at them, and they flinch because they do not know better. That day I tell them about Moses leading his people out of plague and into safety. I am Moses and I am safety, and they shrink back away from me in fear and still I lead them through the ocean. My hand seizes as I raise it, fingers stuck together with thick phrases of crystals.
The leg goes next. I limp and I am joyous, because God is testing me with an angelic adversary and I am winning.
The distillery closes, and the Bartender closes up the brothel. She’s lost all her girls, she says, and I barely remember their caskets. The families move and the Butcher wanders off, dried blood on his apron and a bloom of fungus at his eye. I lay in my church and I pray and I feel righteous, because God has listened. The salt did not kill me and I am not dead.
I wake up in solace now, my body a mass of white crystal, my face permanently in a wide-toothed, wide-eyed smile. The few people left in town had fled once they saw me, hulking and shuffling in a half-done up cassock, calcified like bedrock. Still I smile, because I can’t do anything else. I lived and I conquered, and now I spend my days speaking to the lamb, watching as her rot spreads through our town and the next.
THIS SHORT STORY WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN JABBERWOCKY, THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST LITERARY MAGAZINE
Maanasa Dhavala
