The Weight of Nothing: Chapter Four
Salt
Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter One
Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Two
Read The Weight of Nothing - Chapter Three
The man tastes it constantly. In everything. Water. Food. Air.
Salt coating his tongue, thick and endless.
He’s tried rinsing his mouth. Drinking until his stomach hurts. Nothing helps.
The taste is drowning him.
He works - if that’s what it is - at a building where people sort things. Objects come in boxes. You take them out. Put them in different boxes.
Why? No one knows.
But hands remember the motion so people show up and do it.
Today he can barely function. The salt taste so strong he gags. Spits. His coworkers don’t notice.
Or they do and forget immediately.
He leaves early. Steps outside.
The salt follows. Of course it does.
It’s not real. It’s memory.
His body insisting on something his mind won’t hold.
His feet take him somewhere new. Not the sorting building. Not his room. Somewhere else. They know the way even though he doesn’t.
He walks for blocks. Past the crater.
Past buildings that still have windows and buildings that don’t.
Past people who move with purpose or don’t move at all.
He arrives at water. The city has canals. Or a river. Some kind of waterway. He’s never thought about it before but his feet knew it was here.
At the edge, he kneels. Cups water in his hands. Brings it to his mouth. It tastes like…
Salt.
Of course.
Because this is salt water.
The river meets the ocean somewhere.
Or it is the ocean.
Or was.
Doesn’t matter. It’s salt and his body knew.
He drinks anyway. Let salt meet salt. Maybe they’ll cancel out.
They don’t.
He sits. Lets his hands trail in the water.
Watches the current move.
It smells like brine. Like decay. Like things that lived and died in the deep.
His body responds. A tightening in his chest. Not fear. Recognition.
He knew someone who drowned.
Or almost drowned.
Or - the image trying to form - someone who loved the ocean.
Who tasted like salt from swimming. Who would come home with hair stiff from brine and skin smelling like summer and…
The image cuts off.
But his mouth fills with salt.
More than before. Overwhelming.
He leans over, spits into the water. Again. Again. As if he can expel it. As if memory can be vomited out.
It can’t.
“You’re one of them.”
He looks up. A woman standing above him. Not young. Not old. Just standing. Watching.
“One of who?”
“The rememberers. The ones whose bodies won’t let go.”
She sits beside him. Doesn’t ask permission.
“I come here too. My hands want to fish. Watch.”
She holds them out. They move on their own. Casting invisible line. Reeling in nothing. “I was a fisherwoman. Or my hands were.”
“You remember?”
“No. But they do. They know how to gut fish. How to read weather. How to find schools.”
Her hands keep moving.
“I have no pole. No line. No bait. But they insist anyway.”
They sit together. Two people haunted by trades they don’t remember having.
“There’s a meeting,” he says. “Tonight. When the sky darkens. For people like us.”
“Where?”
“My feet will know. Yours probably will too.”
She nods. Her hands still casting. “The salt you’re tasting. What is it?”
“Tears, I think. I cried so much I can still taste it. Someone died or left or…” He stops. “Someone was gone and I couldn’t stop crying.”
“A child?”
“Maybe. Or a lover. Or… I don’t know. But my body grieved. Still grieves.”
The fisherwoman nods.
“I lost my boat. I know this. My hands know how to tie it up. How to check the hull. How to bail water. But there’s no boat. Just…”
She gestures at the empty water. “Just absence.”
“I am from the place where your eyes meet with a void,” he says automatically.
“No,” she says. “I’m from the place where my boat was moored. Where fish filled nets. Where I knew what I was for.” She stands. “And I want that back. Even if it hurts. Even if it drowns me.”
She walks away. Leaves him sitting there. Tasting salt. His body insisting on grief he can’t name.
But tonight—tonight he’ll go to the meeting. Find others carrying impossible weight. Maybe together it won’t feel so heavy.
Maybe.
He doubts it. But his feet will take him anyway.