Week #9—Free Entry

Salt

I watch a glass of water with its fine fuzz of ice, silvery colors touched with sky—

yet if I shift slightly, a tiny wooden tower appears, walnut-stained and cylindrical,

handmade by some underpaid artisan. It contains my father’s favorite seasoning.

Salt improved the tack when he was a sailor on a merchant ship, and after that,

when my mother would dish up her bland dinners. “Big eats!” he would exclaim,

clapping his hands together and rubbing them as if he were sanding down his callouses.

Then we would sit at the kitchen table, the four of us, and begin to eat, waiting for him

to initiate his nightly game of Q & A so we could see how self-educated he was.
Invariably, he would flummox us with a difficult question and scold us when we could
not answer it correctly. My older brother would cry and be sent to his room while I
would remain, exempt, because girls didn’t need to be too smart back then. I reach
for the salt but keep my eyes fixed on the glass, observing the distortions of people
moving by my table in the waves of water. The intermingling of their darkened forms
as they drown in the icy sweat conjures up images of the Titanic, when the brackish swirl
of the Atlantic swallowed all the fathers first, followed by their wives, sons,
and daughters. I witness a metamorphosis of the anonymous forms as they disintegrate
into particles of dust, browning the water with a solemn air. By now, my father’s ashes
have washed up onto foreign sands, perhaps a beach in South Africa or an island
off Central America. I wonder, as I season my soup, if they could change into salt.