Literary Orphans

The Breaking of Salt
by Matthew Kabik

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You haven’t looked at me since you started talking about your family. Not your immediate family, or even your extended family, but your ancestral family. The family which had as much notion of you as you have memories of them. But you don’t say ancestors—you say family—which I think would make them happy.

You say your family was the first to gather salt from the Xiechi Lake. I don’t know how you could prove this. I don’t want to ask, because I can tell it’s something you believe and your father told you since you were a girl. I just nod as if I know where Xiechi Lake is. You describe how salt lead to the explosion of population in your country, even though China isn’t your country and you’ve never visited it. You pull some of your thin, dark hair past your ear and say how horrible it was for your family, how honored they were to be responsible for the salt. How they helped create the first saltworks in the world. You said the salt covered your family’s skin and dried them out, crept into the nostrils and burned the eyes. You told me your family built a resistance to the salt over time, a second skin.

I want to share something about my ancestors but have nothing to say. I don’t know anything about them. European, early settlers to Minnesota or Nebraska, probably God-fearing Christians scared of Native Americans and fevers taking the children. I want to be so confident in knowing them I can say what they felt and what they did, that I could draw their faces from a memory I couldn’t have.

You tell me how they hid the salt from the rain and broke it up if it got wet, how salt becomes so hard if it’s exposed to moisture. You show me by stamping your feet and clawing at the air how your family would desperately try to make it into smaller pieces for moving, how it got under the fingernails and pointed out every open scratch on the skin. I think about telling you how beautiful you look in your reenactment, how funny and childish and cute it is. But you aren’t with me in the telling, you are with your family in Yuncheng sometime near 6000 B.C. You are making salt from a lake with the rest of your family and are proud to be with them, they are proud to have you.

By the time you finish I can’t remember what started the discussion. You look at me and smile, like I just managed through a family album without looking bored or ate your mother’s fried duck without showing the natural American disgust of traditional Chinese cooking.

You put your hand on my face and kiss me. I feel the cool smoothness of your skin and the salinity of the sweat you built up in your telling. I close my eyes and imagine you with your family, the beauty of your work making you almost unpalatable to the tongue of a lover, but I kiss you anyway.

 

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Matthew Kabik’s work has appeared in Structo Lit Mag, Cease Cows, and The Fat City Review, among others. He also has work forthcoming in Pea River Journal and WhiskeyPaper. Follow him on Twitter @mlkabik or visit his website: www.matchstickcircus.com

Kabik Picture Bio

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–Art by Peter Lamata

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