The Salt Grows Heavy

They were always men, those itinerant storytellers, for the bitter winding roads—bandit-swollen, lord-haunted—were and, for all that I might wish otherwise, will likely always be unkind to women. I remember the first of them to arrive in the court. He was lithe, circumspect in conduct. His coat was wrinkled. He wore a cravat around an untidy collar and had untidy curls that fluffed along his ears. The maidservants called him unhandsome, but he was kind to me and for that, I adored him.

“You remind me of me,” he told me once, sadly and quietly. Dusk had glazed the chamber in glowing indigo, gilded the chairs, the hulking cinnabar armoire, its surface engraved with vignettes of primordial birth. I could smell my evening’s repast: something choking with cream, fresh vanilla pods, a hint of citrus. “Trapped.”

In response, I shrugged and wrote him another koan to decrypt, this one pertinent to the rites of ceremonial fratricide. Later, I’d learn of the palimpsest he’d made from my stories, how he told the world that a mermaid, should she prove virtuous enough, may hope to transform into a daughter of air. Of all the
men who have mistold my history, I resent him least. Like me, he stood anchored in gilded chains, throat and wrists collared by another’s presumptions, breath beaten to gasps by a world that permits only a single direction: forward and away from our heart’s desire.

He was not quite wrong, but he certainly was not right

Instead, I say nothing.

“Do your people believe in an afterlife?” They pluck tufts of straw from beneath them, grimacing.

I shake my head. What need is there for such platitudes when you are born to yourself time and again? Like a story, we are the summation of our incarnations, a spirit refracted through a billion lives. We are our pasts, our futures, tethered by the flavor of our sisters’ flesh.

“Ours do.” A smile, or something like a smile, invents itself upon their lips. “Even though no one has ever discovered any proof that we are more than meat and bone, humans continue to hold on to the belief that some part of us will persist after our deaths. The unscrupulous have built an entire industry on this.”

I glide towards the plague doctor, shrugging free of my furs as
I do, and stop inches from their knees, my hands outstretched. They nuzzle their jaw into my hands, allow my fingers to cinch about their skull. I could snap their neck, dislocate the vertebrae stacked upon each other, sever the blood flow. They know this. I do too. Nonetheless, they place their faith and their breakable flesh in my fingers, eyes closed.

“But they are not all charlatans.” The plague doctor does not kiss my skin, does not move to restrain me, does not do anything but rest their cheek in my grasp, its stitching rough against my palm. “There were three—surgeons, I suppose you could call them. They were better than the rest of them. They understood how one might lengthen the life of another, might prolong the function of a failing body by exchanging old parts for new. Eventually, they grew more curious. Could you assemble a new life from nothing but debris?”