The Use of Salt
by Lynn Mundell
The salt cellar is passed down from mother to daughter, on and on, for decades, for generations, forever, until one day it lands on an IKEA kitchen table in an untidy flat in upstate New York, where it sits unused for too many days.
In the last moments of the latest mother’s visit to the latest daughter, after two pale ales, the mother takes a pinch of white grains from the small wooden box and flings it over her left shoulder.
“To luck!” she shouts. In an old, pre-arranged response, the neighbor downstairs taps her broom handle on her ceiling.
“Shhh,” the daughter murmurs, exasperated with her mother, like all daughters before her have been with their own. “She’s trying to sleep.”
“This is important women’s business you need to know,” the mother says, a shade too loudly, earning another tap, but frustrated with her daughter’s depressing lack of saltiness.
The mother is scheduled to return to her own land, a parcel along a Western manmade lake, so the daughter is alarmed when she cancels her flight and begins to unpack her jumbo wheeled suitcases. Soon the mother’s tracksuits and smelly face creams clutter the apartment all over again, now joined by old pans, brass measuring spoons, linen towels, and handwritten recipes.
Within the hour, centuries of maternal ancestors crowd the flat with their own baggage as they line up to pinch salt from the box before setting to work. They scrub the grains with cold water into fabrics stained with period blood, preserve wilted produce in Mason jars of salty water, sprinkle lines of salt along the windowsills until invading ants retreat.
“See!” the mothers shout as each use of salt is revealed, proven, celebrated, the broom handle downstairs punctuating each exaltation.
“Yes, thank you, you can go now, I see,” the daughter mutters.
Her mother shouts above the clamor, “No, you don’t see!” She pushes the salt lines out the window.
“Salt can destroy,” she says, pouring grains from the box onto the slugs and poison ivy flourishing in the garden below.
“And it can save,” she says, deftly starting a grease fire on the stovetop, then just as easily putting it out.
“It’s all too much,” the daughter says. “You’re too much.”
The ancestors hiss. They resume their demonstrations, pouring grains from the box to make a poultice, to shine a copper vase, to revive the drooping flowers it contains.
“What do I need with all of these old wives’ remedies?” the daughter asks, her voice finally raised. “Can your precious salts summon him back? Can salt warm my empty bed?”
As though in answer, the broom handle thumps from downstairs, only this time accompanied by the wail of a baby. The daughter pushes through the crowd of mothers and out the door, returning in a moment with an infant furiously sucking from her breast.
“One lousy break. That’s all I wanted,” the daughter sighs.
The ancestors hastily end their assault on the flat and file out, until only the mother, her daughter, and her daughter remain.
“I only came here to help you two…” the mother begins.
“Some things can’t be fixed,” the daughter interrupts. “By anything.”
A silence as big as a sea washes over them.
The mother, seeing she’s really not the latest in the line of mothers anymore and relieved about it, takes her grandbaby in her arms, rocks her to sleep, restoring peace.
Later, the daughter will find her own use for the box, pinching from it to season their dessert of strawberries. Over time, she’ll discover the grains can clean her tub, too.
And soon, alone at night, she’ll learn the box’s intended purpose, as she replenishes it from her own endless store of salty tears, like all the mothers who came before her.
Lynn Mundell is editor of Centaur and co-founder of 100 Word Story. Her writing has been published in Booth, Five Points, Tin House, Wigleaf, Best Microfiction, a W. W. Norton anthology, and elsewhere. Lynn’s chapbook Let Our Bodies Be Returned to Us was published by Yemassee in 2022. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.