Man of Salt

I wake up screaming, startling the pigeons. I sit up on the hard, slatted wood bench and let the magazine covering my eyes slide into my lap. Nightmare images continue to play in front of my eyes—awake but still dreaming. A little girl wearing yellow rain boots and a blue jumper dashing past me into the downpour, ignoring my snatching hands and pleas to stop, please, wait. Her tiny pigtails bounce as she giggles, splashing in the vile liquid. My muscles twitch and my heart refuses to slow.

I focus my eyes on the parched crabgrass surrounding the bench—my new bedroom/living room/den of the week. My pulse slows as I contemplate the desiccated blades. A shadow passes over me, and I look up, paralyzed like a groundhog spotting a hawk. There, hanging over me is a torpid body of evaporated poison, heavy and dark with its load. Surrounded by its kin, the raincloud bears down on my tiny form, it threatens me like that big guy in high school—the one with the even bigger brothers—that you accidentally bumped into in the hall.

Quivering, I slowly get to my feet, expecting the rain to fall on my unprotected head at any moment like sand through a cheese grater. Backing away from my bench—I’ll find a new home for my unwashed body clothed in vintage dumpster apparel—my eyes never leaving their sullen, featureless faces. I watch, glassy-eyed, as the first drop splatters on the parched sidewalk. Finally, the iron cord connecting me to this peril snaps, and I turn and run.

The first onslaught falls lazily—the loin who has already cornered his meal. My mad dash takes me down a side street and I dodge the fat droplets like a dolphin dodges fishermen’s nets. A dripping, searing pain slides down my back as my flannel shirt takes the brunt of the attack. Its soaked, heavy weight of evil spurs me on.

Soon the lion decides that the time for playing with its food has passed, and springs for the kill. I have nowhere else to go as the drops fall so thick that even a gnat could not have escaped a drenching. I stop, defeated, in the parking lot of a faded small town grocery and scream. I watch as my skin dissolves, sloughing off like paint, and puddles at my feet. My howl is cut off as the horrid stuff eats away first my muscles, and then the rest, leaving nothing solid. It is too early for shoppers to stand around and watch my shrieking agony. No one is there to mourn the passing of a salt man. The puddle that was once a man mingles with the continuing downpour and washes down the storm drain.