“Salt is Life, Sand is Eternal” • by Kai Delmas

I never wanted this day to come but as you said, “nothing lasts forever, except for sand.”

I remember your wrinkled fingers trailing my rough jaw. You explained how sand is the oldest and strongest material in the world. It has weathered millennia and will weather whatever is thrown in its path. Sand is eternal.

I smiled and wished you had thought about that before you made me. But now I understand. Now that you are gone, I wish for nothing more than to have you back.

You told me how you did it so long ago and even though I have doubts, I cannot imagine my life without you.

I poured sand from our spot at the beach into the bathtub. Followed by saltwater from the sea. I shaped your body like clay. Not the old and frail body that you had become but a younger version. The way I remember you from when I first opened my eyes.

I left a hole in your new body’s chest and filled it with your old body’s ashes. The old within the new.

Finally, I filled the tub with salt—covering your new body completely—all the way to the top. Because salt is life. Salt is in our blood, in our seawater, flowing through our veins. It’s in our tears and in our hearts. We are nothing without salt.

Now I wait.

I wait for you to rise from the salt and fall into my arms forever. We are sand. We are eternal.

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Kai Delmas loves creating worlds and magic systems and is a slush reader for Apex Magazine. He is a winner of the monthly Apex Microfiction Contest, his fiction is forthcoming in Zooscape, and can be found in Martian, Etherea, Tree And Stone, Wyldblood, and several Shacklebound anthologies. Find him on Twitter @KaiDelmas.

 

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