to make something beautiful should be enough;
Live too long as a ghost and it starts to consume you.
Salt prefers that form, always has – there’s a comfort in it, in being transparent and intangible. In her corporeal form, she is clumsy, bumping into things, things ache or burn when used too often or incorrectly.
She thinks she’d live eternally as a ghost, if it wasn’t for her mother, who was quick to scold her. You’ll miss out, Gail said, living this way. There’s a whole world out there. Friends and lovers and children and even enemies. Things that make life exciting.
Perhaps – but Salt has none of these. Her only friend is her sister, whom she hasn’t spoken to in some time. She’s never had a lover, or a child, or an enemy. So life, in this form, is rather boring and a bit painful.
But she tries. For mother, who tries to hide her envy when Salt leaves the afterlife.
She was bred at a crossroads, a mortal king and a dead queen, and the result – a ghost shifting girl – was an apt mix of the two. Almost storybook, really.
She takes to the woods because there’s comfort in shadows, they dapple her grayed body like a whisper of intangibility, and she takes every ounce of it she can get.
She swallows, and moves on. She resists the urge to transition into a ghost, but every step’s a struggle, and she can’t help but sigh.
salt