IMAGE NO. 1:

Alt Text:

Picture of the beach.  At the top center of the image is an airplane that is about to land at the airport.  Directly under it is a black sun that is rising over some hilly islands that block the view into the open ocean.  At the bottom of the image there is a pigeon standing on a sandy beach.  The airplane is directly above the pigeon and the black sun—they are all center aligned.  Not exactly center aligned, but there was an attempt to make the composition of the image seem perfect—seem cosmically aligned.  Outside of the picture are three girlies: one alt punk pseudo-intellectual, and two slightly awkward sweethearts.  One group of girlies—wearing all the primary colors.  Twenty years old each—one group of years as sixty.  Their legs are visually cut up by short planks of wood and their torsos and upward are shining in the sun.  Three stragglers that didn’t know how to keep up—in class and out.  Small three-person clique formed for survival.

I was on this beach some time ago, sitting with two of my friends—fairy-dust in my pocket.  My friends—Nixie and some other girl—were feeling that this whole ordeal was rather pleasant, but I felt it was rather bittersweet.  We had been there for only a week, but we’ve somehow made it feel like a month—lots of fun.  Some sort of heat-induced drunken stupor allowed us to forget multiple things—forget every other pseudo-girly (every other girly not in this clique—this clique of survival).  They were on this beach with us—they had no plan to see the sunrise.  The pseudo-girlies were walking to our next destination.  We stayed around for a while—we wanted to be left behind.  They whispered to themselves and laughed as they left.  It was there we sat for quite some time—on the beach—watching the seagulls walk around the sand and the planes pass in the distance.  It was there we were supposed to watch the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.  We were made quite uncomfortable by the sun’s absence, and only had time to gather our thoughts on the plane ride that evening, where we would fly far away from the Atlantic.  I wondered if we would ever laugh together again.  A week of eye-opening experiences was commemorated by nothing—no sunrise.  Nixie poured black salt in my eyes when we got back.

MONOLOGUE NO. 1:

My first lesbian experience was with the sun.  This was a few years before the beach event.  My eye stared at it for a whole minute—a hole was bored into my eyesight.  There was no solar eclipse or anything—no reason to stare.  Nobody there.  Just me, the sun, and the threat of blindness—the thought of it all excited me.  There was something in my peripherals, but I can’t remember what—I had very intense tunnel vision on that sun.  The heat made my eyes sweat into some strange mix of tears.  I began to wonder what the result of this spiritual experience would be.  The pseudo-girlies would’ve definitely whispered and laughed to themselves (had they known me at the time).  

Eventually, I had to stop myself from staring.  Turning away was hard—I didn’t really want the sun to leave my vision, but the result of turning away was unexpectedly fulfilling.  As the sun left my vision, it imprinted a black sun into my eyesight—a pseudo-friend.  I physically couldn’t look at the world the same—constant black sun rising everywhere.  However, I would eventually end up going through the usual banalities of life, so I started to make special time for the black sun in order to keep its spiritual impact significant.  I would walk out of work, conversations, and restaurants in order to have something akin to a smoke break.  I tried to start a dialogue with it during these moments.  I stared at it with purpose, instead of trying to see around it (the banalities of life had to be kept in my peripherals).  

After the first few ‘smoke breaks,’ it didn’t really have much to say to me and I was quite scared about losing my new pseudo-friend.  I tried very desperately to make it mean something again.  Eventually, I realized nothing would come of these attempts, and I was fully consumed by the banality of everything.  Maybe one day it would start a dialogue with me, but as of then it was just a visual commemoration of that one beautiful moment.

MONOLOGUE NO. 2:

Nixie was actually very sweet.  She always offered me all sorts of snacks and would send me pretty pictures of the moon, so I wasn’t too mad about the salt incident.  Apparently it cleanses bad energy or something?  I don’t know what bad energy she thought was in my eyes—my peripheral vision?  Is that what needed to be cleansed?  The black salt washed out leaving my eyesight red—the color of sunrises.  I commemorated that short-lived moment by keeping her in my peripherals for quite some time.  I don’t know why, something just urged me to.  Weird.

We didn’t really vibe well together—not going to lie there.  Yes, we were both pretty wacky, but our tendencies were awfully different.  I stared at things; she poured stuff in people’s eyes.  What more could I say?  We were secretly enemies.  It was much better than the pseudo-girlies though.  I was very afraid of losing this friend.  She took such good pictures of the moon.  

IMAGE NO. 2:

Alt Text:

A picture of the black sun burned into my vision.  Behind it are two dusts: fairy dust and black salt.  Black salt for cleansing.  Fairy dust for art ho pseudo-intellectual vibes.  My dust and Nixie’s salt intermixed.  Intermixed together, the fairy dust is left powerless.  The black salt stripped it of its power.  The dust is in the shape of a sun.  A big mass of dust that is dense in the center and slowly dissolves at the edges.  There is still a very defined edge though—just specs outside of it, like sun glares.  The sunshine reflects off the fairy dust making them appear as a multiplicity of smaller suns on different wavelengths.  The black salt absorbs all the light and appears as burnt marks in the camera lens.  The sunshine splits the pseudo-sun (the dust/salt sun) in half.  Not exactly halfway, but there is an attempt on the sun’s part to make the composition of the image seem perfect—seem cosmically aligned.  It is some sort of obscure yin and yang symbol.  The dusts are on a yellow towel, and the weaving of the towel creates a gridded plane of space for the dust to lay flat on—no three-dimensional qualities.  

The lights had to be purposefully turned off for the sunshine to appear.  The two dusts had to be purposefully dumped onto each other—this was done to answer one question: did they look good together?  I felt as if they did.  There were other questions though.  How would the teachers interpret it?  My dust and Nixie’s salt intermixed.  How would the pseudo-girlies react?  Would they whisper to each other and laugh?  Would the teachers be confused?  How could this moment—this image—be made to hold some sort of emotional significance?  How could this image mean something?  This pseudo-sun would stay in my room for at least a couple of weeks.

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Part 2 of “Black Salt” appears in issue 95 of Vagabond City.

Lace Franklin (she/they) is a transfemme student pursuing art and writing.  She needs the sun’s warmth to live and the moon’s light to glow. You can find her on Twitter/X @lacee_scape.