IMAGE NO. 1+2 + MONOLOGUE NO. 1+2:

Alt Text:

My first lesbian experience was with the sun.  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.  Two dusts: fairy dust and black salt.  Black salt for cleansing.  Fairy dust for art ho pseudo-intellectual vibes.  Intermixed together, the fairy dust is left powerless.  The black salt stripped it of its power.  Just me, the sun, and the threat of blindness—the thought of it all excited me.  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 sun splits the text in half.  Not exactly halfway, but there is an attempt on the author’s part to make the composition of the story seem perfect—seem cosmically aligned.  It is some sort of obscure yin and yang symbol.  I began to wonder what the result of this spiritual experience would be.  The lights had to be purposefully turned off for the sunshine to appear.  The two dusts had to be purposefully dumped onto each other.  The two images had to be purposefully collaged onto each other—this was done to answer one question: How could this moment—this image—be made to hold some sort of emotional significance?  How could this image resist the fading away of its meaning?  Turning away was hard—I didn’t really want the sun to leave my vision, but the result of turning away was very unexpectedly fulfilling— it 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.  However, I would eventually end up going through the usual banalities of life again, so I started to make special time for it 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.  The pseudo-sun (the dust/salt sun) only stayed there for a couple of weeks.  Was it rising or was it setting?  It was there we watched the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.  Was it even a sun?  Or just a hole in my vision?  Eventually, I realized nothing would come of these attempts, and I was fully consumed by the banality of everything.  Nixie poured black salt in my eyes when we got back—it imprinted a black sun into my eyesight—a pseudo-friend.  It was better than the pseudo-girlies though.  Maybe one day it would start a dialogue with me, but now it was just a visual commemoration of that one beautiful moment.  It was there I (and only I) watched the black sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean.  We haven’t truly laughed together since—I took twenty more smoke breaks.  After the first few ‘smoke breaks,’ Nixie didn’t really have much to say to me and I was quite scared about losing my new pseudo-friend.  I was very afraid of losing this friend.

IMAGE NO. 3:

Alt Text:

A picture Nixie sent me not long after she poured black salt in my eyes.  A completely black picture—besides some clouds around the edges.

Part 1 of “Black Salt” previously appeared in issue 94 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.