Salt: My Mother
Sugar, Salt and Pepper (1970) by Wayne Thiebaud
By Emily Hoang
The girl devoured salt like rice, by the cluster, and it was even sweeter when her mother wasn’t looking. Facing the stove, her mother fried tofu while the girl, crouched under the table, hugged a Morton container—her first secret lover. Instead of her usual pinch, a waterfall cascaded into her mouth, onto the floor, creating a mountain. Her mother reprimanded her and cleaned up her mess, a dance they would return to for years to come. But this didn’t stop the girl from future attempts. Licking the Himalayan salt lamp in her aunt’s bedroom. Gathering the dandruff in her hair that deceptively looked like coarse salt. Sifting salt from the snowy roads. Each encounter met with a lecture but made the girl more unstoppable. Even when she accidentally found her mother crying the one and only time. By impulse, she traced her mother’s face with her tongue, starting from her right jawline, then up to her cheeks, until she reached the source, where the skin parted and deepened into a hole that housed her eye. The girl, blinded by the taste of salt, drank and reaped its goodness, sucking her mother dry until she was no longer a girl but a mother herself.
Emily Hoang is a Chinese-Vietnamese American writer from San Francisco. Her work has appeared in GASHER Journal and Black Horse Review. When she’s not writing, you can find her running, eating, or exploring new spots around the city.