Orion Magazine

The Age of Stolen Salt

SALT IS AN ANCESTOR. Older than ocean, old as stars. Salt flows through your saltwater body even now like blood, as blood. Salt is nonnegotiable, necessary for the working of every single cell. Salt is time. Evidence of how long since evaporation. Resident time of water in basins. Measured future for the preserved dead. Salt is first and lasting.

We live in the age of stolen salt, bottled sweat, preserved expendable flesh.

Some historians say salt

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Orion Magazine

Orion Magazine15 min read
Ill at the Plague Festival
THE FIRST TIME I went to the Kyoto Gion Festival, my friend Isao insisted I wear a kimono. He had found one for me to borrow, and a friend to dress me. For an hour, a young Japanese woman padded my back with towels to de-emphasize the slope of my rea
Orion Magazine4 min read
Resurrection Biology
George Church has a beard like God’s.Each whisker contains helices of DNAthat curve like mammoth tusks. Church and his team work to resurrectthe woolly mammoth, or rather, to createan approximation of it—an elephant cousinadapted to the Arctic. The m
Orion Magazine1 min read
The God of Small Things
THE TITLE character is Velutha, a low-caste worker in a pickle factory and part-time handyman at the Ayemenem home, with whose matriarch he falls into an epic and criminal love that ends in tragedy, and the small things are exactly what they sound li

Related Books & Audiobooks