Read the First Prize Winner 2025 - Salt by Jillian Grant Shoichet

 Salt
 by 
Jillian Grant Shoichet

My task was to salt the slugs. 

            As dawn stole beneath the scant slip of fabric tacked to the window frame, I crept from the bed I shared with my sister.

            I slid past the bathroom, with its leaky faucet whose drip-drip-drip was the soundtrack of my childhood, along with the throbbing growl of the train that lumbered through the blackberries beyond the gravel path three times a day: 6:06, 3:14, and 11:20, like clockwork. Down the hall on the left to avoid the squeaky floorboard on the right. Across the edge of the balding carpet that marked the boundary of the living room, where my mother now sleeps on a pull-out couch, pills by her head, lined face awash in flickering blue light from the television.

            Towards the stained Formica table with my salt pot and its tiny silver-plated spoon.  

            Each night I check the salt pot because I’m the one who knows the habits of slugs.

            The salt pot, handmade by my grandmother, has a bloated belly like the bellies of the ornamental Buddhas at the garden centre in town. 

            My grandmother didn’t salt slugs. When she was a girl, she stabbed slugs with a nail on the end of a board. That’s what my mother said, and that was long before her old lungs got eaten by the cancer, which is also what my mother said, so then I pictured my grandmother getting her old lungs eaten by the cancer and in my mind the cancer was a big slug, munching away on her lungs.

            “What do you think?” my mother asked last night, as if everything was normal.

            I scratched a mosquito bite on my knee. The insects had emerged from the dank water in the ditch between the rail tracks and the path and we didn’t have a screen on the bedroom window. Come end of June, either we were all too hot or we all got bitten. I preferred too hot but in our family the eldest chooses and I’m the youngest by fourteen months so we all got bitten.

            “It’s going to rain,” I said. There’s always more slugs when it rains. That’s how it is with slugs.

            My mother, hands on hips: “So, more salt?” She said that, too, like things were normal.

            She took the box of salt from above the stove and tipped the spout towards the clay Buddha belly. A small waterfall of white cascaded over the silver-plated spoon.

            “Good,” I said. I said it like normal, too. Saying it another way would mean things had changed.

            I planned to write about what happens when you sprinkle salt onto the back of a slug because Mrs. Whitcomb said she was interested, as a scientist, but my mother said I shouldn’t write about killing, I should write about preserving. The best writers do that, she said: they preserve ideas for the next generation.

            We’re in luck then, I said, because salt is a double-duty compound. It doesn’t just kill things, it preserves them.

            “Hannah Grace Lee, stop talking salt.”

            She said it the normal way, but I knew she meant Hannah Grace Lee, stop pouring salt in the wound. That’s a funny thing about salt: it makes a wound sting but it cleans a penny so bright it shines like a copper moon.

            I pushed open the screen door. I waited for the train whistle to round the bend and then I took the steps slowly so as not to spill salt from the Buddha belly. 

            The air was two things: fresh from the rain and heavy with the breath of rotting seaweed. If Carleigh and I followed the tracks to the sea, the tide would be low. I don’t know about you but I like to walk out onto the sand so far that it melts away between my toes. Then we dodge sand hoppers and forage for bits of sea lettuce, which we wash in the ocean and suck on to get all the salt.

            I lifted the latch on the makeshift gate to the salad garden, with its neat rows of bitter endive, mizuna, chervil, spinach, spicy arugula. Dandelions too, but slugs prefer imported greens because slugs have fancy tastes, that’s what my mother says. Slugs like the same salad greens that women from West Vancouver buy at the Horseshoe Bay farmers’ market on Saturday mornings, before champagne breakfast weekends in the cabin at Honeymoon Bay. My mother rolls her eyes when she says this as we load crates of salad greens into the hatchback early on Saturday mornings. But after she leaves, Carleigh and I pretend to be rich ladies from West Vancouver having champagne breakfast and mizuna at Honeymoon Bay, which looks like it sounds, all liquid honey and copper moons.

            Last summer I convinced Carleigh to help me lug a pail of sea water home from the beach; I set it on the front walk in the sun. We won’t need to buy salt anymore, I said. We’ll get our salt from the ocean just like the Romans did.

            I planned to scrape the salt off the sides of the bucket, the same way the ancient salt collectors collected salt from the salt pans at Ostia. I wouldn’t have to barge the salt up the Tiber, of course, because all I needed to do was walk it up the front steps.

            After two weeks the pail was still full of sea water, maybe some rain water too, and once I saw the neighbour dog drinking out of it so it couldn’t have been too salty after all, and then my mother knocked it over when she was bringing in the groceries. 

            She said not to worry because she’d just bought salt at the grocery store. 

            That’s the whole point, I said, to not have to buy salt.

            But that was last summer.

            I closed the gate and surveyed my mother’s small, verdant empire of salad greens. 

            Anyone who’s squeamish should look away right now because this is when I salt the slugs. I won’t write about it, but I will say this: the trail of destruction would be long and bloody if slugs had blood but they just dry up like a tide pool in the sun until all that’s left is a line of slime and salt on the soil.

            The week before school let out, Mrs. Whitcomb started her last science lesson of the year and said we were going to talk about salt. I put up my hand right way.

            “Yes, Hannah Grace?”

            I love how Mrs. Whitcomb says my name, like it’s a song. I once told her that, and she said in music there’s something called Grace notes, so it all made sense.

            “I know about salt,” I said.

            “Pray tell us,” she said.

            So I pray did.

            After five minutes, Mrs. Whitcomb said, “You know a lot about salt.”

            “I know a lot more,” I said.

            For instance, last night I knew there was enough salt in the Buddha belly to salt the slugs. I asked for more salt for another reason, a reason of preservation, so it’s okay to write about it.

            But first you should know that sometimes Carleigh comes with me to salt the slugs. She doesn’t like to watch the actual salting, but afterwards we follow the tracks through the blackberries to the beach. We get there before 6:06. When we hear the whistle, we turn and watch the train from the sand. Then we walk home along the tracks, across the ditch and through the loose boards in the fence, and we’re back in bed before we have to be up for school. Sometimes we’re too loud: we wake up my mother in the cot next to us, but she’s not angry.

            A few days after Mrs. Whitcomb’s science lesson, Carleigh came with me to salt the slugs. It was what my mother calls a “rare fine spring day,” early fingers of sunlight practically prodding us to the beach.

            We slipped through the fence, scrambled up the slope, and turned towards the briny breeze that slithers through the blackberry bushes. Later in summer the ripe fruit tastes of salt.

            We didn’t do anything different from normal. We took the bend like we always do, Carleigh on one rail, me on the other.

            We felt the thud in the air at our backs before we heard it. Carleigh looked over at me, startled. I spun around but we’d already rounded the curve and the blackberries cut off the view of the tracks behind us but still blocked the beach ahead. We felt the singing of the rails beneath our feet and the scream of the whistle in our ribcages and Carleigh jumped like a deer and grabbed my hand and we ran—but with all the rain and sun, the blackberries had grown thick and fast and there wasn’t room along the side of the tracks so we ran in the middle, but suddenly the engine shot around the bend and screamed right in our ears and I screamed too and pulled Carleigh off the tracks and into the blackberries through a wall of oil and sound.

            When the noise stopped, I was still holding Carleigh’s hand. I looked over and smiled because I knew she’d be scared and even though I’m fourteen months younger I’ve always been the tough one. She looked back at me, face white. Her eyes fluttered in an odd way and her gaze slid away from me and up to the sky, so I looked up too.

            That’s when I realized the train was still there, the metal sides of the engine blocking the sun. Towards the beach, I heard the voices of men and the sound of boots on gravel.

            I looked back down and saw the blood, flowing towards me like a tide. I’d pulled almost all of Carleigh with me into the blackberries, but her left leg was still caught beneath a wheel of the train.

            The bushes parted and suddenly men were shouting, searching, probing, wrapping me in a blanket, kneading Carleigh’s leg. One of them tried to pull my hand from Carleigh’s but I wouldn’t let him, even when they tied a rubber strap tight around Carleigh’s thigh and freed what was left of her leg from under the wheel.

            I only let go when I heard my mother scream, louder than the whistle of a train.

I’m still writing about preserving, so I have to skip the next part because not everything gets preserved.

            Instead, I’ll go back to this morning: after I salted the slugs, I closed the gate to the salad garden and crossed the dewy grass to the fence, where the boards are no longer loose, but I can climb a fence just fine, even with a pot of salt in my pocket.

            I pulled myself up the slope and headed towards the beach. At the bend, where the blackberry bushes were beaten back wide enough for a stretcher, new shoots had already sprouted. But the cut was still raw, like a scar that hadn’t healed.

            You wouldn’t know Carleigh’s blood was there if you hadn’t seen it. But I knew it lay in the earth beneath the gravel and the weeds. I pulled the Buddha belly out of my pocket and cast the rest of the salt over the place where Carleigh had been.

            Mrs. Whitcomb probably knows about the preservative aspects of salt. She may not know that blood is only one-third as salty as the sea. But school is out for the summer. I won’t have a chance to tell her until next year.

            I returned along the tracks and climbed the fence. I slipped past the flickering-blue light from the living room. Then I crawled into bed, avoiding Carleigh’s side of the mattress and the depression that still held the shape of her body.

            I suppose I could have shut the window now, but I didn’t.