The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw

Author:Cassandra Khaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

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“Your eyes were green before.” And they’d tasted of lime and sweat and ice, had dissolved on my tongue like crème. I had eaten those like I’d eaten the heart, the hand.

“I’m certain,” says the surgeon, fingers threading together. His new eyes are silver, like starlight strained and sieved, stainless save for the pinholes of his pupils. “That you believed they were green. Green is a very beautiful color.”

No longer do the surgeons speak in echoes, the madrigal of their voices finally split. For their evening meal, they wear no masks, only skin and burlap robes, and they laugh like they’re proletariat-raised, full of brashness. The children adore them. The youngest attach to their knees, their arms, tugging them every which way. The older children weaponize stories: accounts of their fastidiousness; descriptions of a fox they’d sighted in the woods, its tail a tongue of blood; philosophies newly improvised from the wisdom they’d culled from the guts of a stag. Anything that might elicit attention; a glance, the curve of a smile, or best of all: a word of approval, more precious than any opal.

The normalcy rankles. It reeks of rehearsal. I glance to where my plague doctor sits, spine straight, hands clasped over the table. Their plate is laden with cheeses, frost-bleached grapes, cold cuts thick-rind with fat. Nothing has been touched. As I watch, my plague doctor leans into conversation with the deep-voiced surgeon; their jaw clenching, unclenching, juddering with the effort of restraint.

“What are you?”

I look back to the surgeon-saint to my right. He smiles, only lips, no teeth. He and his cohorts had seemed indifferent to me in the cold morning—the third jabbers with the children, agreeable as a grandfather—but it might have been there were other things to distract them then: the stilted theatre that is every first meeting, the pleasures of such ceremony, the cipher of my plague doctor’s distaste. “You’re clearly not human. An aquatic creature, perhaps? Not a rusalka, no. I know the rusalka intimately. Your eyes—” He raises his hand, fingers splayed. Moves closer, closer, until his nails scratch my lips. “Fascinating.”

I smile, all teeth. “I’m told.”

The surgeon retracts, fingers balling, even as he lays his hand atop the table. Behind him, two girls—one wide-set, with chestnut hair too thick to bind, the other slim as a needle—maneuver a cauldron to the table. Their stew is redolent of carrots, yams, parsnips, all slightly old; onions cooked till the sweetness bled from them; beef and marrow and boiled-down bones. “That was presumptuous of me.”

“Yes.”

“What can I ask you, then? Could we talk about the weighting of the stars above the night-bruised seas, and what happens when one falls into the abyss? Or whether pelicans converse in French when outside of human view? I’d love—” Shoulders slant forward. His expression becomes one of languorous interest, conspiratorial. “—to know what it is like in the deeps. What do you do? How do you interact with one another? Do you have a civilization?

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