Underneath the sun, layering, bursting, coming into being was a curiosity forbidden.

Would today be the day?

When finally their hands would graze each other’s as falling leaves twirled around their feet before the grand fountain? How long she had waited for this to be. His touch, his smile, his devotion. Lost so long ago she could barely remember, and now, out of the blue, returned. A single glimpse at possibility and what could be. One step from truth, a moment detached from everyday toils, one hope fluttered through the cloudless sky.

Now, landed her vision. She held her hands close to her heart as his carriage approached and tiny turtledoves, a fairy tale, flanked the procession. This delivered to her, as she’d always dreamed as a little girl.

He opens the door. Steps out.

Sun bursting so brilliant she cannot see. So close.

But, Oh! Blindness! She falls to the ground, sinking, seeping into mud, sucked down into the quicksand of possibilities lost. She cranks her neck at the sound of heels, his soldier’s boots, stopping next to her.

A hand reaches down. She grabs it. Is pulled from the wreckage of her own obsessions.

Him. Her. Them.

It will not last. This much she knows. Because the sun is fading now. Too fast. Vanishing behind trees. Barely noon.

He lets go her hand, turns on his heel, walks away. Toward the house. Knocks.

Her sister opens the door. His bride-to-be.

A grand and glorious wedding celebration lauded across the kingdom.

Her sister’s belly large with child.

The baby arrives. Then another. And another.

Auntie dotes on them, toys, candy, kisses galore. She lives alone, but close enough to what could have been, harboring in the sea of her beloved’s happiness.

One day a storm descends. Her sister’s fury echoes across the land. He storms out the door. The children cry. He has squandered their money. All of it.

The family’s wrath is quick, merciless. He is cast out, banished. Her father takes in the sister, her children, the tatters of their once bountiful love.

In a distant and unfamiliar land, he fumbles, struggles, flees demons, hope for a resurrection that never comes. She spies him in her dreams, chased by crows, their faces intoxicated with hate, their bites relentless.

Death by a thousand pecks. Swirling, swirling into the depths of his own destruction.

SMACK.

And just like that, I clattered to the floor, my insides spilling out in embarrassing fashion across the cold linoleum. I rolled a bit, teetering back and forth, then fell still.

“What in bloody hell?” I heard a man’s voice grumble. I spotted a wrinkled, jittery hand, reaching down for me, inching closer, closer, closer…

SMACK. A flash of perfectly manicured bright pink fingernails flitted across my field of vision, swatting away the wrinkled hand and swooping my white plastic body up in a single jerky motion.

“Poison, Dad,” said the young woman who was now clutching me with a death grip. She slammed me down on the table between them. “You want another damn heart attack?”

“Grain of salt, sweetheart,” said the white-haired man, his voice playful.

She sighed and shook her head. “This isn’t a joke.”

“Honey.” He reached toward her with his bear paw.

“No,” she said firmly, pulling her fingers away and raising them to her left temple. “I can’t have this conversation again. My head hurts.”

“Eat something,” the man said, gently sliding a bowl of plain oatmeal toward her and accidentally knocking me over with his bulging knuckles.

Lying there on my side, I saw her face. It looked ragged, older than its 20-something years with dark circles around brown eyes, betraying chaos inside.

“Nah, my stomach’s been off,” she said, her face suddenly looking paler. I watched her dark ponytail swish as she turned around and squinted at a clock on the diner's far wall.

“Almost 8:30. Gotta go teach,” she said, jumping up and grabbing a rolled-up yoga mat from under the table.

“Lindsay, doll,” said the man, concern growing in his voice as he beckoned to the dimly lit parking lot. “It’s 8:30 p.m. P.M.”

“Wait, but…” the woman said, trailing off. A nod. “Yes, of course. I taught this morning.”

“You did,” said the man. “Here, take some,” he said, pushing a half-eaten $3.99 diet plate of egg whites and cantaloupe toward her. She sat down slowly, her eyes welling with tears.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me lately,” she said. She didn’t move when her father took her hand this time.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, reaching over to stand me upright and slide me towards her.

That’s when she looked straight at me. And instantly, I knew. Her headache. Nausea. Confusion. It wasn’t something I’d seen much in my days here at the Big Rig Diner in Tallahassee, but there it was written all over her face, plain as day.

Salt deficiency.

She’d been decrying me as poison for years, worrying about her father, perpetually afraid genetics would take her too down the road of diabetes and heart failure.

She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want him to die. And so she had cast me out—to dangerous extremes—imagining that removing me from her life would ward off the inevitable. Now she was wasting away with alarming alacrity.

She stared at me curiously, a realization dawning, then coming into focus: moderation.

“Grain of salt?” her father asked again, pushing me toward her. She smiled weakly.

Shake, shake, shake.