This is a story. I'm sitting down at my computer to write a story.

This is a story about salt. Salt is great. Sometimes I eat salt. Othertimes, salt eats me, if you know what I mean.

Mostly, though, I am the eater in my relationship with salt. It seasons all of the foods that I eat. I partake in the grand parade of sodiumness. Other times, though, I am the seasoning on the meals of the salt. This story is about one of those times.

During a long hot spell, people got really thirsty and then they sweated. Lots of sweat filled lots of bottles in dingy floors around a room of steamy vinyl couches and old coffee tables peppered with moldy magazines. It was the salt collection agency's main office, where the government collected sweat-salt for study and later reclamation and commercial use. The people who worked there, of course, were a little weird.

One of them was named Sal. Sal used to walk to work every day, even when it was 100 and the humidity condensed on the shop windows' edges that lined the way he walked. By the time he reached the room where he worked, his shirt was soaked, and he smelled pretty bad. But the smell didn't really matter, because he worked in an office that was full of jars and other containers, some with poor lids, that were full of wonderfully odored sweat. And he could always wring off his shirt into a jar and add to his personal collection of salt jars. He really liked his jars of salt. A lot of the salt in the office was from his body. The truth was that Sal sweated profusely almost every day of the year.

The office itself didn't have any air conditioning. Instead it had old foggy windows, slid open to allow in whatever breeze the stifling atmosphere created, swaying the broken and bent faded yellow blinds that kept the blazing sun from baking the inside. Two 50s styled circular fans on tall stands swept the room with their breath too far away from the windows to affect any effective air circulation. One of them had a few streamers attatched. The colored streamers flowed and danced in the current, the happiest element in the beauru.

Sal walked into the office late a Monday morning some time in the middle of week. "It's hot outside. Should be good for business," he said.

Sal spoke not to a person, but to a large pillar that he had erected from reclaimed salt in the corner of the room. He was currently in the process of working this salt into a human figure during his lunch breaks. It was something to keep his mind off of his boring job, anyway. And it was good company. The only other employee that worked in his office was a small round lady that cleaned the office every weekday afternoon from 3-6, and a supervisor that came down from the main office in the state capital once a week to check on his collection progress.

In general his collection progress was good. He was efficeint at his job, no matter how much he hated it. He had a few regular sweat collection routes that he ran, depending on the day. Wednesdays he started the day at the local gym. There he would receive whatever sweat the showers' filters had caught the day before. There was usually quite a lot of it, sometimes up to 5 gallons. After the gym he'd drop by the post office where recent clothing alterations in the postal carrier uniform had upped the production and conservation of sweat per person quite a lot. He had maybe 10 gallons from the entire postal workers union. Then he would go off to the police department: 2 gallons. His last stop Wednesday and every day was at the sweat drop off point. There local conscientious citizens would drop off their personal sweat collections. This was quite a lot, and would take maybe an hour to fill his tanks with it and take it back to the office. There he would work on draining the salt, and start on the refining process to reclaim the valuable salt.

I visited it once. Only once, though. Remember that statue that he was making in the corner? Well, it turns out she didn't like me very much. So she ate me. Fortunately she was just salt, so I broke my way out and walked home.

And that's the end of my story.