🍑 "Too late for the peach."

Salt: 3

Hi, readers!

This week's edition features flash fiction by Ada Astrella, who guides the reader through the textures, dimensions, and hypotheticals of a single, still moment. It will also make you crave a peach.

The piece refers to the Old Testament story of Lot's wife, who was turned into a pillar of salt after glancing back at the doomed city of Sodom — against the directions of an angel — as her family fled from it. 

Lot's wife is painted as little more than a naive casualty in the verse, but the 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova later gave her some well-deserved interiority in her poem "Lot's Wife," which imagines how she felt as she left her home. The last stanza:

"Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem

too insignificant for our concern?

Yet in my heart I will never deny her,

who suffered death because she chose to turn."

Unsurprisingly, Ahkmatova's version is what Astrella's narrator prefers: By finally acknowledging the character's complex fear, joy, and longing, it also acknowledges theirs. 

Context is just the salt in the smoothie here, though: Astrella's work speaks best for itself. Be sure to read it below!

A few reminders:

We're open for submissions on the theme of Salt until June 30. Please send your work to tartmgzn@gmail.com.

The PDF version of Issue 1 is still available on our website for $10, as well as print copies and tote bags for $15 each. We are donating all June proceeds to Flatbush United Mutual Aid. The PDF won't be there forever, so get a copy if you've been meaning to!

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In the morning when nothing happens

By Ada Astrella

I’m eating a peach over the sink with one hand, grabbing a napkin with the other even though it’s too late; the juice is down my arm. Almost too late for the peach, too, but I saved it. Can never decide whether to leave the peaches out in a bowl or put them in the crisper. Out, their skin shrivels faster. In the crisper, they risk being forgotten. And then, either way, I might have to desperately reimagine them as jam or filling for a galette, which never tastes as good with the desperation baked in. This one is cold from the crisper. The college students whose yard backs up against ours must have built a fire last night. I think I heard their music when I went to check the oven, even though I didn’t use it that day. The uncovered fire is still smoking, and I can smell it. If I were a mother, I would be upset with them. I put my elbow on the countertop, and it’s gritty with salt that got away from the saltcellar. Some people say you should salt all foods, including smoothies. I always think about trying it then don’t. No one would tell me to salt this peach, and I wouldn’t either. Unless it preserved me right here, alone with the lights off in my kitchen holding a peach in one hand and the smell of burnt wood coming in through the screen. I’d be frozen like Lot’s wife, if you squint. But Anna Akhmatova’s version, the version I like. Except I am insignificant. And because there is no destruction behind me, no man next to me — I’m really only turning toward the kitchen window. By the time the kids wake up, the fire and the peach will both be just pits, and I’ll have walked away.

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About the Artist

Ada Astrella is a fiction writer from New Jersey. 

✨LAST SLICE✨

FTP.

#1 Rachel @rachel

made my friend let me share this from her private instagram because it’s so good