Salt Deposit

Beneath the playa, light compresses into rind, a crust so white it hums against the heel. Wind has done its work here — stripped the lake down to its slowest syllable, the residue of ten thousand summers drinking themselves dry.

Pick up a shard and hold it to your tongue. The taste is older than the basin, older than the fault that cracked the range apart and let the water pool and wait for its own vanishing.

Every crystal remembers the column it descended — the long fall through a body of brine, each molecule choosing its lattice the way a word chooses the line where it will finally stop moving.

Walk far enough and the horizon loses its seam. Sky presses into ground, ground lifts into sky, and you become the only vertical thing, casting a shadow so precise it could cut the salt in two.