last I saw you were down on your knees; any

[salt]

to make something beautiful should be enough;

Keeper answers the question, tells of a family scattered here and there, and then it’s turned back to Salt, who takes a moment.
“I have a twin sister, but I don’t entirely know where she is,” she says. Vael was not born half-ghost, as Salt was, and she had left the afterlife well before Salt had. She doesn’t know if this was a choice on Vael’s part, or if it was something forced upon her. She thinks of her often, how her sister could heal things, and how she glowed, soft, like fairy lights in the forest. Beautiful in a way Salt would never be (her own beauty is a more haunting thing, girl and ghost, there but flippant).
“My mother’s in the afterlife. She’s not dead, but she’s not…not alive, either. My dad’s with her, sometimes, but he’s not dead either. He’s like me – part ghost.”
When she says it like that, it sounds strange. So many things dead, and not-dead.
“There’s others, but they’re distant, and I don’t know anything about them.”
She had pressed, but Gail had never divulged further information on Salt’s relatives, the inevitable half-siblings that spring up in most piecemeal families. She’d overheard Gail talking of other children, but from the way sadness had drifted into her tone, Salt gets the sense they are dead. The kind of dead where they stay gone.

“I grew up with mother in the afterlife,” she says. This is not part of her family – but then, it is. Mother was her family. “But eventually she said I needed to come here, that I couldn’t waste my youth on so many dead things.”
When she had lived in the afterlife, things had not felt dead. But now, being here, she realizes how those horses had lacked - a certain indefinable thing gone from them. She wonders what it will feel like when she returns – if it will feel like home, or just like another haunted place.

salt