Dave didn't care for salt. He refused it kindly when it was offered to him, shaking his hand like a stop sign and upturning his mouth into a polite, no thank you kind of smile. It wasn't because he disliked the taste of salt, although it sparked an inherent disgust inside him. And it wasn't because he didn't like the granular texture--that strange feeling on your tongue as you passed your teeth over row after row of corn on the cob. It was because when David was 11 years old, he crouched over to look beneath the underpass just a street over from where he lived, and saw something in the tree.

There had been a tree growing out from the walls of the underpass for over sixty years, and no one had ever considered it a hazard, although it obviously was one. It had crawled out from between the old stones, and it was ugly. It was a filthy brown, and during the best parts of the year its leaves were wilted, almost a grey-green. David had looked into the deep, crawling branches of that tree, and he had seen the Salt Man.

His blood ran cold at that moment, rippling gooseflesh running up his arms and neck and into the thick of his bushy haircut. The Salt Man was bright white, and no shadow cast over him, not from the dripping underpass nor the cracking branches of the old tree. He moved effortlessly and fell, purposefully, from his perch. The creature gathered itself at the neck of the tree, where the wood first met the wall, flowing ominously from side to side, seemingly unaware of David. David was nestled next to a bush on the steep knoll that ran beside the underpass, its thick, wet grass alive with all sorts of bugs and nasties. But none of it bothered Dave, not like how the Salt Man did.

The Salt Man licked his own wrist, or something to that effect. He had no visible face or features, but as he brushed the length of his arm along where a mouth might sit on a creature of this world, he began to dissipate. As the creature brushed away more and more of its carefully formed existence, David again felt that cold sweeping fear come over him once more. He couldn't bring himself to move despite every part of his body urging him to run and never look back. But as the Salt Man pushed himself out of existence, David knew he would return.

He could sniff it in the air. That salty smell, like when the waves come in from off the sea. Or, more aptly, when you spill a salt shaker down your nose. He was overcome by the smell, and as it seeped into his pores, it imbued him with a powerful knowledge. Something that ran alongside us, as a species, had accidentally fallen into itself under a small underpass in a small town. And although that underpass meant a lot in the grand scale of that village on the coast, it meant nothing, as the town did, in the scale of the world. And to where ever the Salt Man came from, that world meant nothing in its grand scheme.

So David does not like salt, nor does he like imagining where it might be from. If all the salt in the ocean is just a byproduct of some massive factory that exists on the fringe of a different place, David doesn't want to hear of it. But what he knew as fact crept over him in the night, and he built towers of wonder imagining the encapsulated hallways that ran thousands of miles both wide and high, thick with that living salt. But David knew there was a leak, and eventually, as people become wiser to the humans and their old oceans, where the salt sifted in copious, unimaginable amounts. What worried David most was that he knew how factories worked, and he knew that leaks were more often than not closed off. It was only because of the Salt Man that David welcomed mortality. He didn't press death; he didn't hope for it to take him away. But he knew that if it didn't, something worse might do just that.