The Salt Archivist

The museum kept its salt in the basement, in drawers labelled by the year the sea gave it up. Ilse had been told this on her first morning, and had assumed it was a joke the director told every new hire. It was not a joke. It was the only collection that was growing.

She worked through the drawers the way her mother had shelled peas: without looking, mostly by feel. Grey salt from the winter the harbour froze. Pink salt from the year of the red algae. Coarse, wet, stubborn salt that someone had scraped off the hull of a ship called Patience and never thought to explain.

At the back of the last drawer, under a paper bag that crumbled when she lifted it, was a ledger bound in sailcloth.

14 March. Received: one crate oranges, one crate bells, one crate of the sound a door makes when nobody is home.

The ink was still soft enough to smudge. The date was tomorrow's.

Director Abreu ate the same lunch every day — two sardines on dark bread, an apple cut into eighths — and he ate it in the gallery of figureheads because, he said, they were the only colleagues who never asked for funding.

"A ledger," he said, when she showed him. He did not touch it. "We have three hundred ledgers."

"Not like this one."

He read the first page, then the second, and then he put down the apple slice he had been holding. Ilse had never seen him put down an apple slice.

"Where did you find this?"

"Drawer forty-one. Under the salt from the year the lighthouse went dark."

"There is no salt from that year," he said. "Nobody went to the water that year."

Above them, a wooden mermaid with a cracked nose watched the conversation with an expression Ilse would later describe, in her own notes, as professional interest.

On the fourteenth of March a delivery van reversed into the loading bay at eleven minutes past nine. The driver had a clipboard and a cold. He did not know what was in the crates; he only knew that someone had paid in advance and asked for the basement door.

The first crate was oranges. The second rang when it touched the floor.

Ilse signed for both with a pen that skipped. The driver looked at the third crate, still in the van, and then looked at her.

"This one's empty," he said. "But it's heavy. I don't know how to explain it."

"Leave it," Ilse said. "I think it's expected."