The Saltness of Time

A Kansas snowstorm forces a car of college students returning home for the holidays to take refuge in the hotel of a small town where they encounter a fellow traveler, who also seeks shelter, and has a story to tell about the consequences of another snow storm decades before when a hideous truth is revealed about an old woman.

"I haven't told many people this story. Perhaps you'd rather not hear it. I know how hard it is for young people to listen about what rocked the hearts and flamed the passions of old people when they were young. It seems so long ago it's hard to believe lives back then were blood and bone real. And what happened to me that night reached back into the last century. I mean, Gabrielle was born in the 1880s. No, wait, might as well get it right. She was eighty-nine when we ran across her and that was in 1963, so she would have been born in...'" he stopped briefly to calculate in his head and Stephie, the little math whiz, spoke up with the answer, "1874."

"Eighteen seventy-four. Amazing that I can pass on, personally, now more than hundred years after her birth, some of the reality of Gabrielle. If you'd care to hear about it," he said and it was more a plea than a question. Something there that needed telling....