little salt

 “To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.” - Salmon Rushdie

She held his hand. “For someone so small and frail, 

he has big, strong hands,” she thought as her fingers intertwined his fingers.

When you're a migrant kid, and you spend your life 

picking peaches and tomatoes in the hot sun of humid days, your hands grow like the fruits and vegetables of summer, but the rest of your body withers away like the vines of fall.

He squeezed her hand, and she could feel his heart beat in her hand. She felt it deeply inside of her, and she turned and looked 

at him.

“I understand,” she whispered, and he could feel tenderness deeply inside of him as he looked into her earthy brown eyes.

When you're a native kid in the Arctic, and you spend your life building and mending under the small sun of frozen days, your heart grows beautiful and mysterious, like the great bowhead whales under the ice, but the rest of you bends against the harsh, bitter winds of the ocean.

They both turned again and looked out over the water at the setting sun. Tears welled up in the corners of their eyes and dropped down their cold cheeks into the icy Chukchi Sea.

And for the first time in their lives they knew human kindness, they felt the warm tears of love.

- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown eyed girl, 2019