Nil utilius sole et sale. (Roman proverb: Nothing is as useful as sun and salt.)

'Another Invisible City' (with apologies to Italo Calvino) by Jeremy David Stolen

Mortonstan is a city made of salt. Everything in it is constructed from the compound sodium chloride: the walls, the lintels, the cribs, the pots hanging in fires, the benches and every street sign; even the wheels that support the crystalline lacing of the king's carriage as it rattles down the street, sending up behind it a fine white powder that glitters, star-like, as it settles back into the well-worn grooves of the salty streets. There are no trees in Mortonstan, or flowers or moss or bees or butterflies, for it never rains there. The fountain in the square spews sprays of salt from its spigots and the specks collect in the pools below, run out through drains, and are pumped skyward again. The fountain is like an hourglass that never needs turning, but no one keeps their time by it -- it is merely beautiful and is otherwise is without function.Standing above the square, commanding it, is the clock tower. On every hour the salt bells within let out their tinkling peels and little doors open on the face of the clock and intricate figures carved in salt -- kings and merchants and peasants and saints and painters, and bristly dogs and tumbling kittens -- emerge, jerkily, and jilt-jolt along hidden tracks, jittering and clicking, and tinnily clinking tiny tambourines, in time with the cling-clang of the salty bells, peeling and tinkling above. Three types of people watch this show: Tourists, children, and old people. Gathering and pointing and snapping, or letting the ball run down to the gutter, or up from under bushy eyebrows and in a pungent cloud of cigar smoke, they lift their eyes to the movements of the mechanism. They know that behind the glittering grates and moldings and doors of the clock is the real action: a collection of gears and springs and weights and counterweights and teeth -- parts whose sum is a noise: a droning, groaning, grounding grinding that vibrates in your soles and buzzes lowly in the back of your head -- a frequency more than a sound, that throbs in your temples long after you've left for green fields. Only a day under the sun and over the grass -- where the one pattern is the song of birds in the wind and the whir of insects in your ears (which you know is a pattern only because you _know_ -- no proof burdens this act of faith) -- only such a day can soften and dissolve the dreadful rumble of the machine in the clock tower. Of course, Mortonstan is itself a machine and all its citizens and visitors merely cogs. That the princes and the gardeners and the bankers and the maids and the bartenders and the doctors and the street musicians, and even the sculptors and the novelists (especially the novelists!) and the critics (most of all the critics -- they uphold the conceit that they know the machine, yet they turn their eyes nowhere else) -- that these people, the bulk of the population of the city, don't notice that they don't notice the gay dancing figures on the clock -- this makes them no different at all from those who do: the couple from Newport (with a Nikon and knapsacks), the five year old girl in pigtails and her younger brother and his friends (who giggle and scream as the terrier snaps at the baker's baguette), and the retired cafe owner and salesman on the bench (who speak as if their childhood is the only one that ever made sense). Each of these three groups sees a different clock. The tourists are amazed that people count that way, the children don't count that high, and the old men do nothing but. Nothing but count. Nothing, if not for counting. Counting. All the people in Mortonstan count, whether they watch the clock or not. But without rain they have forgotten what they are counting, and count now just for the sake of counting. With rain the city would dissolve -- cornices would drip like icicles, towers melt like candles, and squares and parks slide away like mud. Into the sea it would all go, joining the atmosphere of fish: brick clock and dock made specks, invisible. No one in Mortonstan has ever seen rain, but they pronounce its name regularly. Once every day, at exactly the same instant, all the salty bells in the city ring, and all activity halts. No one works, no one plays, no one talks and no one honks or boards or walks away. Every citizen performs a ritual, long practiced, but completely forgotten: in unison they speak -- in atonal concert -- but the words are merely sounds, so often have they been recited, and no meaning bubbles up from the murmuring. No one knows that the words are a prayer, or that the prayer works because no one understands it. The prayer is simple. It asks only for no rain.