The Salt and the Flame

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

When Mairead set out on the SS Metagama that day, it was Reverend Macqueen’s sermon a few Sundays before that kept swirling through her mind. He had drawn his inspiration from the Book of Genesis, how Sodom and Gomorrah had been destroyed after the Lord had threatened to “rain fire out of heaven” on the two cities, destroying the people who lived there for their sins.

“Do not look back on these places,” God had told Lot, one of the few God-fearing men who lived there. “If you do, you will be destroyed too.” Macqueen looked down from his pulpit, taking in every face of the congregation that had gathered within the walls of the church in the village of Cross, noting their expressions of doubt and certainty; how sometimes their eyes journeyed round the other people in the community, observing the changes that had taken place in one another over the years. “And so, Lot repeated the news he had been given to his family, his wife, sons-in-law and daughters. ‘Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain, escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.’”

He paused then, his wrinkled fingers flexing before resting on the pulpit edge, his thick grey eyebrows and blue eyes becoming more intense as he looked up and down the church once more.

“Yet some of them did not listen to Lot’s advice. Instead, his sons-in-law rejected his words, mocking all he said. His wife, well, she listened – but only in the beginning. Together with their daughters, she ran away from the city alongside him, but then she heard the explosions, the walls tumbling down, and then she made her mistake. She glanced back at the place she had left, thinking, perhaps, of her old home and whether it was still upright. Or it might have been her old friends and neighbours, relatives and others that she knew. And then what happened? As the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace, she looked back then behind Lot and she became a pillar of salt, punished for her indecision, for her longing to return to that city which had been destroyed by God.”