The minstrel appeared on one of the days between the beginning of time and the death of the squirrels.  He was just a stranger when the People met him, but he told them that he was a minstrel and they accepted this, having no better explanation.  He appeared, one morning, in the kitchen of the house belonging to Jeroen and his pregnant wife, sitting at the hearth next to the red flowering bush, which also sat there.  He was dressed in a vivid costume of red and green stripes.  His hat and his shoes tapered into soft points and had tiny chiming bells on the ends, which looked and sounded just like stars to Yalanthe.  They were not alarmed at the appearance of the stranger in their home, but the squirrels studied him with their brightly comprehending eyes and kept out of his way.

     The minstrel sat before their fire and smiled at the flowering bush with the same bright, understanding look the squirrels wore.  Then he turned towards Yalanthe and Jeroen expectantly.  Yalanthe knew that they must speak to the stranger, but she and Jeroen seldom spoke even to each other, as there was rarely anything they needed to communicate.  So, without thinking, she let the first words in her head tumble out of her mouth and land in front of the stranger.  She asked him, "What should we do?" and he smiled a second time and said, "Dig." and left.

     Soon after the minstrel left Yalanthe's baby was born.  It arrived in the middle of the night and Yalanthe was terribly concerned because, for the first time, she could neither see nor hear the stars.  It was as if something was covering them and keeping them from her.  She worried and worried about it until the ripping pain of birthing swept the stars from her mind.  In the morning the sky was its clear, parched self again and lying by Yalanthe's side was the baby.  It was a girl and it was completely unremarkable except for its size: she was remarkably thin.

     The girl, whom they named Astrid, was strangely quiet, never screaming the way other children did.  She merely lay on her back in her basket and gazed at humanity with her moist, incredulous eyes.  The only odd occurrence connected with her birth was the disappearance of the squirrels.  The creatures all vanished from the town the morning Astrid was born.  But nine days later they were discovered in a pile on the floor and shelves of an empty closet in the back of the house.  They were all dead, lying on their backs with their eyes wide open and their little paws extended pathetically towards the door.  Though their heads were intact, their bodies had melted into a sort of liquid dust, which had seeped into the floorboards.

     Yalanthe felt a great sense of loss after Jeroen took the squirrels away and scrubbed the cupboard clean.  She was furious at him when he callously commented on the fact that they couldn't have rotted because they hadn't smelled.  She wouldn't let him lock the closet door and she made him throw the flowering bush out with the squirrels.  The town seemed forsakenly quiet after the constant bustle of the squirrels.  The sedentary way of life the People had led was no longer satisfying.  It was then that Jeroen told the rest of the town about the minstrel and his advice.  Since the People had no other indication of what they should do with themselves they took the advice and started to dig outside the town.

     Everyone became tremendously busy digging all of the time, to make up for the loss of the active squirrels.   It wasn't until a few months after Astrid was born that Yalanthe noticed that the child had a way of vanishing.   The first time Yalanthe noticed it she tore the house apart searching for the little girl, who was discovered later, in her bed, sleeping on her back with her knees drawn up as she always did.  But as the digging became more involved Yalanthe stopped paying attention to the child's random popping in and out of being.  Astrid always reappeared and, as she grew older, she began to disappear more and more frequently.

     Yalanthe and Jeroen didn't usually have time to spend on Astrid, who somehow grew into childhood during the bustle of the first years of digging.  In fact Astrid noticed that they often disregarded her even when she spoke directly to them.  She got on well with them when they spoke to her, but if they didn't she might as well not have been there.  She had a great deal of time to think about this circumstance because she was too young to help with the digging and so was left alone a great deal.  She tried to determine what exactly was wrong.  There were only two things she could identify that made her unique.  Her extraordinary thinness was obvious, but the other was a secret and, she thought, deeply prodigious. She could do something she knew no one else in her town could. She could cry.  The town and its inhabitants were dry as dust; it never rained and the People never cried and never sweated. Astrid was the only one with water. She always cried in secret, in the back closet where the squirrels had been found, where no one ever went.  She had been going there since she could walk, once every day, to cry.  She didn't know how she did it but, when she felt the tremendous weight of being alone because everyone behaved as if she were invisible, she would go there and let the horrible lump in her chest melt away and out at her eyes in a strange liquid, unique to her.

     When she was very young, too young to walk, she had curled up on her side in her basket and cried into her pillow, letting the feathers and fabric consume her tears.  No one had ever noticed her when she did this.  The first few times she went to the closet she had just let her tears flow onto the wooden floor, as she stood facing the back wall, clutching the edges of the empty shelves. However, she soon decided that if she was the only person who had this ability she ought to keep her tears.  She had tried to fetch the huge cauldron from the kitchen hearth, but it was too heavy so she contented herself with taking the lightweight, shiny, tin cookie sheets.  She kept them on the shelves of the closet and carefully filled them, one by one, with her tears.

     The day Astrid realized her power of invisibility was the same day the People of the village discovered salt.  They had been digging to the north of the
village for a long time and the pit had become so deep that diggers had to remain underground for longer and longer periods of time just to reach the
bottom.  So it was that the news of the discovery took some time to actually reach the surface.   But when it did a crowd had formed to view the dirty white chunk.  The woman who had carried it up vigorously rubbed the dirt off onto her shirt, and the salt crystal sparkled brightly in the bright, dry air.  Now, at last, the People had a purpose.  They were no longer digging without reason. The People decided that they had better get most of the salt to the surface before they started selling it.  In this way they would be able to proceed directly from mining to selling without always having to go back into the pit for more salt.

It was during the digging time that Astrid found the reason everyone had been ignoring her.  She had reached adolescence as successfully as could be expected. She was still tremendously thin, but also exceptionally beautiful.  She continued to go, in secret, to the squirrel closet everyday to collect her tears in the cookie tins.  Several dozen of the shining, silvery tins met her and whispered to her in faint crystalline voices as she added to their contents.  It
was on the day that the salt was brought to the surface, that she dropped one of the tins.  It was on a shelf, not far from the floor, and just slipped through
her tear-wetted fingers.  The tin landed gently, leaning vertically against the shelf it had just quitted.  The tears did not splash out of it but remained
fixed, as solid and clear as crystal.  In their surface Astrid could see a girl who she immediately knew was herself.  Entranced, she rotated slowly before the
mirrored tin and saw, with a shock, that when she turned sideways her reflection vanished.  She was so thin that, when viewed from the side, she was completely invisible.  Astrid accepted this calmly.  There was nothing else to do; it made such perfect sense.  She knew that the People would value the mirrors she had created because there were none in the town.  She also knew they would be more mindful of her if she provided something of such interest, but she recoiled at the idea of her secrets being defiled through common knowledge.  And she realized she could use her unique body to her advantage.

     Everyone had been busy at the salt mine for months.  They were accumulating baskets and baskets of salt underground. Yalanthe, who had asked the question that led to the discovery in the first place, was named Director.  She had decided that when they had three hundred and ninety thousand baskets filled, they would carry them to the surface and open their salt market.  And on that day they would close the mine.

      Astrid, during this time, had met a man.  She could slip away to meet him easily now that she understood her body's ability.  It was harder to avoid her
mother than she had thought it would be because Yalanthe suddenly seemed to have more of an interest in Astrid, but her skill improved quickly with abundant use. She made very sure that when she was with her man he always faced her so she wouldn't seem to disappear.  He was wonderfully handsome and intelligent, but very absorbed in his study of the stars.  So much so that he often disregarded Astrid even when she knew he could see her.  But slowly her devotion was noticed by the man and he spent more of the nights in study of Astrid than in study of the stars.  By the time the last of the baskets of salt had been filled and brought to the surface they were deeply in love, and Astrid had stopped crying.

      The final basket of salt was set out in the dry heat of the surface nine days after Astrid's last trip to the old squirrel closet to cry.  The People were
ready to open their market and had more time for leisure than they'd had since the beginning of the mining, years and years ago.  Yalanthe, who had been slowly paying more attention to Astrid as the work dwindled, discovered that her child was no longer the little girl who quietly came in and out of existence. She realized that she did not even know this strangely beautiful young woman who lived in her house, and had no way of knowing if Astrid was even in the house, at any given moment.  Yalanthe searched for some clue to her daughter's life, so separate from her own, and rediscovered the little back closet. In it were thirty-eight reflective pans filled with solid tears, and one pan half filled with liquid.

     Yalanthe decided to question Astrid about them, though she could see no reason why her daughter would talk to her after all these years.  But when Yalanthe spoke tenderly to her, Astrid told her mother about the crying, and how she had met a man, and how he made her happy so that she had stopped crying. Astrid didn't tell her mother that she knew why she kept disappearing, but she couldn't help telling the rest of it.  She had wanted to confide in her mother for so long and now she grasped the opportunity, even though it gave her a vaguely uneasy feeling.

It was exactly nine days to the minute after Astrid had last gone to the closet to cry that the rain began. One moment, the town was as dry as it had always
been, the only existing water in the back closet of Yalanthe's house, and the next a torrent of warm rain flowed from the sky.    The People sat for a petrified instant before someone yelled the alarm, “The salt”.  Yalanthe watched from the doorway of her house as the silvery warmth issuing from the sky dissolved their years of work.  The salt flowed in a stream like quicksilver back to the mineshaft, which quickly filled in with water.

     The rain fell for thirty-nine days without slackening one drop.  And then stopped as abruptly as it had begun.  The People quickly made their way to
Yalanthe's house to see what should be done.  They found her out in the yard shredding the baskets that had held the salt and screaming.  The People gathered from her ranting that Astrid's young man was in some manner responsible and must be punished.   Some forfeiture must be paid.  As Yalanthe saw it the man was to blame for the loss of their endeavor.  He had caused her daughter to stop crying, and then the rain had come.  The People formed a mob and searched out Astrid and her man.  They found them on their hill, near the flooded salt mine. In a frenzy of vindication and loss the People seized the man and drowned him in the salty lake that had been the pit.

      Astrid watched them with the same detached calmness with which she had accepted her invisibility.  She then turned away and walked back to the house, where she sat in front of the fire, unmoving.  She was drenched from the rain, but the heat of the fire did not dry her.  Soon, with the heat and moisture, she began to sprout little plants all over her body.  Tiny red flowers bloomed in the place of her mouth and blue vines twined themselves through her hair.  The little plants gave her a thickness and depth that she never before possessed. As the plants grew, enveloping Astrid, the People slowly went back to their homes.  They did not understand what had happened, so they sat in their homes, as Astrid sat in hers, and they waited.  After a time they forgot that they were waiting. But, as they had nothing else to do they continued to sit. Sometime after the last little red flower on Astrid's mouth bloomed, the squirrels came. The squirrels, unlike the People, were always doing something. And the People sat quietly, hardly even speaking, content to watch them.

On one of the days, it didn't matter which because the days slipped one into the next without any clear division, the stranger came. He merely appeared in the kitchen one morning, sitting at the hearth next to the red flowering bush, which also sat there. He was dressed in a vivid costume of red and green
stripes.  His hat and his shoes tapered into soft points and had tiny chiming bells on the ends, which looked and sounded just like stars to Yalanthe.  The
minstrel sat before their fire and smiled at the flowering bush with the same bright look the squirrels wore.  Then he turned towards Yalanthe and Jeroen
expectantly.  Without thinking she asked, "What should we do?"

     The minstrel smiled a last time, "Dig," he said, and left.