Palace of the Brine

In a place they say is dead
In the lake that’s like an ocean
I count about a billion head
All the time
There's a motion
Palace of the brine

— The Pixies

Do you know what sea-monkeys are? My boss’s boss says they’re tiny brine shrimp. There was a glass ball on his desk that was a self-contained aquarium for sea-monkeys. They were his poor man’s bonsai tree, his poor man’s Newton’s Cradle. He didn't even need to feed them; they would have been able to live off of all of the naturally-occurring algae for up to three years.

I say all of that in past tense because today we had a meeting and I thought it was a snow globe, so I shook the glass ball really good. The meeting ended early.