VI

She longed to be covered in dust, longed to walk in it so that her shoes would not seem so new and her socks would darken at the ankles and the cuffs of her pants would in color by comparison. She longed for the dust of a barn, the dust that rises up from the otherwise imperceptible sigh of a full barn of hay at the first of September. The dust that twinkles in the odd shafts of sun coming through the cracks in the walls. She longed to see the cloud of dust which would arise, were she to lift first a blanket, then a saddle onto a horse, and then, the little puffs as she tightened the cinch around his belly, and the thick cakes of dirt which would scrape off of her boot as she stepped into the left stirrup and swung herself up and over. She longed for the dust from the clatter of hooves, or the bouncing of a ball from asphalt off onto sand, or from the smooth scrape of feet as they graze the ground from a moving swing. She needed badly, to scrape her knee, to smell like sawdust, to smell like manure. To work until her hands were swollen and her body was marked, on her forehead, or her forearms, or her collar, or her thighs, with grease or soot, or paint, or redness, or rash. She needed badly, for the sun to burn her and for thirst to crack her lips and for a dirt road or a rough wood pile or a path of rocks to crack her shoes and make filthy her socks, and her legs would absorb the tension and her hips would absorb the shock and the sweat would dry on her when the evening became cool and her arms would sag and pull at her and she would slump into a straight backed chair and her arms would stretch a long distance down toward the ground.
Her arms would be so heavy that they would make almost a continuous line with her neck, oblivious of her shoulders, and her neck would arch itself like the caning that constituted the chair, and it would maintain exactly that curve until well into the night.