Sockskin It was dawn when Dusty decided to crawl out of bed and into the socks of another. Something about the way that her foot caressed the first and middle toe knit reminded her of younger times, happier times, times when a moldy sky day was something to just deal with. Anyway, Dusty placed the socks on her feet and waited for things to happen.
Before she had moved into her white house in Iowa, Ulsa, Iowa, her grandmother had warned her of all of the situations that she might endure. The snakes, for instance, were a concern of hers. The plants that grew in parking lots where dumpsters sit and sit and sit on top of cake layers and dented boxes of dish soap, wax, and vermin. All that Dusty had wanted was to live inside one of those little crystal balls and swim around the trees and the smiling figurines. To stand invisible next to tall men and shake their hands from behind. Iowa.
There was a warning. A jowled no, no, no. A finger that shook furiously from one side to the next. Iowa wouldn't make it in time. White houses would not keep her from crawling outside and examining the plants that grew beneath dumpsters as well as the mouths of serpents tucked into their holes.
Putting on a stranger's socks would make whatever had happened in her many years different from what it was before. Dusty could walk on smudges and shadows of gigantic fossilized matter. She would slip them on and roll her metatarsals one over the other. She would pull the heel back towards her ankle and then knees and fists and she would sit in her chairs waiting for the snakes to come and greet her hello.
And they would come with a slither and sit upon her knee, staring at the sky and all of the biggest things it does. And she would spread her feet into the general direction of the east pointing to yesterday and the day before.