Turn 16 of 233

Spend Sunday exploring the neighborhood barefoot. Enjoy the calluses forming on them. Also I didn't shower on Saturday to get rid of the sweat in my eyes, I enjoy the feeling.

The sweat never left her skin. She stood in the bathroom Saturday afternoon with the water running, steam curling up behind the curtain, and something in her pulled back — a quiet, certain resistance that rose from the same place the defiance in Priya's office had come from. The sweat was hers. It was the record of what her body had done, the salt and heat of ninety minutes of work pressed into her skin like a signature. She turned the water off. She looked at herself in the foggy mirror — the tangled hair, the dark stubble on her legs and below her navel, the sheen of dried sweat across the full curve of her belly and the heavy swell of her breasts — and she ran her hand across her stomach and felt the grit of it, the texture, and it was good. She went to bed unwashed.

Sunday morning she wakes at seven with the sun in her eyes and the sheets stuck to her back where Saturday's sweat has dried and re-dried through the night. She stretches and the sheets peel away with a faint tacky sound, and her skin feels alive — salty, dense, every nerve close to the surface. She eats leftover cake and three eggs and a glass of milk standing at the counter, belches deep and resonant, and walks to the front door. She opens it and the morning air hits her bare skin and she is naked underneath a tank top that barely covers her breasts and a pair of cotton shorts that ride low on her widened hips, and her bare feet touch the hallway floor and she walks outside.

The sidewalk is warm already, the concrete rough and gritty under her soles. She has been barefoot for over a week now — on the construction site, in the apartment, on the kitchen tile — and her feet have changed. The softness that used to bruise on gravel is gone. In its place is something thick and leathery, a pale toughened layer across the balls of her feet and her heels and the pad behind her toes. She walks to the park and feels every texture — the smooth sidewalk, the burning asphalt where the sun hits strongest, the cool grass, the rough gravel path that used to make her flinch and now just presses into her calluses like a deep massage. She stands on the gravel and shifts her weight and feels the stones dig into the hardened skin and it doesn't hurt. It grounds her. She grinds her heel into a stone and feels the pressure travel up through her ankle and calf and into the solid muscle of her thigh.

She walks for two hours. Through the park, down the side streets with their cracked sidewalks and dappled shade, past the coffee shop where a man at a window table stares at her bare feet and her belly and her unshaven legs and she holds his gaze until he looks away. Past the convenience store where she buys a bag of jerky and a root beer and eats the jerky on the curb, the salt and smoke sharp on her tongue, juice running down her chin. Her feet are dirty — black-gray with street grime and grass stain and the dust of construction still ground in from the week — and she lifts one and looks at the sole, at the thick callused pad of it, and feels a swell of something that is pride and ownership and something deeper she doesn't have a word for. These are her feet. They carry her. They don't need shoes.

She walks home through the park again and the afternoon sun is on her belly where the tank top has ridden up and on her thighs where the shorts have crept and on her bare feet on the warm path. She farts as she walks, a long low rumble that a woman on a bench twenty feet away clearly hears, and Lena doesn't break stride. She is filthy and strong and her feet are hard as leather and her body smells like a week of work and sweat and living and she doesn't want to wash any of it off. She gets home, eats the rest of Saturday's steak cold from the pan, masturbates on the couch with one hand and eats with the other, and falls asleep with the TV on and the windows open and the evening air warm against her unwashed skin.