This Sacred Dust

He was watching his sister coming up the hill to the house. Tall for her eighteen years and still unformed, she was wearing a lime green dress that didn't quite suit her. Her skin honey coloured, faintly freckled; her hair touched with red. One day, with time, the right clothes, she could be beautiful. She had blue eyes. Only the slight curve of the eyebrow, the cast of the wrbt revealed her father's heritage. She had yet to learn to walk as a woman; at present hers was the long legged ambling of the school girl. It was all familiar to him: the view across the vegetable garden; the red dirt road that curved on up the hill, dusty in the heat, viscous mud after rain. The hills in the distance didn't change. Those clouds had been there all his life. His father had built this house: square cement blocks, pink washed, dark brown doors and louvres framed by hibiscus, red and beige floor tiles; and after thirty years his mother had still complained about the red dirt that splattered the walls, that washed down from the road, down the garden, red dirt that seemed to ooze through the very walls of the house, coating everything with rust.