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2002-06-03 | 4:37 p.m.

At the arts fair, I stopped at the pottery wheel. I love the pottery wheel. Someday I'll have the guts to take a pottery class. At the fair, a volunteer helps people, usually kids, form simple shapes, bowls and vases, from clods of golden-brown clay. The line is always five or six kids long, sometimes longer, and each kid carries a handful of clay through the line. It takes forever. There are buckets of water strategically placed to help them keep the clay moist.

The volunteer today is a boy, about 16 or 17. Next to him is a girl who is maybe 14. Her clay is already on the wheel and spinning. The boy is wetting it, shaping it slightly, making sure it's centered. The water is golden-brown from the clay and his hands are slick with it. The run-off slips between his fingers and covers them with golden streaks. He is speaking to her in a low voice, not saying much, and she keeps her eyes lowered. The boy, I realize, is both completely ordinary and devastating. He wets her hands, places them on the clay, and immediately his larger hands close over hers. There is nothing overt about it but something inside me lurches, staggers, and I decide that I have never seen anything more er*tic in my entire life. I think to myself, "No wonder they put this in Ghost." But Ghost doesn't have anything on this.

The boy's hands are beautiful, big and muscular, with big healthy veins standing out in relief and tiny golden hairs running up his forearms. He keeps his hands closed over the girl's, exerting a slight pressure, with the slippery clay spinning underneath them. He directs a simple question at her and she can barely whisper a reply. She never looks up, not once. She is humiliated with desire and doesn't want to wake up.

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