Sunshine and Naraya

In Wind River, Wyoming, two wrinkled Shoshone women sit on a red stone reservation, working with Sunshine. They sing into a small hand-held recorder. Sunshine's foreign arms and head are bound up in white. She listens to their songs that call themselves Naraya, remembers twenty years of working and countless tapes, the notes bearing thunder, bringing armor against invading pox, calling down antelope and sheep from tall mountain passes. And the women continue singing for all the green, for the water lying flat but still moving, for the riverraft that shattered Sunshine and the songs in her house that kept her alive.

appeared in the South Dakota Review

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