The Bones of Paradise by Jonis Agee

if someone discovered the body. In a year they would end their mourning with a wanagi yuha to remember Star’s spirit. What few relatives were left would tell stories about Star and distribute her possessions, except there was nothing left. Rose and Some Horses would have to buy and make clothing and tools to exchange.
    â€œNow,” Some Horses whispered from the tree, and Rose began a blessing song, torn even now between wanting to release her sister’s spirit into the other world and holding it here until Rose could avenge her death.
    The wind quietly grew around them and began to push the pine and cedar tops side to side, tossing Horses and her sister like a boat on a lake.
    â€œHurry,” Rose called. Some Horses grunted with effort as he lashed the body to the limbs and trunk.
    Rose tried to recall the other song in the burial ceremony, and couldn’t. She was empty, numb; her own tears wouldn’t fall though she could feel the salt warmth of her sister’s drowning her heart. She knew she shouldn’t, but while she waited for Some Horses to slowly descend, Rose looked up at the sky, the sliver of moon, and finally the dark mass of her sister’s body, and whispered her promise.
    The wind rose and quieted as if it had captured the moonlight that settled like a flock of silver birds around her. It was then that her sister’s spirit began a tale that would send Rose on a journey for the man’s heart. It must be taken so Star could rest:
    I am Star of the Miniconjou. This is the story I never had the chance to tell, though I whispered it to the deer I spied fawning in the marsh grass one spring morning. The doe’s pain fresh, like my mother’s that winter morning ten years before, at Čhankpé Ópi Wakpála, what the whites call Wounded Knee. Later I wonderedif I had ruined the world for that babe as it stood wobbly on long, spidery legs, gazing about at the dew-sparkling grass and the water alive with light while his mother licked him clean and dry. Did I curse him as my people have been cursed?
    Would he fall prey too soon, as my sisters and brothers did that morning, the bullets finding their running backs and skulls as they stumbled in the hard dirt and icy clumped grass? We gave thanks for the mild weather, believing Wovoka’s promise that the world would open again as we sang, “The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming . . .” Someone looked up at the weary winter sky and said she could smell their hot, grassy breath, and then she saw their powerful legs galloping down a ray of light and clouds, and we threw up our arms to rejoice, and sang even louder, “The whole world is coming!”
    Stosa Yanka throws dirt into the sky to make a road for the buffalo we can all see and smell and hear, dreaming already of the rich meat stews and the warm robes they will give us, and deer and elk and antelope and bear following, the eagles arrive, the air yellow with the whip of their wings, and then crows come, hundreds, they walk among the dancers, proud bobbing heads keeping time, and it is all happening as Wovoka has promised and the people sing louder in time with the animals, and the ghost shirts come alive, birds and butterflies and animals lifting off men’s shoulders and chests and backs to join the dance, and the thrown dirt hangs in the air like a road to welcome back the world, and only the hummingbirds are shy and hold off, as they are wont . . . and then a sharp crack and the air is split, the dirt spilled, and the new world collapses down on us in pieces, the guns boom and the people fall, running, falling, screaming, falling, and I am away, my hand pulled by my mother as we follow the others up the ravine, running like deer now, light and bounding until we come to a place where badger dug a hole in the side of the hill and Mother shoves me inside, no matter what awaits me, stay, Star, she whispers with her finger to her lips,