The old ones like to say memory is like riding a trail at night with a lighted torch. And so it does not surprise me that your face has been swallowed by darkness, your voice black as the wounded wings of a crow. But sometimes the torch flares, illuminating the way your body folded itself against mine, how the last time you loved me you dipped your thumb in red paint and covered the part in my hair, marking me a woman greatly loved. When the rattlesnake came into the lodge, you could not crush it. And you couldn't save our daughter from the white man's coughing disease. In the end, the Black Hills were lost, too - the heart of everything that is. I wasn't your only wife. But I am the one who remembers. I whisper your name and it drifts as snow across the prairie, then melts and is gone.