Killer Kiwi #3

The old woman spread her brown hands before her, and a pack of gray wolves sprang forth, their claws slashing in the snow, and a hurricane roared in the curve between her thumb and forefinger, and tears ran in the canals of the lines of her palms. She tipped her face to the red Arizona moon, and her mouth opened, and out rushed the Rio Colorado, blue-green through the canyons, and out danced the long braids of the Apache nation on horseback, and out murmured the faraway drums, thundering low, drums of war, of wedding, of warning. And when she spoke her thin heart was the drum, and her steady voice the flute, and when she spoke the red rocks listened, and when the rocks themselves spoke she listened with a spirit that held all that the rocks and the rivers and the wolves had ever seen, or feared, or forgotten.

“In the end,” she said, “there is no difference between the history-keeper and the curandera who heals through sweet-smelling herbs. Between the storyteller and the shaman. There is always a wound to close. There is always a people to knit together. There is always a magic to call down.”