by Lily Bruzas
photo by Ben Wilson

I may look like a real person from a distance, but I am not. I am like a rag doll stitched together of odd parts. I am a ghost in the desert. I wove a body from scattered lost pieces of bright, in the center there is a reflection, a stab in the eyes. I am a hole in the sun, I should no longer exist, but I persist as an acid burn eating a photograph, an eclipse. A rot that eats air, because there is nothing else left behind, like an inverted shadow.

My bones are broken and sewed together with barbed wire that I stole from fence lines stretching from weather-beaten post to post. My skeleton is a collection of deer vertebrae, worn down cow teeth, the tiny ribs of mice: Lost bones bleached and dried from years under the sun, lying exposed until I stumbled upon them and put them into the bag on my back, for later.

My blood is stolen blood; it is the blood of my husband when he lay gasping on his back after a faceless man shot him in the stomach. The blood pooled in the center of the wound, trickled out like the tines of a star in wavering rivulets, dark red seeping from the raw blue ends of flesh. You know, the wet flowing from a crack in the desert is not always a sign of life.

His blood is always in front of my eyes, as a superimposed nightmare, I have blood red eyes that shine iridescent in the dark, like windows.

The skin I wear is mud mixed with ashes. I hide in the forest, watching hunters and hikers until they leave their campsites. I crouch on my heels and eat the wet ashes from the fire bank, because I myself am what’s left over from the brief blaze of light in the night. A flash losing itself in the dark.

All these things I stitched together with barbed wire after losing my life in the pile of rocks at the base of Chief Mountain.

They told me to go to the Sand Hills, but I did not go. They refused to say my name, but I would not leave them alone. They told me to marry my husband’s brother, but I would not. They told me to be courageous and take up the other half of life, but I could not erase the line in the sand, touch the tools in the corner; fill the empty space. So I abandoned the filled and became the empty space.

I remember the fight we had before he rode away. We were screaming at each other, neither understanding what the other was saying, speaking our words at the same time until they jumbled together into a deafening avalanche of heart tumbling against heart.

He, the great man who always did the right thing, the leader laughing on the edge of violence, the nonchalance of war streaming out from him in magnetic rays, making the other men want to follow him to the end of an arrow, into the path of a spinning bullet. The vision in his eyes was like a hint of blue between branches, he always seemed to be looking past the people standing in front of him and over the horizon line, seeing what we could not.

I never fought with him, I was his only wife and it was not like me to move in any greater step than a small one; to argue; but that night I held my hand trembling in the air. I wouldn’t touch him though my fingers craved the feeling of his shirt. My voice rose to a hoarse wail, I told him, if he walked out that door he would never come back.

He never came back.

He walked out that door. Rode away in a stream of horses, a cloud of dust, crossed the line of the horizon to the horizon in his eyes where I could not follow behind. Later, I found him. He lay glassy-eyed and staring at the sky, the gaping red star wound on his stomach with his palms up, arms away from his side, coated with a thin film of dust. There were forty good men lying dead beside him.

I cut my hair. I gouged thick lines in my arms to let his blood run out, to loose the pain. Like a bird with hollow bones, he was the marrow filling me. I screamed and sang and cried in exorcism, but he never left my blood or my bones, he was still there, loving, but he was not there in front of my eyes, he was the color of my eyes. I could not reach him beyond death no matter how many miles I walked, arms stretched out in front, tripping through clumps of sage brush and stumbling down gullies, parched, no water, vision blurring to white, fading to white, calling his name. I never found him.

He was a hunter and he shot me with a black glass arrow. The arrow lodged itself in my heart and melted in the heat. Liquid rivers of fire moved along my body, mixing with my blood, filling my fragile swan bones to the brim. When he went beyond the veil, the black glass arrow became stilled frozen rivers and shattered. Splintered me to pieces.

I remember braiding my husband’s hair in the early morning. The sun flew into the doorway like a river of gold, waking us, turning the dewdrops on the rim of the door into a necklace of transparent light. I dipped my hands into grease, sat behind him, combed his hair. Pulled it straight in handfuls and wove it into thick, heavy braids, my knees against his back. Both of us were silent, listening to murmur of the current running between us through the room.

I remember him at night in the darkness. The sound of the wind all around us was like the rush of an ocean, the wind through sage, through pines, in waves through bending grass. I knew his presence in the darkness. That is the way I know him now. I have forgotten his face, his name. I only remember him the way you know a man in the dark, like an answer without a question, a recognition with the source forgotten.

After he died, I wandered until I fell from the cliff or my body fell away from me, in thin flakes of flesh, it peeled like birch bark in long spirals turning pale, and my teeth dropped out and scattered across the ground as unwanted jewels, and the birds carried away my ragged hair for their nests, until there was nothing left of me but a voice and a tangle of black glass glittering through the air in a strange cloud. Ghost, they called me. A ghost possessed by a ghost. The old women could hear my voice in the wind, moaning, groaning at the Chief Mountain with his wife leaning against his back, sitting behind him, Ninaki, Ninaki they named me again. With a wind-voice, I carved my face into my death place at the cliff base, into the scarred rock.

I have been rebuilding myself ever since. I will stay, always, as the unspoken promise hanging in the air, searching for an answer in the eyes of everyone I frighten, everyone I shake.