In the morning, before full sun smiled over the mountain, Danny was in the shower, chanting. Then he remembered
The meeting. The silence of Indians as they looked from two hundred years of broken promises at the speaker, a woman unaware of the miracles of flowers, another stone in the burden of years.
On the table was a grey pocket computer, spelling out the destiny of men in numbers and powers of ten.
Danny was in the back of the Indians, a young Indian full of doubts about the old ways, engulfed in the new, and graced with a certain silent light.
As the woman spoke, he felt the power rise, gripping his chest, filling his fingers with magic.
She picked up the calculator & Danny spoke in a voice hardly
his, resonating beyond the room
a voice which seemed to remove the Indians to another time, with
different rules
(shimmer: images
of cliffs, starlight fires)
a voice which made the room go dim and filled the knowing
with hope.
It was a chant, in a language foreign to Danny though issuing from his lips, yet he understood that the words he was being given moved with great power among the symbols of the room. The calculator in the woman’s hand broke and she was beached, gasping, unable to see what she had no hands to grasp.
All in a moment, the other Indians felt the power and began a chant as well old and filled with dust and light. The woman spoke on, unseeing, the very air began to murmur. Danny trembled, wondering at his true name, his name without lips.