by Leslie Silko
The horse felt warm underneath me. He shook his head and pawed the sand. The bay whinnied and leaned against the gate trying to follow, and I remembered him asleep in the red blanket beside the river. I slid off the horse and tied him close to the other horse. I walked north with the river again, and the white sand broke loose in footprints over footprints.
"Wake up."
He moved in the blanket and turned his face to me with his eyes still closed. I knelt down to touch him.
"I'm leaving."
He smiled now, eyes still closed. "You are coming with me, remember?" he sat up now with his bare dark chest and belly in the sun.
"Where?"
"To my place."
"And will I come back?"
He pulled his pants on. I walked away from him, feeling him behind me and smelling the willows."
"Yellow Woman," he said.
I turned to face him. "Who are you?" I asked.
He laughed and knelt on the low, sandy bank, washing his face in the river. "Last night you guessed my name, and you knew why I had come."
I stared past him at the shallow moving water and tried to remember the night, but I could only see the moon in the water and remember his warmth around me.
"But I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman—I'm not really her—I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side of the mesa. Your name is Silva and you are a stranger I met by the river yesterday afternoon."
He laughed softly. "What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what you will do today, Yellow Woman."
"I know—that's what I'm saying—the old stories about the ka'tsina spirit and Yellow Woman can't mean us."...
"Have you brought women here before?" He smiled and kept chewing, so I said, "Do you always use the same tricks?"
"What tricks?" He looked at me like he didn't understand.
"The story about being a ka'tsina from the mountains. The story about Yellow Woman."
Silva was silent; his face was calm.
"I don't believe it. Those stories couldn't happen now," I said.
He shook his head and said softly, "But someday they will talk about us, and they will say, 'Those two lived long ago when things like that happened.'"
"The Man to Send Rain Clouds" ed. Kenneth Rosen.Vintage Books. 9/75.pp34-37.
Silko, Leslie and Melody Graulich "The Yellow Woman" Rutgers University Press, 1993
The Man to Send Rain Clouds, ed. Kenneth Rosen.Vintage Books. 9/75.pp34-37.