Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe

Author:LeAnne Howe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aunt Lute Books

8 | A Road of Stars

YANÀBI TOWN

WINTER SOLSTICE, 1738

Anoleta is marooned in her sleep. Trapped in a white room with white cane mats on the windows, she can see herself sleeping, sitting up, wearing her mother’s white deerskin dress. But whose cabin is this? Where is the hole in the roof for the smoke to escape? Maybe she has accidentally slipped into na tobhi, the something white. But na tobhi is where aging warriors go for their visions. It is not a place for women.

All at once the spirit of a woman enters the room. She has a white mask over her nose and mouth. The woman approaches Anoleta cautiously, then forces her mouth open.

Anoleta screams and a grasshopper-like arm pulls out her teeth. Blood gushes from her mouth. She feels the pain. She wants to ask the woman if she is Filanchi okla or Inkilish okla, but is catapulted across the night sky onto fichik tohbi hina, the white star road. When she looks down at the ground she sees her body strapped on a wooden frame, glowing like fire.

“I’m being tortured,” she screams. Her words echo all the way to Fichik Issi, the Deer Star, who agrees with her.

“Look at what is left of you. A chin, a foot, a jawbone, and ten thousand feet of intestines hanging in the trees,” he says, turning his antlers so he can watch her body wither on the frame. “You can stop what is coming,” he says, clearing off on a vapor.

“Alleh, alleh, alleh, Chishke apela...” Mother help me. Anoleta wakes up with a start, and indeed she is wearing her mother’s white deerskin dress, but standing over her is Red Shoes, his naked torso painted for war. He holds a war club in one hand, a heavy killing tool made from a cypress tree, with the skeletal head of a gar lashed to its top.

“Get out! Am I to be your next victim?” she shouts with such ferocity that Red Shoes backs out of her cabin.

She leaps up and chases him after him, yelling, “Wait! How can you show your face to me after what you did?”

He stands partially hidden among the oak trees, a few feet from her cabin.

“I heard you scream. Are your dreams so terrible?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I have nothing to hide,” he says. “I came to the bone-picking ceremony to honor your mother, along with the others who have died in the past months. Now I am gathering many warriors to fight against our Inkilish okla enemies with Bienville. At last I will be able to prove that I had nothing to do with your mother’s death.”

He steps toward her with a calm face, presenting an image of goodwill. She’s heard that he’s fallen into debauchery, but he looks as good as ever. Straight-backed, tall, and muscular. Self-confident. She pulls her knife from its sheath and holds it taut against his belly. “All you have ever proven is that you will fight in the pay of anyone who gives you muskets.

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