By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.