S̶e̶a̶n̶’s Reviews > Mangled Hands > Status Update

I was on my hands and knees like a village dog, yet I was dreaming about the beautiful world at the bottom of a ladder. Everything was upside-down and gone crazy . . . my other father was returning to the people who had mangled his hands and tortured him so cruelly.
I could not dream anymore . . . my tongue was split down the middle of the Great River. What I might say scarcely mattered, so I watched and listened...

There were nine days of bad dreams before it was the middle of the night again. All the other Snake villages had been destroyed. I had dropped my voice to the point of a stick . . . my head rolled out of a tobacco pouch while my heart was stuck inside a snakeskin. I felt as if I had died and my body had gone where the dead crabs go. I rubbed the dreams out of my eyes and looked over the rim of the kettle.

A Snake warrior named Curly Head danced by himself on an ancient mound of earth. His moving feet were like fierce sharp bursts of fire, his tail was like a nail studded war fork . . . sometimes he would leap off his mound and go bumping into the prisoners. He could take off either one of his arms and beat you with it . . .