She knelt beneath the cottonwood, her palms pressed to the soil. The wind moved through her braids like a whisper of those who had come before. Her voice did not rise — it resonated.
He came with brushes. A book of watercolors. A commission from a museum back East. But when he saw her, he stopped sketching feathers and beads. He began painting her silence. Her stillness.
She knew he watched. She let him. Not because she trusted him, but because something in his gaze felt like memory — misremembered, but longing to be corrected.
One evening, she approached and placed a single red ochre handprint on the canvas. Not approval. Not dismissal. Just presence.
He asked if he could paint her. She said only if he prayed first. Not with words — with breath, with stillness, with humility. He did.
When he left, the portrait remained unfinished. A smudge of color where her eyes would have been. She kept it beneath her blanket, beside the bones of her ancestors. Not hidden. Just waiting.