Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  She will not make decisions. She will not think. She will not act.

  Water of the sea is everywhere even, everywhere moving, everywhere. Light comes and goes on its surface, but does not attach itself to any part. It breaks into shape, but then the shape is lost, with no parts that made it whole. The sound is continuous, like sleep.

  The day that Lonely left the tower, Yora left a prison of her own. She did not consciously decide it. She had no purpose in leaving. She only discovered herself no longer able to stay, and she discovered this by the fact that she was already leaving, flowing into the sea and away. The little girl Mira—the only one she would miss, the only one from whom Yora received more than she gave—wanted to go with Yora but was afraid. So she sent her soul along with Yora in another form. Say I am male, the soul had said to Yora, not female. Say I am just an animal, nothing more. That is the only way I can be safe.

  But Yora cannot be responsible for this soul or its love for her. She cannot be responsible for anyone anymore. So she gave it away.

  The sea is death. But it is not stillness; it is not peace. Yora lays herself down in nothingness, but the nothingness itself keeps moving, and by giving up her will she only allows another, larger will to take over. It feels easier, but it is not. She is still moving over the earth. She is not gone, after all.

  Instead, like a ghost, she evaporates into the sky. It does not happen all at once. She is pressed and changed, hot and cold, but she does not feel it. She is accustomed to these influences, and to not feeling anything on her own. Perhaps days, moons, or years pass. She is only moisture in the sky. She cannot be seen. She is too far up to be felt. She lies suspended in whiteness.

  Delilah crouches behind the inner lip of the cave and hunts Dragon with her eyes. She breathes in, scraping her bare skin against the stone beneath her on purpose, imagining his penis now lying still and innocent beneath him. It feels like so long since she held one. She wants to hold it in her hands and her mouth—engulf it, devour it. She wants to revel and play in the design of man himself.

  No one has come through these arches for months, and no one has ever come on foot, with nothing on his back and nothing in his hands. Eventually someone always comes, and it is always a man, for only men dare travel into these outer realms of wilderness. Or if women dare, perhaps they are not allowed. But Delilah neither knows nor cares about the women.

  The men come seeking the jewels of the mountains: riches beneath the desert sands, remnants of dragon eyes and scales, whatever is new and precious and brings the hope of wealth—some fulfillment they cannot imagine but dream of day and night. Soon, Delilah knows, they will come from the west with concrete in their wake, building a new road that will turn the whole world into City. This new road will cut right through the ancient purple ridge that separates the City from the desert, that runs halfway from the sea to the mountains. Lovers she’s taken in the past have told her of its coming. But for now they take the older roads, around the end of the ridge to the east, and where the roads end they drive their vehicles over the sand, heading toward the old caves where the dragons were said to have lived, though they’ll claim not to believe in such things. The men’s instincts, smarter and more focused than their minds, frequently lead them near Delilah’s caves. Thrusting points and deep caverns of stone arrest their eyes, and the insistence of the sun begins to weigh them to the ground, where the sand luxuriates under their touch. Delilah knows it is not jewels they really want, not riches they really need. She knows the road-builders are only following orders, from someone they no longer remember, and that they do not know where the new road is going. For these greedy, stupid men she would have contempt, except that whatever it is they do need is also what she needs. She has only to remind them.

  Usually, the months that pass without human contact make her wary when she first sees them. She has to walk beside them for a little while first, or sit at their fire, to get used to the sound of their voices again.

  But this one felt so easy. She could almost have climbed right down and opened to him, without speaking. Maybe it was his own obvious desire, the way he lay it down like that right outside her door. Maybe it’s a certain helpless surprise in him, that makes her trust him. She shouldn’t have allowed him to see where she lives, but there he was, and she could not help it.

  She won’t need to talk to him, won’t need to sit beside him and listen to him boast of his adventures in order to feel comfortable. But she does need to watch him first, to make sure she’s in control. Now she waits, breathes, tries to catch up with herself inside. Each time, she must go through this remembering: the feel of her own body coming near to another.

  For just a moment, she must crawl back into her darkness and lie on the cold stone in there, her fingers whispering over her own breasts, the little pleats of her ribs, her hard belly. She feels good today, her body sharp and strong. No pain, no weakness. She opens and closes her knees, staring up at the stone turning color in a sunset-tinted shadow, thinking of the boy outside. It’s spring. The flowers are opening their depths with ridiculous abandon, the animals going crazy—so desperate for each other they don’t care who or what sees them. Yesterday she saw two coyotes fucking in broad daylight, the female looking at her lazily as she stood there and took it from behind, tongue dripping out as if to mock Delilah’s own longing.

  A bat flickers across her vision, not even solid. Delilah turns her head to watch it disappear into an opening of paling light, and feels the weight of her own need. Her fingers play anxiously in the wetness that rises from her—a ridiculous surplus of wetness in a waterless land, the decadence of her own body surprising her. She watched the boy coming across the flat desert beyond. He was like a vision with his desire leading him, his fists heavy and beautiful against his hips. She thought he was a sun god, with his clenched, red-black body, his shoulders angled and shining, his chest lined too perfectly like stone just recently broken. Some pendant in the center of his chest flashed in the sun, blinding her. She rolls over and slides to the edge to look at him again. She follows the indented path of his spine, dipping between the hard banks of his muscles like surrender.

  Now. She will go down to him. But something holds her back a moment longer. Something about this one makes her nervous. She shouldn’t have let him see where she comes from, even though he could never fit between the stones that form the entrance to her cave. She shouldn’t have revealed herself so carelessly. There is no reason to feel uneasy—no one has ever come back looking for her later on. Once is enough with a “demon goddess,” after all. But still.

  A snake who slept inside her cave today now flows across the floor and over her lap, heading to the outer stones that will still remember sun in the evening. He pauses to take in the warmth of her flesh. Delilah sighs, her breath heavy in her throat. She doesn’t want the boy to leave. She doesn’t want to miss her chance. She’s watching him as the snake twines around her, climbing the slope of her neck with his invisible limbs. She shivers, resisting helplessness, but it comes over her too fast to stop. The snake slips his head through her hair and flicks his feather tongue against the underside of her chin.

  The evening comes but it isn’t fully cold yet. Darkness lifts like dust from the earth, intimate and hazy. Delilah inches down the crook of the stone like a spider. She can feel the boy’s hot breath suspended in the air, and she knows he’s at least part mortal. She can feel that intensity of humanness, that densest form of aliveness—the very top of the food chain. Now she crawls on her hands and knees. Above her the rest of the bats release themselves suddenly like smoke from the cave, their silence fluttering above her, their musky mammalian heat blooming into the sky.

  She leans close to the boy’s sleeping form and blows the hair away from the nape of his neck. She crawls forward, brushing her lower lip, and then lightly, her tongue, downward along his spine. The lower half of his body rests in sand, and as she moves forward off the stone,
her palms press into a softness that is difficult to resist. It pulls her closer. She drops her lips to the indentation of his tail bone and breathes in. She can taste the sharp edge of his sweat. He bucks underneath her in a panic of surprise.

  When he flips over, her little body traps his big one through sheer novelty. She feels him freeze, his breath pummeling her in gasps as he turns and faces upward. The pressure of it makes her cry out, falling between his thighs and gripping them hard. She nuzzles his penis like a familiar animal with her nose and lips, feeling the terror of his unfamiliar breath and taking it in. She teases him with her tongue, holding him captive with her tiny wet touch. She is not afraid of men. What can they do to her? She isn’t afraid of a fight, and not one will ever know her enough to take anything from her. The things she fears are things they cannot give her.

  This one doesn’t seem to know what to do. The animal of him bounces against her tongue. He cries a strange, high cry, as if swept into a river that fills his mouth and steals his breath, and then he expands into a frenzy of limbs. He is everywhere trying to get into her—she feels his teeth for one wild moment, she feels unconscious fingers like Coyote’s laughter near her hungry places, she feels herself lifted and turned and held suddenly beneath him inside the envelope of his arms. He stands over her on his hands and knees and she lies haphazardly, her legs tangled in his, watching him to see what will happen next.

  “Who are you?” he hisses.

  She smiles. His face hangs over her. His eyes, furious, pin her to the earth, and she enjoys being pinned, but is tormented by the empty air between them. A cool breeze slips in, brightening her wet places. She can feel her breasts pressing against space, her nipples biting the nothingness. She taps his erection with one finger, and it presses against her hand with a life of its own. His chest is hairless and shiny as a mirror. His lips are full and proud and they pout as they hang open. He stares.

  It’s strange, as if he’s paralyzed by his own desire. Delilah rolls onto her belly and slips out from under him, and he stays there, frozen. But she hears his knees grate against the sand as she stands up and walks away, swinging her small hips. She looks back and licks her lips as she walks. It’s so easy to seduce, her own desire undulating through her body. She sees the expression return to his face.

  When she hears him coming after her, she runs. She runs across the hot sand in the darkness, laughing as the stars spill over her, the thrill and the fear and the fastness of his coming knocking her down. The expectation of oblivion is on her so fast, her mind already goes blank. Desire beats against her skin, a voiceless wind. She lands on her hands and knees and closes her eyes. In the moment before the weight of his body throws her belly-down into the ground, her psyche releases every emotion she doesn’t want to remember, knowing that the force of his entrance will eclipse everything.

  He fills her up. All her focus is there, at the deep point inside where his desire now suddenly, intensely reaches her—and pulls back and then reaches her again, and again. Sex is simply this: friction. Two opposing forces rubbing in opposite directions, drawing ecstasy from their opposition, and the sensation of a place inside that cannot physically be felt without the touch of the other. Desire has tormented Delilah for many moons, but she could not locate its source within her body. It was a tiny, focused softness, too soft to make sense to her as anything but a nameless frustration—a place that never touches air, never touches anything but itself, and which she cannot feel until the knowing arrow of another body comes in from nowhere and pinpoints it exactly. That touch, at her very center. That place. That was what she needed to feel. Now she can let out her breath.

  She feels the life returning to her body. Suddenly she can see the sky again and enjoy the simple grit of sand against her belly.

  She doesn’t know whether it’s his masculinity or simply satisfaction that equalizes her somehow, so that she feels steady and calm for those few moments, as solid as earth. In those too-brief moments of not needing, not wanting—before he comes far, far too soon, and then collapses, shriveling and shrinking out of her inch by inch—she feels that life is a loving kindness, and that growing old will not be so bad, and that everyone she’s lost is inside her somehow, not lost at all.

  But what is love? Where will you find it? How will you know it if you do? How will it know you?

  The wind sails around Lonely’s face, sticky with the scent of the sea, asking questions with its emptiness. Lonely feels cold as she lays her bare arms across the horse’s back and leans hesitantly into his stiff damp fur, into his hard flesh, into his shifting, nervous strength. He does not move. The wind buffets her in soft puffs, as if despite its difficult questions it is attending to her, pressing her face and skin, molding her and the horse carefully together.

  Then she looks up at the horse’s eyes, small on the sides of his long, silent head, and they glimmer at her, pupils wide. She touches his warm nodding face, cups her hand under his great breathing nostrils. He shivers again.

  “What should I do?” she cries in a low voice. “Do I get on?” She misses Yora already, but the horse is better than no one. He seems to ignore her, sniffing the sand and then turning his great neck to look vaguely back toward the sea. He stands tense, his eyes wide, as she grips his warm body and starts to climb up him. She balances her weight and looks off into the cold morning dunes, into the foggy possibility of the world.

  “Go,” she whispers, and the horse doesn’t move. He stands still and endures the wind, glancing back again at the sea. He whimpers.

  “Go,” she says again, louder. They cannot stay here. She feels sure of that now.

  The horse lurches a little as he begins, and Lonely hangs on, feeling all the effort and weight of his muscles roll beneath her hands. In shock and confusion she feels the horse’s body come alive beneath her. Balancing on the tail of her spine, she rides a movement beyond her control past grey ages of sand and onward into newborn green.

  The vision of the world breaks through her in waves. As the horse heaves them up onto the dune, his hooves sinking awkwardly in sand, she looks down to see little beach plants, their simple leaves like cups of hope. Their humble smallness gives her strength, drawing her spirit downward from the memory of a tall, cold tower. When she sees them she thinks she might survive, after all.

  While the horse pauses to explore them with his heavy square nose, Lonely sits high and easy, feeling the brightness of her shoulders in the smooth air.

  Welcome, Lonely, the wind breathes. This is the world. She doesn’t even mind the name now, because it has a lilt to it that sounds pretty.

  And this is only just the edge of the world. She can feel how the world begins here, dashing off before her into wild distances and heights, and how the sea—like the nothingness before the world—still swirls darkly behind her. The wind threads a restless line between nothing and beginning, rushing in directionless fits, chasing its tail over the wrinkled slopes of sand.

  When the fields finally spread out before her, Lonely spreads her own arms, laughing. Her fingers swim in space. The sky makes her head hurt. Above her the sun blazes with a confidence she has never known. She can smell its sweetness beaming in the grasses. The light smiles inside her skin, pressing her hair with a weight that burns but does not hurt.

  A bird explodes out of the golden grasses beneath the horse’s feet, and then a hundred birds lift up before her, where just now there was nothing. Their beating wings palpitate in the air. Lonely can hear their music, like twisted cords of light. She leans forward into possibility, unconsciously seeking to increase the pleasure of her own body against the body of the horse. Freedom balloons upward from the roots of her, rolling with the rhythm of the horse, shocking her, making her gasp.

  She looks down at the animal that carries her. She places her hand on his shoulders and feels the bones turn beneath his skin. She wonders what guides him forward. She wonders where forward is. She w
ishes she could look into his eyes. His head sways from side to side. Sometimes he flicks it into the air, at the wind.

  In a house in the City, you sit staring at a wall. You are supposed to be doing something. Cleaning up from breakfast, maybe.

  Breakfast was pieces of sugar floating in milk. But the sugar was not pleasurable, or reminiscent of love. It did not come from flowers. Nor was the milk fulfilling, or reminiscent of the comfort of mothers, and it did not even come from anything that could be called alive.

  Anyway, you are not thinking of breakfast. Breakfast is only something that is done in the morning, because that is what is done. You are not thinking of anything. It is becoming more and more difficult to think, and you do not know why. Maybe it is the sound of the machines that run the house, though those sounds have always been there: never ceasing, never changing. At times there will be a click, a brief whirring rise, and the hum will begin. There is always some machine humming. Over this sound, you cannot hear the songs of the birds outside, or the sound of your own breath or your own footsteps—much less your heartbeat. And yet it is a quiet sound.

  You stare blankly at a magazine open in front of you on the table. You cannot feel those bright colors. You cannot feel that world they portray of magic and ever-greater excitement. Pictures of the Princess in the Tower. All women want to look like her. Blonde and slim and innocent.

  Last night your husband beat you when you told him the rumors you heard, that Hanum is dead. Then you realized he’d heard those rumors too, but did not want to hear. You know he is afraid he will lose his job; the road construction must continue, and things must go on as they did before. But you’re afraid you can feel the god’s death in the hum of the machines. As if this is all that remains.