by Mindi Meltz
Every evening Delilah wakes from a dream in which the deer looks pleadingly into her eyes, and every evening she is angry. Angry like she hasn’t felt since before she came to the desert, angry for no reason. She has an endless supply of anger, like a thick well of acid beneath her breast bone that seeps drop by drop into her day.
One day she wakes before sunset with tension gripping her shoulders, a ringing pain traveling the length of her neck up into her head, from a nerve caught and stretched to the limit. Impatient with it, she writhes on her back, hurls off the animal skins, and arches her neck.
When she opens her eyes, she is looking into the face of a rattlesnake.
They’ve come through here before, leaving their winter sleeping places in the stone and traveling through thin, secret passageways, through the wind-hewn cavern where Delilah makes her home and out into the desert to hunt for the summer. Generally, they seem to know her, and pass by her in peace. But this one has reared up as if to attack, its face stretched into a grimace like some ancient ritualistic mask, its startling, limbless torso swaying in space, its tail echoing against the cave walls. The snake’s body is nothing but spine, and its rattle sends shivers of pain up Delilah’s.
“Oh, come on,” she whispers, pulling herself up on her elbows. The snake’s face is inches from her own, but she tells herself she is not afraid. “I’m not bothering you.”
But the rattle continues, a vibration in her mind that is no longer a sound but a trance that overtakes her, blurring her sense of self until the rattlesnake’s eyes and flat gaping mouth are all she can see. Not fully awake yet, not fully in control of her mind, she feels the mirroring between the snake’s tall body and her own spine. She feels the pain, not sickness but pure lightning, running upward from her tailbone to her skull, as the snake rocks ever so slightly back and forth.
Then the snake falls, melting into pure grace and—in the same motion—flowing away. While Delilah watches, it turns back to her once more, its body fat and long, its scales grating dryly against the stone. She thinks it is very old, bigger and longer than any snake she has ever seen, its tail still rattling beside her even as its head silhouettes against the cave entrance.
It goes, but in that strange way it turned back—a gesture so human, so unlike the tendency of a snake—Delilah, though feeling childish, feeling embarrassed, cannot help but see something like a call to follow.
She watches it go. She believes absolutely in the wisdom of animals. But she also believes it is a wisdom she does not have and cannot understand, because she is human. She sits up and shakes herself, rolling her shoulders. She crawls to the entrance and looks for the snake but it is gone. Instead, she sees Dragon on the sand below her, sitting cross-legged in the spot where she first seduced him. She can’t stop looking at him because with his straight spine and his concentrated, wide-open eyes, he reminds her of the snake when it reared up before her. His erection stands up almost parallel to his body. And that irritates her, as if he’s in league with the snake, as if he knows something she doesn’t.
He doesn’t look at her as she comes down and circles around him like a hyena, breathing her anger at him. “What are you doing?” she says finally.
Dragon opens his mouth and a flame shoots out, lands on the sand, and keeps burning. He turns to her.
“I’m learning to concentrate my desire and pull it upward.”
Delilah stares at him. Her head is throbbing. “What for?” she snaps.
“So I can turn it into a different kind of power,” he answers, and his voice takes on that quality of low, ridiculous serenity.
She keeps staring. She wants to ask what and why, but doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of her curiosity. She sees him more self-contained now, ringed neatly and confidently within a circle of concentration that she has not seen before.
He smiles at her. “So far, I’ve only got it up as far as my heart. But I think that’s still important, don’t you?”
“No,” she says, but her voice comes out softer than she meant it. He feels so far away from her now, and that distance draws her, in spite of herself.
His little flame sizzles and dies. “You don’t know. You don’t want to know. Look at you. Look at the way you’re hunching your shoulders. You’ve got them so tensed up, trying to hold in your heart. Why don’t you let it out?”
Delilah laughs and saunters toward him. She doesn’t know why she does it. Because he pisses her off, maybe, or just because she can. Or because she can’t stop watching the way his erection nods toward her, how it speaks to her in secret, the way they always do, and she cannot help but answer. She walks slowly, watching his eyes get dizzy as she fills them, holding their gaze tightly in hers as she kneels simply before him and runs a finger up from the base of him, up along that hard vein.
Only when he leaps up at her touch and steps back does she realize the force of her own desire.
“You don’t know shit about my heart,” she snaps, just to say something back—to cover for this position she’s in now, kneeling before him. She scrambles back to her feet, her hands ashamed.
“Sit with me, Delilah,” he says, gently this time. “I’ll show you a better way—”
She turns around fast and leaves.
At the water hole, she rinses her face, swallowing panic. She will ignore him from now on, and then eventually he will leave. She will not waste her time on him. Why did she—? How could she—? But she stops herself from thinking, to stop her own fury.
She has no dreams by which to hunt tonight, besides the one that is always there now. So she will go to the river and bathe, and wash the few clothes she has left. She will pick some of the cactus Moon taught her to harvest—another of the few plants she feels close to, hard and thorny like herself. She will look for more dry sticks, for whenever she does make her next kill, she will need more tinder for her fire. She can never have too much of it on hand.
Surely she will have another dream soon, a dream that tells her which animal to hunt next, so she’ll have food when the boar’s meat runs out. It is already running out. It will only last a couple more days. And what then? What if the dreams she’s come to count on abandon her, leaving her to starve? When she leans down to the pool to drink, she looks again into the deer’s insistent eyes.
The next day, Delilah does not dream at all. Tomorrow is the full moon, and she must hunt, dream or no. She wakes up almost pain-free. But she’s tired for no reason, her body shaky with weakness when she stands. She eats a little meat, but it doesn’t help. It makes her nauseous. She ignores this. Walking will help, and breathing the night air.
She follows the moon out onto the playa, a dry field of mud where the invisible river opens up into an invisible lake, and she makes circles with the wind, thinking of the snake. She knows she has to listen to the animals. Besides Moon, they are her only true friends. She feels that the snake was telling her something, but whenever she tries to think of it, Dragon’s image interrupts, and that infuriates her.
The playa’s hardened mud whispers of water; the edges around its dry cracks are sharp on her feet. She misses Moon with a pain so strong that it, too, feels like anger. Where is he, and what is he doing to himself that makes him forget her, forget the desert? She knows he would be able to help her. Simply being with him would heal her.
But she cannot predict when he will come. Sometimes he is gone for over a year. It used to be he always came with the rains. Now the rains don’t always come. Or they come without him. Like he doesn’t remember, any more, who he is.
Suddenly the playa begins to vibrate like the dry skin of a rattler’s tail, and she looks out toward the City, her whole body flushing. There’s a truck coming, one that can travel over rough terrain. It stops some distance from her, just close enough to enter the realm of her vision.
In the moonlight, she can see two men dismount and begin to unload their things,
laying out sleeping rolls for the night. She wants to laugh out loud.
She sees them first, as always. Of course, they are going to bed down right in the path of potential flash floods, knowing nothing of the land they’ve come to dig up and brutalize. It doesn’t matter any more whether it’s the rainy season or not: floods come at random. For a moment Delilah hates them, and hopes the river will wash them away.
Then she walks toward them.
She’s aware of her body again, but in a different way. She is not self-conscious. She has no idea what she looks like any more, and she only keeps herself clean for her own sake, and to keep from being noticed by the animals. Her magic is a force that unfurls from inside. It is easy. It is simply her own desire, set free.
As she approaches them, the darkness becomes like water that she wades through, swinging her hips, trailing her fingertips across its invisible surface. She breathes into her chest, lifting her breasts, and begins to smile. She walks straight at them, both of them kneeling on the ground by now, and takes her time, watching their expressions of surprise. The older one, maybe in his mid-thirties, has a long, narrow, office-man’s face, with a stern chin grown stubbly, and hard, skeptical eyes. He is obviously in charge. The younger one, hardly more than a teenager—a brother or a nephew but not a son, not the way the older man is ignoring him now—is slim and effeminate, with big eyelashes and long hair curling at the tips across his face and brushing his serious, open lips. He reminds her a little of Moon. He is looking lower than his older brother, his eyes unabashedly fixed on Delilah’s body.
“Could I have a little of that?” she asks, sitting down on the sand across from them. The older one freezes with his fork in a can, but after a moment of tense silence, the boy rushes forward to hand her another can, unopened. She can smell his heat as he leans over on his knees, supporting his body with his other hand. She can smell boy loneliness in that heat, the uncleaned smell of a boy’s bedroom with one poster on the wall and a single mattress on the floor floating like an island in cluttered space. She can imagine his whole life in a moment.
She holds the can in her hand, smiling, until the boy, still shocked, seems to remember himself and rushes forward again with a can-opener. He kneels beside Delilah with innocent yet nervous familiarity and opens it for her, his hands shaking. The man has not moved. Delilah opens her mouth to breathe in the nearness of the boy’s body. He hands her a fork.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asks finally.
“Who the hell are you?” Delilah answers politely. “I live here.”
The man pauses. Then, “You’re that demon woman. The one they talk about.” Of course. She watches his eyes widen and sighs. She stands and climbs up onto their vehicle so they can watch her, and she them. She stretches her legs wide with each movement across it, reaching down between them to steady herself, and then sits finally with knees open.
“That’s right,” she says.
The young one shoots a glance at her face, and she throws him a deep smile that makes him look down uncomfortably. Shy. She loves shy.
“But who are you really?” the boy presses, looking more concerned than afraid. “Are you lost? Are you okay?”
“Well,” says Delilah, trying not to laugh, “I’m okay, but it’s been so long since I’ve seen a man out here.” She closes her legs, opens them again. Waits.
Now there is dead silence, uninterrupted. She eats while she waits for them to get used to her. She can hardly taste what she’s eating; she can hardly even identify it as food.
“What are you guys doing out here?” she asks finally, counting on the boy’s eagerness even if his older companion stays wary.
The boy glances at the other. “It’s something my brother did, when he was my age. Went out and drilled the caves for dragon—for gold, I mean. It’s mostly gone now, but we’re going anyway, just to see what we can find, just to…” He trails off, shifting uncomfortably.
“Just to prove your manhood, brave the darkness and all that?”
The boy looks down, shrugs.
Delilah glances into the compartment beside her, sees the enormous lights and explosives, the heavy equipment. “Could be dangerous,” she tells them. “There are sounds sometimes, down there. Maybe the dragons are still alive.”
The older brother grins now, and she knows he’s laughing at her, but the boy says, “Have you been in the caves?”
“I live in the caves,” says Delilah.
“What are they like?”
“They’re like this,” she says, but she’s looking at the older one as she slides onto the sand again, and pulls her shirt off fast. A few paces more, and she is kneeling. Not ready to look at him yet, she runs her fingertips over his thighs. She’s missed the heavy feel of men’s jeans. “Do you want to know what the caves feel like?” Again she has to keep herself from laughing from her own sheer power.
“You—” the man coughs, his voice seeming to come from far above her. “I’m a married man. Get away from me.” His voice is dry and slow, caught between breaths, like someone dying of thirst.
“I thought you were brave. Why do you sound scared?” she asks. It’s true. As if he is terrified now of what he’s about to do, certain there is no way to stop himself.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she assures him. “I’m going to help you.” He doesn’t move as she reaches between his legs and cups the warmth there in one hand. She feels such tenderness for men’s erections, constantly needing to be hidden away and subjugated to the reasoning mind, pressing endlessly against pant legs with their silent, instinctual plea.
Lying back, she looks finally up into his eyes, and finds him waiting there, behind his words.
He lasts a good long time, and she lets him take her in every position he can think of, listening to the younger one gasp beside them. When he’s on top of her, she lets his eyes—so heavy with unspoken longings—fall into hers; she makes her own eyes into endless depths, knowing this desperate looking is part of his release. When she’s on top of him, she tells him to touch her, and he touches her as if he’s never touched a woman before, as if he can’t believe his eyes. Then, after his eyes have poured out all their anguish, he flips her around and drives his anger into her, and she welcomes it because she knows its language, and she drives her anger back. Then he starts to cry, and then he comes, and while he comes he, too, laughs.
As usual, Delilah doesn’t come. In high school she was known among girls and boys as the most sexual, not some easy bimbo who was too dumb to know better, but the most horny, the most seductive, the girl who craved sex and thrived on it. Girls assumed she came repeatedly with every lay, and she did not correct them. Guys didn’t really care, or else they assumed they were making her come when she cried out in general ecstasy, and never bothered to ask. She didn’t pretend for them though. And she tried not to care much. Even though she loved boys, she loved them in an obsessive, emotionless way, and it was her dance with herself against them that gave her pleasure. She could always count on herself to bring her own release after they had gone. It was a rule for her never to depend too much on anyone.
Delilah can tell when she is ovulating, and now that she lives in the desert with only the sun and the moon for light, that time coincides exactly with the cycles of the moon. This is something she figured out on her own to avoid pregnancy so she wouldn’t have to slay her own baby (which she would have to do, and would not be afraid to, she tells herself). But so many times, like tonight, she’s fucked a man even though she knows she’s going to ovulate any day now, because she gets so few chances, and is so damned desperate. Maybe, she thinks, it’s the bitterness inside her that makes her body uninhabitable by something so innocent as a baby, and that is why, so far, she’s been lucky.
When the older one has spent himself, she caresses him mechanically like a child until he falls asleep, which doesn’t take long. Then she turn
s to the boy, whose mouth hangs unabashedly open.
“Stand up,” she commands, and he stands. She walks to him and presses her body against him, hugs him while he hardens against her belly and his heart moves like sporadic wingbeats against her breasts.
“Do you want me?” she whispers.
He takes a sharp breath.
“Promise me something,” she says.
“Anything.”
“Don’t go digging in the caves for the gold. Don’t send your drills and explosives down into the earth. This is my home. Understand?”
“Okay.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes. I didn’t want to do it anyway. He made me come with him. Said this is what men do.”
He whimpers, and then cries out, as she falls to her knees and opens her mouth.
Later, while they’re sleeping, she takes almost all of their food.
This way she’ll eat for another half moon after her meat runs out, and the men will be forced to abandon their quest, with only enough food remaining to get them home. She also searches their pack and finds a pair of loose pants that must belong to the boy. She’s stolen a good number of shirts, but no pants like this, light and easy for the summer. She can cinch them around the waist with twine.
When she gets back to her cave to inspect her loot, she feels sad to discover that nothing in the City has changed. What they call food still doesn’t look like food. It is colorless and textureless, packed into boxes and cylinders that ring cold metal when she taps her finger on them. Not like anything that comes from animal, or was ever alive. She remembers how it was to buy food in the City. Narrow corridors of cans and boxes, shelves and shelves of their neat, artificial shapes, labeled with fancy advertisements. How could anyone sense, looking at those long rows of simple, odorless, symmetrical shapes, what the body needed?
She started stealing food long before she was too poor to buy it, probably because even then, she wanted to feel like a hunter. Even then, she knew that handful of paper at the cash register had nothing to do with the pain and beauty of taking a life.
