Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  But he does hear her, and he will make himself wait. He has learned waiting, and she is worth waiting for. He feels almost relieved by her rejection. He feels its familiarity, its holiness. And yet he knows that he will have her, for she wants him. He felt her wanting, in his hands, only a moment ago—something he never felt with the goddesses, something they would never let him feel. He has carried her here. He has laid her down, and she looks wonderfully up at him, at once willing and afraid.

  “Are you the one?” she asks.

  In answer, he leans over her again, intending the gentlest of kisses, his hand running down her body. Her mouth shivers under his, barely opening, but then she presses her hand to his face and pushes him away.

  “No, stop,” she says. “Please.”

  “Sorry,” says Dragon. He lies down on his back and tries to breathe evenly.

  After an awkward moment, he turns toward her and finds her facing him too, her eyes bright and earnest.

  “Do you want me?” he asks, wanting to hear her say it.

  “I don’t know,” she says.

  “But,” he fumbles, “why not?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I can’t remember, what it was that I wanted.”

  Her face looks so childlike, so open. With such willingness she looks toward him, surrounding him with the beauty of her eyes, and he must forgive her, soften toward her.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he says. “But you’re so beautiful. What were you doing in the river?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dragon jumps up suddenly and takes one of her hands. He can’t lie here and talk or he’ll go mad.

  “Let’s walk together,” he tells her. She stands up with him, letting her hand follow his, and her obedience melts him. This is the gift the river has given him. He knew she would come to him eventually—the woman who would finally receive him, the woman who would reward him for all his days of waiting, frustration, and patient meditation. See, Coyote? he wants to shout aloud. See, Delilah? This is how it is.

  He doesn’t know what to say to her. He doesn’t care where she came from. He only wants to be inside of her, to be bathed at last in such purity.

  “What is your name?” he asks quickly, automatically. When she doesn’t answer, he looks at her and sees her brows furrowed in concentration. He thinks, suddenly, that she will lie to him. He pulls her hand sharply toward him, so that it brushes his thigh, and makes her face him. She gasps.

  “Tell me,” he demands.

  “It’s—Yora,” the girl says. Dragon catches her hesitation and gives her a sudden look, trying to see into her eyes, which she keeps hidden. He has the anxious feeling that she is lying, after all, and immediately that idea hurts him, but he doesn’t know what to say. They walk together for several moments, close to the river, their hands searing into each other. Out of the corner of his eye, Dragon sees Delilah watching them from the distance of her cave, even though she normally sleeps during the day. Out of nowhere, a fantasy arrests his mind of the two women, black and white, entwined together, laughing toward him. His body tenses as he walks.

  The girl sighs and pauses, touches his waist with her other hand.

  Without stopping his motion, Dragon lurches into her, pressing her against a wall of stone, searching under her dress with starving hands. His desire is like an unbearable weight that will crush him if he does not release it. She tilts her head back, starts to open her mouth. He kisses her violently, and catches one easy breast in his hand, and with the other he finds her opening under her dress, not as wet as Delilah’s but moist and contracting around his finger—its fuzz softer and finer.

  But then she begins to writhe beneath him, in a way that at first drives him wilder and then hurts him as she pokes him with the sharper points of her body, pushing him away again.

  “No, no,” she cries, “what are you doing to me?” He stands back, disbelieving, his eyes wild. But she curls up, presses her hands to her face, and begins to cry, and then again he softens. Again he can bear to wait a little longer. He kneels down and presses his face into her warm dress, feeling the burning that comes from her center, and this seems to make her cry even harder.

  Dragon will always remember the bewilderment of that first moon in the desert, when he discovered his own fire, and it seemed completely beyond his control.

  His body aches constantly and his heart is in constant pain. He tries to speak to the girl and his words come out as fire. He looks at her and his jaw comes unhinged with desire, his thighs shiver, and suddenly she is surrounded by fire. The more he wants her the further she moves away, because the more he wants her, the hotter the fire burns.

  All he can make is fire: fire pleading, fire fury, fire lust. Flames come from out of him and make theatrics in the air, and they need nothing to live on, and they change shape like the clouds, and die leaving the air melted and deformed. The closer they get to the beautiful girl, the hotter they seem to burn, as if she were a wind that fans them. They never seem to burn her, but she turns away from him anyway, murmuring, “It’s too hot. Stop, it hurts… ”

  “But I can’t help it,” he cries, his voice drowned out by the momentary roaring of the flames. “I want you. This is my love for you!”

  “But how can it be love? I can’t touch it,” she says, standing sad and childish on the other side of it, her face cool and unmoved behind the seething flames, her eyes round.

  “Enough with your stupid games,” says Delilah suddenly, lifting a stick to the air and catching one of his flames on the end of it. “Fire is sacred.”

  He doesn’t know where she came from, when she came, or which one of them she is talking to. In shock, he watches her walk away, and his own ethereal flames disintegrate, so that the flame on the end of her stick is now the only flame left in all the desert. He watches her crouch a shout’s distance away, closer to her cave, and carefully light a tipi of sticks she has already arranged. Then he sees his little goddess floating toward her slowly, as if drawn, and he has to follow.

  Delilah looks up at Yora, but not at him, and then turns back to her humbly burning, careful human fire and scowls. Its light unfolds its various arrays of color delicately, more subtle and introverted than the flames he just threw in his passion across the sand. These flames cackle deliciously over their meal of dead wood, whereas Dragon’s were wordless, roaring palely over nothing.

  “Are you jealous?” he asks Delilah, trying to regain some control, thinking he interprets the hint of pain in her darkened eyes as she turned away. He is wary and irritated by the interruption, even though the air between himself and Yora is calmer now, and Yora even reaches for his hand. He doesn’t trust Delilah’s influence on her.

  “Jealous,” says Delilah thoughtfully, looking up at Yora again as if she doesn’t understand, but he sees the anger there. He sees it!

  “Of this goddess,” he explains shortly.

  Delilah snorts. “She’s at least half human, that one.”

  Dragon is hurt by her dismissal, the way she talks about the girl as if she were not there—as if she were not what she is. But to his surprise, the girl answers, her voice clear as night air on a cold day, with nothing but wonder in her tone: “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen your kind,” says Delilah, but Dragon thinks she sounds uncertain now, and is perhaps as surprised he is.

  “Have you?” says Yora innocently. “We’re like each other, aren’t we? You and me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We look alike,” his goddess says eagerly. Dragon knows what she means: both of them small and slim, with girlish breasts and pretty limbs, only Delilah is quick and muscular and mammalian, while the new girl is shining, glassy and bird-like. Delilah’s hair is everywhere thorny and tangled, while the girl Yora’s lies in an icy sheen down her back, never dry and never tangled, and lines her legs with the palest
down. But they mirror each other in their stance, Delilah’s eyes boring into Yora’s in challenge, while Yora—crouching down now by the fire as if she were welcome there—faces her back just as directly, out of pure curiosity.

  But Dragon doesn’t think Delilah sees the similarity.

  “Where did you come from?” she asks, her voice flat. “Women don’t come to the desert.”

  “You’re here.”

  “Where do you come from,” repeats Delilah with impatience.

  “A tower,” says the girl, the quietness in her voice making Delilah’s sound even harsher and more unkind. “In the middle of the sea. But it isn’t there any more.”

  Dragon, who was watching the girl’s lips as they carefully formed these words, and the beautiful newness of each gesture she makes, turns back toward Delilah when she does not reply. He catches the end of several strange expressions passing over her face.

  “Oh, is that it,” she says finally. “You’re the Princess in the Tower. Of course. Right. I guess that’s the best fantasy you could come up with for yourself. But it’s completely meaningless, just so you know.”

  Dragon watches the girl’s mouth open slightly and her eyes widen, and he turns to Delilah. “Don’t speak to her that way,” he growls.

  “Don’t speak to me about what you don’t know, boy-god. You’re only a child.”

  But Yora catches them both then with the sweetness of her sigh as she glances upward.

  “Oh,” she says, “look at the moon.” They both look up, without thinking, and see the moon which has risen in secret and casts its looming beauty through silver clouds. They all stare at it for a long, long moment, as if they have never seen it before, and then he hears Yora’s voice again, soft beside him.

  “I’m on a journey,” she says. “I am looking for love.”

  Delilah whirls back around and makes a grimace and a choked sound that Dragon thinks is a failed attempt at contemptuous laughter. She tosses her head toward Dragon.

  “Dragon thinks he’s looking for love,” she says. “But he’s really just looking for sex.”

  “Fuck you, Delilah,” Dragon retorts, using her own ugly language which is so distasteful to him, for he can think of nothing worse to express his anger. “What do you know about love?”

  “Nothing. But I’m not looking for it.”

  Then they are all silent again, and the silence is even more painful than before. After a while, Delilah says to Yora, without looking up, “What do you know about the City?” and Dragon can see that it costs her to ask this question, but there must be some reason she asks, something she wants to know.

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you know anything about the Road? Have you seen it?”

  “The what?”

  “Forget it.”

  “What is it?”

  Delilah sighs, rubs her hands over her face, and then looks away. Dragon hasn’t seen that gesture before, but he can tell she is going to walk away soon, or tell them to leave. It doesn’t matter. He has his goddess now. She is afraid, but she loves him; she will, she must.

  “What is the Road?” Yora asks again.

  “It’s like another river,” Delilah answers, her voice resigned. “A river of death. There are others. The people of the City build them, so they can turn the wilds into City, and find more places to build up their make-believe world and dump their trash. They’ll destroy us all eventually, and then they’ll destroy themselves. Fortunately, I’m purebred human, so I might be dead by then, of more natural causes.”

  “Where is your family?” asks Yora, which surprises Dragon, and seems to surprise Delilah, too. Didn’t he ask Delilah that, too, when he met her?

  “I don’t have a fucking family.” Delilah stands up. Maybe he’s imagining it but she seems more and more edgy. Maybe it’s his fault. Maybe he should leave. He’ll take his little goddess and travel the world with her, searching for where the two of them belong.

  “I don’t have a family either,” says Yora.

  Delilah stares at her hard. Then she says, “Neither of you are welcome here. Don’t you understand that? This is my home. I’ll fight you for it if I have to, and I’ll win. You take your little love games somewhere else.”

  But his goddess doesn’t seem to hear her. She is holding her hand out now to the aura of the flames, as if she hadn’t shied away from them in fear only moments before, when they belonged to him. He and Delilah both stare at her, as if from a terrible distance. Dragon’s is the distance of longing, while Delilah’s is the distance of hatred, though where this hatred comes from he does not understand.

  She’s looking at Delilah as she holds her hand against the heat of the flames, saying, “It’s light, isn’t it? Just light, moving and moving. Light with no body. Just light.”

  For all the days of the waning moon, Dragon tries not to let his little goddess out of his sight. Sometimes he lets her sit and dream on her own, looking off at the mountains or back the way she came, but he watches her, haunting her with his desire. Somehow every night she hides herself, and he can never find her. But every morning she returns to him, her eyes open and hopeful.

  She wants to sit and talk with him. She asks him about where he comes from, and pleads for stories about the goddesses there, and the things that bloomed there, and what it felt like. He doesn’t tell her he did not always live in the Garden. He will not or cannot speak of his life with the dragons, though he doesn’t know why. Perhaps those experiences were never described or recorded by any thoughts, and the memory of them is not something his mind holds in words. Anyway, he doesn’t want to talk at all. Though she opens to him and listens to him the way he longed so badly for Delilah to do, he doesn’t want that with Yora. He wants only to get inside her.

  But he succumbs to her questions about the garden he came from, because explaining its shape is the only excuse he can find—after hours of frustrating conversation and walking separately in the sun—to touch her.

  “Here,” he tells her, “the heart of the garden. Here, its flowering breasts….” His fingers linger around her nipples, for which he cannot remember any symbol in the garden. Forgetting himself, he brings his lips to one of them. Her virginity is dazzling, so sweet he can smell it. He can feel her weaken—a single sharp breath out, as if she has slipped on a wet stone and begun to fall. He can feel her wanting him, and he lets loose before he can stop himself, grabbing her with his whole body.

  But then the same thing again: her struggle, her pained cries.

  He stops, furious. “Tell me when you really want me,” he hisses.

  “Okay,” she whispers, pulling away from him in fear.

  He swears he will not lose himself like that again. But one day in the river he sees her watching him, and he sees her eyes tracing the length of him with a look of awe and fear that makes him grasp himself—a sense of his own power pressing at him from inside until he wants to scream it. He wades over to her and bounces his erection in her face, watching her lips part in surprise.

  “Touch it,” he begs. “Just once.”

  She looks up at him, and he sits down beside her and gently takes hold of her hand.

  “Touch it,” he repeats. She looks down and nudges it with the back of her hand, then rubs its head uncertainly with her thumb. Her fingers are so light, like grasses in the wind, and he’s so sensitive that her touch is like pain. She is laughing.

  “It’s like an animal,” she says. She strokes it again so lightly he almost explodes, his whole body shaking. He grabs her, clamps her hand around it, and forces her to stroke it hard, up and down. She looks up at him, her eyes distant and surprised, but obeys. He leans in, breathing into her, giving in to the sensation. He doesn’t mean to force her but he can’t help it. He reaches for her breasts; she begins to pull away, but then remains. He feels her awkwardness, but just barely, for he is almost overco
me.

  “Harder,” he whispers.

  Then they are both looking down at the mess in her hand, and he feels his mind emptying out with exhaustion. They lower themselves into the river. When he looks at her, she is crying again, the redness around her eyes underlining their dark brilliance.

  “Do you love me?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he answers without hesitation. “Don’t you love me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m so confused now.”

  He stares at her.

  “I think I want you,” she says. “But I’m afraid. What do I do? How do I know if you’re the one?”

  And he doesn’t know, because he doesn’t understand what she is asking.

  Whenever Delilah sleeps too deep into the evening, the bats wake her.

  Their bedroom is just beyond hers, a little further into the cave, where it narrows and becomes impossible even to crawl through. Sometimes the wind of their mass exit awakens her, but even if she sleeps through that, their wild calls wake her once they begin returning to the cave to give their babies their first meal of the night. Then she crawls back and down to their doorway, and peers through the blackness to see the mass breathing of that living ceiling. She feels their little hot spirit-bodies maneuvering effortlessly around her head.

  She chose this cave partly because of them. Also, the first cave she had chosen, about a day’s walk from here, belonged to a mountain lion’s home range. She’d found that out when the lion had appeared to her quite honestly in broad daylight, looming above her with a body chiseled from stone—in the perfect position for a pounce, but relaxed, with one paw dangling over the edge of the ledge and both eyes on Delilah, confident as suns in her lean face.

  Delilah had backed away slowly. Only when the mountain lion was long out of her sight did she begin breathing again. She almost laughed with relief, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew she had been warned, and she would not be warned again.