Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The wind touches their faces. Fawn lifts their wool blanket and shakes off the wet fuzz of dew, then lays it down next to their bed to dry. Rye stands with no sound except for deep breaths, raises his hands to the sky, and begins to stretch his body limb by limb. Fawn opens the cloth cover that holds their bedding and spreads apart the pine stuffing to air out in the sun. She spreads it slowly with her hands, feeling and looking through it for signs of mold or insects, and as she does so she blesses it with her touch, silently thanking the coming day.

  Tough, flat feet pressing the cold earth of her rooftop garden, Fawn walks over the body of her house to the stairway, left open to the roof in summer. On her way, she collects a few herbs to add to the breakfast she will make. The innocent scent of cut wood welcomes her as she spirals down the stairs, reminding her to honor the trees that gave their lives for this house and these fields. Through her husband’s hands, they reincarnated into forms of a different beauty—the stairs, the table, her rocking chair, the cradle the children slept in as infants, the walls that protect them—though never quite as beautiful or creative as the trees themselves, whose only function was pure life.

  When she descends into the main room, she finds her son already lighting the fire, and she can breathe a small sigh of peace. She watches his bare back shining and lengthening, watches the way he balances himself, graceful as a beast but with a halting respect in his motions. It moves her, the way the child in him grapples with the weight of expectant adulthood, the frightening power of manhood wobbling precariously in his lean, sensitive body. But she knows he draws comfort from the power of his mind, a power he has known all his life and will always know, which holds him steady.

  He stands up and wipes his hands on his pants, leaving small flames jumping behind the grate. For breakfast in the summer, they need only a few hot coals. He nods at her, his manner warm but his voice—a tremulous, changing thing which he keeps to himself more and more these days—silent.

  “You’re up early,” she says to him.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he mumbles. Fawn thinks immediately, without meaning to, of the girl in the barn. She still makes Fawn uneasy. She is otherworldly in some way. She is too beautiful. There is some spell she casts over the house, perhaps, even asleep.

  “Did you dream?” she asks anxiously. “Tell your dreams to your grandmother. She will know . . .”

  “Ma,” he says, striding around the firepit toward the back door, “I just woke up early, that’s all.”

  “Malachite—”

  But he is gone. Fawn sighs and comes close to the fire for a moment, drawing comfort from its warmth. The rest of the family call him Kite now, which she knows is what he wants, but she will not call him that. He is already flying too far from the earth, she thinks, at this age. He needs the name she gave him to anchor him, to remind him where he comes from.

  Her daughter has already left seven fresh eggs on the counter, but Fawn goes through the south door into the front room, the greenhouse, to retrieve a few more from the glass box of meat and eggs they keep cold in the stream. She knows where her daughter is. She’s in the barn, and she is not only tending to the goats but also watching that girl as she sleeps. No one knows if the girl will ever wake, though Chelya creeps in to watch her as often as she can, ever-hopeful. Each evening at dinner, Chelya makes her eager report.

  “Today she cried for almost the whole day but didn’t wake,” she will say, or “She was talking in her sleep all day long. I didn’t have time to stay and listen, but it was something about being cursed, I think, and she kept pleading for me to stay, though she didn’t know who I was, and she said she needed to get to the high mountain, and something about love. But I think her fever has broken now! I think she is getting better.”

  Though these words frighten Fawn, she tries to present her daughter with a calm face. She tells her that if the girl is meant to wake, she will, and if she is not meant to be in this world, she won’t. She can tell that her daughter is wild with the romantic fantasy she reaps from these fragments of sleep-talk, that she cannot wait for her beautiful princess to wake and tell her the dramatic story of her origins and her quest. And Fawn doesn’t know what else to say. She has a bad feeling about the girl that she is afraid to speak aloud. She feels that something is going to happen, something she doesn’t understand and can’t control.

  She doesn’t understand what her mother, Eva, means, when after spending hours of her day at the girl’s side, conversing with her spirit, she tells Fawn that the girl is not yet fully alive in this world, not yet fully human. Those words terrify Fawn. If not human, then what?

  “She is afraid to wake up,” Eva told her yesterday.

  “But she can’t stay here forever,” said Fawn, ashamed of her own childish tone.

  Now Chelya comes running into the house with some fresh garden vegetables for breakfast to go with the eggs. She grins, kisses Fawn on the cheek, and runs back out again. She’s wearing a thin, shapeless nightgown that, nevertheless, wafts lovingly around her luxurious curves, a faded, patternless hand-me-down from what seems a far-gone era of Fawn’s life. Fawn smiles at the way Chelya seems to move everywhere either running or dancing, her rainbow warmth catching the rest of the family carelessly in its wake. She is only sixteen, but as curvy and confident as a woman—far more confident, in fact, than Fawn has ever felt. Perhaps Eva, who is also outspoken, not shy like Fawn, was like this when she was young. Chelya’s presence comforts Fawn. She feels its constant glow, even when her daughter is out in the fields. Most of the time her absence doesn’t worry Fawn, the way Malachite’s does.

  Fawn brews tea for her mother from fir needles, which Eva says wake her and bring her down from the high of her dreams. She goes out the rear of the house, up over the mound of her mother’s sacred hill, and to the other side where Eva has pitched their old tent for the summer. Eva has spread out a little altar in the sun, facing the great white-topped mountain in the east whose lofty height seems to inspire her. She takes the cup from Fawn’s hand and then clasps that hand in her own, the worn palms as lyrically lined as the designs of bark beetles on old wood and always warm. Eva beams at her daughter, giving her love in a smile, and then turns back to her altar.

  Fawn leaves her, knowing not to speak to her so early in the morning, when she’s still on her way back from dreams, and her mind and spirit are busy in other worlds.

  Fawn mixes green onions and sweet peas and summer squash in her one iron pan on the grate over the fire, which circles half the circumference of the round brick firepit. Through the cloth in her hand she feels the hot metal, that fiery, dark masculinity from under the earth. She is grateful for this magical material, which Rye’s brother has hewn with fire into this round, useful thing. Such magic in life—such magic humans can create—yet its power frightens her, and she is happy with only a little of it, the barest essentials and no more.

  It’s still cold in the mornings, so they eat breakfast right there in the main room, with the windows open. Briefly, they bless what made their food.

  “Thank you, chickens. Thank you, vegetable and herb plants. Thank you, ocean, for your salt. Thank you, animals, for your fat and oil. Thank you, river. Thank you, sun. Thank you, earth. Thank you, air.”

  “Thank you, Fawn,” Rye adds. Fawn catches his eye.

  Mostly, they eat in silence. They let the food travel slowly through their mouths and throats down to their bellies, taking pleasure in what the tastes tell them of the earth’s growth.

  Rye tells them of his greetings with the day.

  “The clouds are thinking of raining again,” he says. “Not yet, but maybe later, tonight. Some of the birds are still having trouble finding food, because the winter was so hard. I hear them still calling for mates, even now, because there are so few who survived to return in the spring, because they traveled over the City. Also, I found another nest on the ground. Eggs that died before th
ey were born.”

  Chelya looks up, serious. Animals to her are like people. Unlike the rest of the family, she won’t even kill or eat them. “I think it means something,” she says. “Remember all the bees that died last year.”

  “I think the river has poison in it,” Fawn says softly.

  “Ma,” says Malachite impatiently, “the City’s downstream. How could there be poison in the river?”

  “From the rains.”

  Malachite twists his mouth in that way he does, and shakes his head. Rye has rested his fork on the edge of his bowl, and is thinking.

  “There is poison,” Fawn repeats. “I can taste it in the rain.”

  “I think the water is still safe to drink, Fawn,” Rye says gently. “It’s so little poison, if there is any.”

  “But it might not always be safe,” says Fawn, “and what then? Those people down there don’t care if the river is poisoned. They get their water from somewhere else.”

  “Ma, you don’t know—” Malachite begins.

  “Kite,” says Rye. But it is Fawn who looks down, ashamed of her fear.

  “The two hawks who came to nest above the fields seem well though,” Rye says, changing the subject. “Perhaps they will give us some perspective, seeing the whole land from above as we cannot.”

  Fawn nods. They finish their meal in silence, listening, as if even now the hawks are speaking to them from the sky, seeing a continuing pattern of wholeness that they cannot.

  After breakfast, Fawn washes their dishes in water she heated over the fire. None of her motions are slower or faster than any of the others. She reaches into the water, rolls the rag in a circle in the deep, nurturing roundness of a wooden bowl, lifts the bowl and dries it with the same motion, and puts it in its place on the open shelves. When she has finished, she casts her eyes in a restful arc over the familiar textures: the varying grains and beans in their neat jars, black and red and yellow and green and white, the small stacks of wooden bowls and cups, the dried herbs hanging and the hand-carved wooden ladle with its swooping handle.

  Rye has left for the morning, to check his traps in the woods and perhaps, if they yield nothing, to catch fish for dinner. Chelya is probably working with the bees, or maybe she and Eva are still conversing with the wasps who built a nest in one of the woodsheds, asking them to live peaceably with this family and to know that the people here mean them no harm. It’s a long process, communing with such a big entity of beings, and it doesn’t always work, but Eva can speak the language of almost any creature, and Chelya’s loving presence is so convincing. Malachite, ever resourceful, is figuring out a way to fix one of the greenhouse windows that cracked when a branch hit it during a winter storm, since they have no way, for now, of obtaining more glass. She knows he is hurrying to get his work done so he can steal an hour sometime in the day to work on his plans and dreams for making energy out of sunlight or wind; he’s heard there is a way to do it, and he keeps promising that someday they will learn to harness that power. To Fawn, this concept is unfathomable. They already have power: the work power of their own hands and bodies, the power of fire, the power of their spirits and their love. She doesn’t understand the need for electricity, whose only purpose is to change the natural flow of things: redirect the water or make light when it is time for darkness.

  The City is closer now than it ever was. To the northwest, near where Rye’s brother Jay has his farm, a huge space of forest is gone. The roads reach their claws deeper and deeper in. Jay’s family can hear the sounds of the machines even in their sleep. Little cities will rise up there, where the forest was, and the earth that the roots of the trees held together will slide down the mountainside and into the river. So close. Nothing can stop the roads. And according to Jay and Rye, it is more than just roads that are coming. Some mountains have been decapitated by gigantic machines. Where there was mountain, now there is a thick, leaking lava of poison, and then there will be only caverns of desert…But they will not tell her more than that. They shake their heads when she asks for explanations, as if they know this information will kill her. There is a reason, Rye says, why they persuaded all the farmers in the north to leave their farms. There is something they want in there.

  In where? Fawn asked him. His eyes when she asked him were heavy and sorry and far away, almost as if he knew—as if there was some hunger within all men that even he, who was not one of these bad men after all, could recognize.

  In the earth, he said, and looked away.

  All Fawn can do to stop these realities from freezing her mind, freezing her body with terror, is what she has always done: dive her hands into the soil. She plants seeds, fertilizes with compost and chicken droppings, pulls weed, helps the climbing vegetables with small structures of sticks, and brings seedlings from the greenhouse to plant out in the sun for the summer crop. As she works around the plants, pressing and massaging the soil around them with nourishment, spilling water over them, she sings to them in a whispered voice only they can hear. They spread their hopeful leaves like wings in the breeze. How easy it is to convince them to live! She lay their simple seeds in the earth, and immediately they knew what to do.

  She works all morning and into the hot afternoon, her knees in the soil, her body crouching low. She is sculpting the earth, day after day, year after year, and her hands always feel it, like a work of life she is molding forever.

  She eats a small mid-day meal with her mother on the hillside, as she always does. It is the only time the two of them have alone to talk. Like the rest of the family in the middle of their long day, they eat whatever they don’t have to cook: goat’s milk, leftovers, meat jerky, fruit.

  Today Eva tells her daughter, “I think the girl will wake soon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The fever has broken.”

  “Maybe she will die,” suggests Fawn, her tone blank.

  “Maybe,” says Eva, “but I don’t think so. She has something she needs to do.”

  They are sitting next to each other with their food in their hands, looking at the high white mountain which, from this distance, seems the only thing that never changes.

  “I’m afraid of her,” Fawn admits.

  “Of course you are,” says Eva. Her voice is deep and sure like stone striking stone, belying the dreamy realms that take up so much of her time. “You’re afraid of anything that changes your routine.”

  Fawn bows her head. “I am just happy with the way things are,” she says, though her heart tells her that this happiness is more shaky than it has ever been.

  “I know. It is a gift you have, a talent that few people share: to be happy, to be stable and content like the earth. You are of the earth, even more than me, more than your children. But don’t forget the river, Fawn, and the air and fire, which are always moving, always changing. Anyway, you know that change always brings us back home again, back to the beginning.”

  “Yes,” says Fawn, but she is thinking. After a moment she adds, “We keep her horse with ours, and like ours he doesn’t have to be tied. But he keeps his distance from our horses, and when I look at him, sometimes he seems to change, as if a light shines from him. And sometimes when I look at him from behind, suddenly I can’t see his male parts any more, and he seems to be a mare! It is a strange, magical horse. Mother, what if it is not a horse at all, but a—a spirit of some kind?” She turns to her mother in horror as she speaks these words, but her mother, of course, does not respond in kind. Her mother is not afraid of spirits, nor even of gods. “What should I do with my fear?”

  “Try to be open, Fawn. Learn from your daughter. She doesn’t fear anyone.”

  “But what am I afraid of?”

  Eva doesn’t answer, but only places her hand on Fawn’s back, behind her heart, and rubs softly.

  On her way back to the house, Fawn enters the dim light of the barn, where the girl lies on a
pile of clean hay in the shelter where the goat kids were fed in early spring. She remembers when Rye carried her into the house, his eyes surprised as if he didn’t understand what he’d found, her body slung over his arms like a small, stilled waterfall. What did he think when he found her? Was he torn a little inside, as Fawn is, by her beauty so bright it seems unstable, by her childish lips, by the helpless grace of her arms? Did he desire her, so pale and smooth and delicate compared with Fawn?

  There was this light in his face when he brought her in. Pine needles fell from her hair as if he had dug her up from the earth, but she was glowing. Fawn had not seen that expression on his face for a long time, the expression of a little boy the first time he watches something innocent die, or sees his father cry; the expression of a boy who promises, deep in his heart, that he will somehow save what could not be saved then, that he will grow up to make a better life for the ones he loves; the expression of a boy when he promises deep within himself, without telling anyone, to become a man. The promise she sees in her son’s face every day now, which moves her and frightens her at the same time.

  Fawn kneels beside the girl now, trying to be brave. Trembling, she touches her hand, and then strokes with her fingertips its fine, bird-like bones. When Rye brought her home, Fawn wouldn’t speak to him for almost two days. She didn’t mean to be stubborn, but she had never felt angry with him like that in the whole nineteen years they had been together. It was an unfamiliar feeling and she had no words to express it. She simply could not believe he would bring a stranger into their home when things were so unstable around them, the City creeping closer every day—and not only a stranger but someone who seemed not quite human, who came from who knew where and for who knew what purpose.