Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Eva shakes her head. “Ah, daughter, I was so young then. Women in the City—we grow up being taught to fear not men, not the powers that oppress us, but our own selves. They teach us to fear the darkness in ourselves, and that way we enslave our very selves, without them having to do it for us. It saves them work.”

  “But there is something inside of Lonely that frightens me,” Fawn insists. “Something unpredictable and desperate, something so intense and—”

  “And unafraid?” says Eva, turning to Fawn. “And free?”

  Lonely walks, bent over, around the edges of the forest, the blanket still enshrouding her. She will not put that dress on again, nor will she reveal her nakedness. She thinks of Rye—how could he want her, the daughter of such evil? How could she take him from Fawn, who is so good and kind, humble and graceful?

  Her horse whinnies at her from across the field and comes trotting lightly toward her, his big body a windy river, fringed by the long fin of hair along his neck. He seems somehow different than before. When he stops, she stands and holds him, her arms around his neck. This is what she has, she remembers: this good animal, simple and hungry but white as the clouds, and her own body, her heart, and desire.

  She talks to the horse for a long time. First she tells him that her father was evil. That everything he created, everything he did, everything he seemed to feel for her was illusion. He was a master of illusion. He made an illusion of her life. It will take her whole life, again, to find out who she really is, and to find out what real life and real love feel like.

  But saying all that makes her cry so hard she can’t breathe.

  So then she begins to say other things, about how her father was not who she thought he was, but that still, maybe, she will try to love him. She tells the horse she is going to be strong, and not cry so much any more.

  She tells the horse how really, she is angry with Eva for the story she doesn’t want to believe.

  No, really she is angry at her father. But he isn’t evil, necessarily, is he? Is she? There must have been something beautiful in her, to take him away from all that powerful magic he’d created, which was so convincing and entangling.

  For a while the horse stands still, nibbling at the grass, listening.

  Still her heart is so heavy. Nothing she can say or think will make it lighter.

  Did her father know about the prince she would see later, his face shining through the glass from the mountain? Is that who he meant, when he promised someone would come, and how did he know? And what did that prince have to do with the story? Should she have waited for him? Was the old woman right to hate her? But how could she hate her, when it wasn’t Lonely’s fault?

  That woman could not be her mother. Her mother would love her the way Fawn loves Chelya, and Eva loves Fawn.

  The thinking weighs her down so much, and she leans, heavier and heavier, against the horse, until the horse grows restless under her careless, unfocused weight, and bolts forward a few steps, shaking his head. Startled, Lonely lifts her own head and steps back, then looks up at the sky.

  The sky swells like the sea, and shakes its white foam. The clouds reach so wildly over half the sky that they break apart and fluff happily into oblivion, whiffs of them bumping without impact against each other, against the sun.

  Then Lonely’s heart lightens—just enough—because it has to. It lightens because she is not a heavy sort of person. It is unnatural to her, to be held under such a weight. Like air she floats upward, and cannot be held down.

  Come on, says the wind, with compassion. I love you.

  Lonely smiles a little and begins to walk back toward the house. She feels unsteady on her feet, as if nothing she thought was real can now be counted on, almost as if the very earth cannot be trusted. In her childhood of mist and dreams, her father was the only thing real. Now he is not real, or at least not what she thought he was. So what is real? She is walking toward this little house without knowing why, except that the way it sits there nestled in the crest of two green swells makes it look as if it belongs. That belonging makes it real.

  Then someone is running toward her who cares about her, who likes her. Lonely tries to focus her eyes. It is Chelya, who woke her with milk and honey, who helped her start again.

  “Lonely! I’ve been looking for you.”

  Lonely stops, and Chelya keeps running toward her. In a moment, she feels Chelya’s warm hands in her own.

  “I want to know about the tower you grew up in,” the girl is saying, as if she doesn’t know, and maybe she doesn’t. “Was it beautiful? How did you—? But what happened to your dress?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lonely says slowly. How can she explain? “I—Chelya, I can’t talk about it right now. But something happened, and I can’t wear that dress any more. It’s not—it isn’t real.”

  Chelya nods, as if this makes perfect sense. “It’s all right. You can borrow something of mine. I’ll make you a new dress. A dress just for you.”

  Rye’s and Fawn’s horses avoid Lonely’s horse for a long time.

  This is not hard to do, since Lonely’s horse avoids everyone, except for Lonely. He does not sleep in the stable, even when it rains.

  There are two horses who live here. The stallion is a work horse, with a rough tail and thick feet and dirty fur the color of seeding grass. He seems peaceful and uncaring, but he makes Lonely’s horse nervous: Lonely’s horse doesn’t want the resident stallion to think he is challenging his authority in any way. The mare they use for riding, at once jumpy and innocent, makes him uneasy, too, though that uneasiness has more to do with himself and the question of his own power.

  But one day the mare grazes near him. That is how she questions him, not by approaching him directly, as the stallion might, sniffing his flanks or even nipping him a little in challenge, but simply by passing near him. Neither horse looks at the other, but each is aware of the other, and that awareness is just slightly heavier than the awareness of anything else.

  Lonely’s horse is gathering clover from between the tall grasses with his lips, unpacking the gentle pleasure of their taste with his teeth. The gathering of the clover—lips and teeth, reaching and chewing—is a rhythm in his skull that keeps him anchored. But his eyes focus elsewhere, not down into the grass, but from the sides of his head outward, to where the mountains hold their darkness on one side and the mare grazes near him on the other.

  It is uncomfortable for him to watch her. She is quick with her hunger, stepping constantly forward, moving from one patch to another without finishing. With her shoulders thrusting toward him and her tail swishing, she is saying i know you’re there. these are our fields, and we know everything. we know you’re here.

  i’m not really here, says the body of Lonely’s horse, shifting away from her slightly. But that isn’t quite what he means. Something changed in him since he rescued Delilah in the desert. He did not know himself when he lept over Dragon and lowered his forehead and…he did not know what happened, but he knew he must stop that man from what he was going to do. He did not know he was capable of such a thing. A light shines in him all the time now, and he can’t turn it off, and it frightens him. It is the hope of it that frightens him.

  The mare doesn’t look at him directly but sends a shiver from her head all the way down to her flanks. you are here, she is saying. but you’re not like us. you are something else. you make me nervous. please declare yourself.

  Lonely’s horse doesn’t answer. He immerses himself in the grass. This is all he has to do, all day long: move slowly forward, and gather grass with his lips, and pay attention to the wind. This is safe—almost.

  But the mare raises her head again, and this time she prances a few steps in place. This startles Lonely’s horse, who cannot help but raise his head, too, and trot a few paces away.

  i love to run, the mare is saying suddenly, prancing in place.


  Lonely’s horse says nothing, his head held stiffly in the air, his eyes at once frozen and flaming.

  don’t you love to run? she tempts him. She seems so brave. She trots a tight circle around him, her mane slipping through the careless hand of the breeze. Over the next hillside, the stallion is hidden from view and has not yet noticed their conversation. don’t you love…? She begins again.

  The horse who is not a horse feels his muscles shiver. He has swallowed his last mouthful of grass. The wind holds its breath in anticipation. He knows why Lonely has been pushing him on toward the mountain. Of course he knows. He knows what it’s like. The grass is not enough. Food and water are not enough. Even the sun in the grass and the scents on the wind are not enough.

  Now he finds himself running across the field, his body unfolding into a gallop without knowing what motions began it. The mare is running beside him. He lifts his face to the wind. His heavy feet reach out to embrace the ground and then pull together, a round circle of legs in the air, and then out again to stretch over the earth. The motion is lighter than his feet, something beyond his feet that makes him fly. The earth is so deep it does not shake and does not hurt upon impact; the wind burrows into his fur, burning with cold against his skin until he feels his skin will peel away, his flesh peeling back to reveal a spirit whose running is a crying out into space.

  His hooves pounding the earth like fists. The wind of his running knocking open the doors of his heart, the wind running through it, the pain flooding out…And as he runs he is crying, for running is crying, the only way to express a passion he could not bear to speak in his former life.

  The spaces he’s been occupying for days fall away, as great distances open under him, opening him to the unknown before he has time to be afraid. When the house and the stables are far out of sight, and the thickening grass begins to catch them with its tangles and thorns, and the forest looms before them, they slow.

  The mare trots around him, laughing with her tail and shaking her neck like a snake. He is standing still now, his belly heaving in and out, his body weeping with choked-back joy.

  Slowly, they walk back. They eat along the way, saying nothing directly. Her question to him continues to move in the shape of the space between them.

  who are you?

  Up in the loft, Lonely waits on Chelya’s dreamy bed while the girl digs through her trunk of clothing. The summer heat sits stuffily around them. Chelya comes toward her with a handful of pale turquoise cloth. But then she stops.

  “Lonely.” She laughs. “You smell.”

  Lonely looks at her, not understanding. “Like what?”

  Chelya laughs again. “Like you. You need a bath!”

  Lonely is amazed. She remembers the way Rye’s smell weakened her, and the way Eva’s wild, ancient scent comforted her. It never occurred to her that she could have her own smell. “But what do I smell like?” she asks again, wondering why she can’t smell herself. Why could she see herself in the glass but not smell her own body?

  Chelya stops giggling and considers, trying as always to be helpful in answering Lonely’s many questions. “I don’t know,” she says. “But honestly, when people haven’t bathed in too long, they all start to smell the same. They just smell like humans.”

  Lonely looks down at her hands, then lifts them up and sniffs them. “Then I guess I’m human now,” she says quietly, remembering Yora suddenly, and feeling afraid but not knowing why. Somewhere far away, she can imagine the empty chill of the sea wind. Somewhere far away, her father’s wife waits for her always, where the only scent is the salty waves. Lonely wants this smell that belongs to her. Already she feels more real.

  But Chelya’s face has grown quiet. “What do you mean?” she says.

  Lonely looks up, scared, realizing what she said. But Chelya’s face changes again, just as quickly. “Oh,” she says, and thinks a moment. “I knew you were something more than human. It’s okay. I won’t tell.”

  Lonely stares at her. Chelya’s smile is so easy. As if maybe the story she remembers Eva telling her last night was nothing but a bad dream, something she could never make sense of and doesn’t have to.

  “Anyway,” says Chelya. “Now you are human and you smell. I’ll ask Ma to take you to the river with her today. You have to be clean before I let you wear my dress.”

  That is how Lonely ends up crossing the southern field and entering the forest again, wrapped in a length of old, torn sheet, following Fawn.

  Fawn says nothing but her awareness seems to trail behind her, catching each sound that Lonely makes. She never gets too far ahead of Lonely. She never forgets to hold a branch back after she’s passed under it, allowing Lonely to pass through behind her. But Lonely’s steps sound nervous and loud behind Fawn’s comfortable, quiet ones, and Lonely keeps worrying that she is doing something wrong, like breaking a sensitive spiderweb. Curtain after curtain of arched boughs fall behind them as they enter deeper into that world that swallowed Lonely up only a moon ago. Fawn travels with a sense of direction that Lonely did not have, and the trees seem to fit easily around Fawn’s passage, as if they know her. She ducks and swings her hips aside to avoid tangles, but she never has to push anything out of her way, or struggle to get through.

  Then, abruptly, Lonely emerges behind Fawn into open space where the stream has opened into river. Here it is like an old woman, slow and brooding, running deep and brown with earth.

  An old fallen tree descends into the hidden depths, and dragonflies whirl there, and across from where the two women stand, a single branch of blossoms bows over the water, smearing a hot pink flame through the reflections below.

  Fawn turns to Lonely, then turns away before Lonely can catch her eyes. Lonely watches Fawn gather her soft green dress about her hips, bend forward slightly, and then roll it up over the arch of her shoulders and over her head. She drops it onto the log and descends into the water, fingertips sliding along the log for support she doesn’t need, so practiced is her grace. Lonely is startled again by the fullness of Fawn’s body, which seems to belie her shy silence. Fawn pauses with the water rippling around her waist, eyes closed. Her pleasure at being immersed in the water is so obvious to Lonely, though her expression hardly changes, that Lonely can almost see colors—the pink of those flowers, deepening into purple—misting around her.

  Fawn doesn’t look back, and so Lonely drops her sheet and walks into the water beside her, staring at the lush swells of Fawn’s subtle, browned body, her full breasts twice the size of Lonely’s—breasts that have nursed life. Such luxury of flesh she bears so modestly, without thought. That is what amazes Lonely: the way other people carry their own beauty without even noticing it, taking it for granted.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, as Fawn meets her gaze and then lowers herself into the water up to her neck. “I’ve never seen another woman before—without clothes.”

  Fawn ducks her head under and comes up, pressing the water out of her eyes with the heels of her hands. Water slopes over her child-like cheeks, and her eyes widen carefully behind them. Her face is like Chelya’s, but less obvious in its beauty, smaller, her nose straighter and more serious, her eyes more deeply and closely set. Her chin is round and tough, and freckles spill over her cheeks, making her look vulnerable, and easier to know than she is. She begins to rub water against her body with the palms of her hands, rising a little from the water again so that Lonely can see the tops of her breasts. Lonely envies her ease. The simple, clear life she has; the simple womanhood of her body. There are people who love her, whose relations to her are natural and easy, who can always be counted on. Lonely has learned all of the words for them now: daughter, son, mother, husband.

  Lonely turns away and copies Fawn’s motions—rubbing the smell away, whatever smell is. But secretly, she clings to the knowledge that this smell belongs to her. She remembers what the vultures told her. Her smell prov
es she is alive.

  “Fawn,” she says, not looking at her. She feels heavy again with Fawn’s silence, and it is a weight the water will not wash away. “Are you angry with me for being here?” Then she catches her breath, afraid of her own daring.

  When Lonely looks at her, Fawn has stopped her bathing, and is standing still in the water, looking startled. “No,” she answers, and her voice tilts a little higher at the end of the word, giving Lonely hope, leaving an opening.

  “Then why don’t you speak to me?” Lonely’s ears are burning, and she can feel her heartbeat in the bones just under her throat, and she dips down lower in the water to steady herself while she waits for the answer.

  Fawn looks down at her reflection. “It’s only been me and my family all my life.”

  Lonely feels sorry for herself again, at that word, family. That secret belonging, to which Lonely will never be admitted. But Fawn’s voice is sweet, like a hidden flower cupped around a tuft of pollen beneath the grass of some wide field. Lonely pats the water with one hand, splashing it from side to side. She tries to think of a simple question to ask, to make a conversation before her opportunity is lost.

  “How long have you lived?”

  “Thirty-four years.” Fawn hesitates. “And you?”

  “I don’t know. What is a year?”

  “Oh,” says Fawn, looking at her, confused. “You know.”

  “No. I don’t. Please tell me.”

  “It is…summer, fall, winter, spring.” But Fawn looks truly frightened now. “There are no seasons, where you come from?” she almost whispers.

  Lonely shrugs. “I don’t remember. Which season were you born in?”

  “Winter.” Fawn pauses to think, despite her fear. And this small consideration, this kindness, moves Lonely. “It’s the opposite of now, of summer.”