Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Where is it?”

  “Oh. No, it’s—it’s everywhere. But not now. Later.” She looks at Lonely. “All places have winter,” she adds. “In the desert, it’s a different kind of winter. The City had a winter, too, but now every day is the same there. At least that’s what Mother says. She knows because of her dreams.”

  “Weren’t you born there, in the City?” Lonely asks quietly.

  Fawn lowers herself into the water up to the middle of her chin. “I was.”

  “What happened?”

  “My mother ran away when I was a baby. It was hard. We were always hungry, always afraid. But now I know the Earth, and now I am home.” Her eyebrows tense into little arches then, and she looks like she will ask Lonely a question. Lonely waits, but nothing more comes.

  “Did Rye come from the City?” Lonely can’t help but ask.

  Fawn starts to rise from the water and wade cautiously back. Lonely can feel her wary attention, though she will not look at Lonely again. “No. Rye’s family are farmers. They are of the few who did not leave.” Then she looks suddenly past Lonely, to something Lonely neither heard nor saw. Lonely spins around.

  An otter stands on her hind legs on the opposite bank, watching them with frank curiosity. Her forehead slants low and sly, and her eyes are big and communicative. She rests her paws on her white belly and gazes at them for an instant, and then, with a voluptuous wriggle, drops to the ground and slips like an eel into the water. She reminds Lonely of Chelya, playful and womanly. The otter rolls on her back and curls her rear end into the air, then flips with abandon into the water.

  Lonely laughs.

  And she notices laughter for the first time—the wonder of it, the humanness in it, and the way she never did it when she lived in the tower. It feels as if the reality she was stuck in cracked open for a moment, and the cracks spread through it in zigzags, and now she falls through them into something ridiculous which feels good. why so careful? the otter seemed to say. you can do this life any way you want! When Lonely turns around, Fawn is smiling, and Lonely can tell by her soft face that the laughter has gotten her, too. It feels sensual, this secret pleasure they share together.

  “I guess I’ve never seen another woman naked before either,” Fawn says now. “I mean, except my mother and daughter.”

  But the laughter has opened Lonely’s whole body, and now some memory pulls her gaze from Fawn’s face. She watches the water shift and tremble, feels it pool around her in a cool sweep, with movement hidden inside it no matter how still it seems. The last time she stood in a river, Dragon’s hands gripped her hips, his hot chest leaned into her, and the animal of his desire pulsed against her belly. She remembers his smell, spicy in the sun. It seems so long ago, so amazing that such a beautiful, naked man could have pressed himself to her body with such desire, and she refuse him. She slouches helplessly into the water. She lowers her head and then her face into the depths. All the way under, she opens her eyes. And sees Yora’s face.

  She bursts out again, gasping.

  “What happened?” asks Fawn, her expression all open now, her own fear gone.

  “I don’t know.”

  Fawn smiles. “It’s okay,” she says. “We’re made of water. Don’t be afraid.“

  Lonely tries to grasp this new gentleness, but Fawn walks out of the water now and sits down on a stone in the sun to dry. When Lonely comes to sit next to her, Fawn gets up and walks away. Body pulsing, Lonely watches her wander nearby, gathering little plants in her deft, wide-palmed hands. Then Lonely lies down under the sun, helpless to thought and desire. Deep in her belly she feels a longing for the arms of the only lover she’s ever had. It was everything to be dissolved in such warmth. To touch another body—that was everything. To be held those few times, wrapped in the oblivion of Dragon’s heat, not having to understand who she was or where she was going, but only giving in to that darkness…

  “Come, Lonely. You can help me make dinner.” Lonely sits up, hearing her name. As she follows Fawn back to the house, the image she just saw in the water comes back to her. Yora. Who was she? The woman who first rescued her, who brought her into this world. Without her Lonely would still be lost, perhaps, at the bottom of the sea.

  The dress, which Chelya made for her own curvy body, falls loosely around Lonely’s, but it has strings sewn into it that Lonely can use to gather the cloth around her, tying it under her breasts and around her waist. Her arms and knees remain bare. The cloth is thin and light, but compared to the dress she always wore, made of some silken god stuff, it rubs like an animal against her skin. It makes her shiver uncontrollably as she climbs down the ladder and then stands before Fawn. At the same time, the turquoise color soothes her like clear water, brightens her senses, eases her breath. When she moves she is swimming.

  “You are beautiful,” says Fawn with a concentrated gaze, as if assessing a difficult situation.

  “But where does the dress come from?” asks Lonely. She must know where each thing comes from, for this is what she is learning here, that everything comes from somewhere. That everything has a story, an origin. Maybe if she understands where everything else comes from, she will eventually figure out her own origin.

  “The dress?” says Fawn, who speaks to Lonely more easily now, but still seems a little surprised by her own voice. “My daughter made it.”

  “But what did she make it from?”

  “From an old sheet, I think.”

  “And where does a sheet come from?”

  Fawn looks at her, finally understanding. “That was made from cotton, and cotton is a plant that grows in the ground. But no one around here grows that plant any more. They make it in the City, some other way. We use animal hair now, animal skins, and some plants. Only a few people know how to make these things. We don’t know anyone near here who knows. So we use what we have, again and again.”

  Lonely looks down at the dress and strokes it gingerly, until Fawn beckons her to the wooden counter. Then they stand beside each other and cut vegetables while beans simmer on the stove. “Rye didn’t catch any meat in his traps today,” says Fawn. Lonely starts at the sound of his name.

  “Is that okay?” she asks, not knowing what else to say, and wondering where Rye is now.

  “Of course,” answers Fawn. “You feel different when you eat only plants. Plants eat light. They talk right to the sun. So the light comes through you better then, when you eat them. You can know things easier, I think, on a day that you eat only plants.”

  “So why do we eat meat?”

  “Oh, not everyone eats it. Chelya won’t. She feels too close to the animals. But some people need it. You need it, I think, because you’re so—” She looks embarrassed. “You know, like air. You need that heavy flesh to bring you down to the earth like us, right?” She laughs. Lonely bows her head because she thinks it is true. They are tougher than her—all of them. She likes Fawn’s laugh, a low, one or two-syllable sound, like a quick dip into dark water and back up again.

  “I don’t understand what people mean when they talk about air people and earth people,” she tells Fawn, remembering the words of the Witch about her ancestry.

  Fawn slices into a beet, and its blood spills onto the old, already stained wood. The color surprises Lonely, and so does Fawn’s attention. There was something there, under the belly of that closed silence, all along, that Lonely did not see. Something warm. Something dizzyingly alive. Fawn’s hands keep flowing in their familiar, efficient grace. Lonely waits for her answer, distracted by the freckles she is noticing for the first time at the fleshy curve between Fawn’s neck and shoulder, and the way they sink into that brown skin like seeds into the earth.

  “Well, you know,” says Fawn, though Lonely does not know. “We are earth people, mostly. Only Chelya is lots of water, too, but she can be happy anyway because she has earth. Kite is air and earth at once. An
d my mother,” Fawn smiles. “She is everything.”

  “What do you mean about Chelya? A water person can’t be happy?” She thinks of Yora.

  “I don’t know. Water is feelings. Maybe sorrow is the heaviest one.”

  “What about fire people? What are they like?”

  “Fire,” Fawn sighs, and stops cutting. She is listening to Lonely and thinking up her own words, but she is still cautious. There is something else happening that Lonely cannot define. Something else she is managing, inside herself. “I don’t know. They frighten me. Fire is what gives us life—it’s pure spirit! But most people don’t know what to do with that. It burns them up. It burns everyone.” She seems to think about this, as she stares into the fire that is burning now in the grate.

  As the memory of Dragon burns Lonely’s skin, even now.

  “I think I met a couple of fire people, or gods, in the desert,” she tells Fawn.

  “Maybe.” Fawn nods.

  “A man,” says Lonely, “and a woman, too, but the woman hated me. The man—he was very passionate. He wanted— But it was too much for me.”

  “I think it must be very strange to be a fire person” Fawn says. “Scary. They feel, I think, that if they cannot satisfy their desires, they might die. Fire is the only one that has to eat to live.”

  Lonely looks at Fawn. “I think I am part fire, too,” she says. “And part earth, and part water.”

  Fawn nods, but does not reply. Her face looks wary and closed again, and she does not look back at Lonely as they gather the pieces of vegetables in their hands and bring them to the pot, to heat and change and soften.

  That night, lying alone in Chelya’s bed, Lonely can hear the sound of Rye’s guitar on the rooftop above her, as he sings Fawn a lullaby. She touches herself, fantasies of Rye’s intense gaze and sure, deep-reaching fingers making her bite her lip to keep from crying out. Her orgasm shocks through her so powerfully that her body stretches and turns all the way over in the bed against her will, and in the moment of its peak, a flash of Fawn’s shy, careful nakedness, her modest fullness rising up from the water, crosses her memory. Turning all the way around to lie on her back again, Lonely rests, breathing fast and then gradually slower. She lets the clear, comfortable pleasure of her day with Fawn sink through her. She remembers Fawn’s gaze in the pool after they saw the otter, and when she came downstairs in Chelya’s dress. She remembers Fawn’s presence beside her and the vulnerable aura of Fawn’s familiar motions when Lonely stood with her inside the space that belonged to her. She can’t sort anything out in her mind, but in her body—in her chest and in the fluid muscles of her arms and in her lips and in her belly—she can feel that Fawn is attracted to her. She can feel that attraction peering from the shadows of Fawn’s silence, dreaming deep under the brown waters of Fawn’s presence—something Fawn would never, ever express. But Lonely can feel it. It fills her with wonder, like the sky.

  In the City, you put your hopes and fears on a screen, then sit in the dark and watch them play back. People more beautiful than you are act out your lives. People braver than you are doing what you ought to do.

  But most of the time, on this screen that you watch in the darkness—too dark for you to see each other’s faces, the screen too mesmerizing to allow you to turn and look at the real person sitting close by—people do things that you would never do.

  People on the screen drive their cars off of cliffs, smash them into each other at top speed, and explode into flame. They shoot, they punch, they slice their enemies into pieces; their machine guns vibrate with deafening white light and smoke, and blood fountains like freedom from chests, heads, throats, bellies. There is screaming and cursing and more fire. Buildings collapse in an instant, and calm herds of people and animals are slain in a single chain of blasts—a few flicks of a finger.

  You sit in the dark room watching the screen, and you do not move, except occasionally to put something in your mouths: something to grind your teeth against, or something that tastes strong enough to sting. Your bodies are saggy and malformed inside rectangular clothing. Everything in the room is covered with a fine grey dust of skin cells and lint.

  You keep chewing, wanting more. More guns, more fire, more blood in higher fountains. It still isn’t loud enough to drown out the din you hear inside; it still isn’t violent enough to express your own silent anger. Your heads shift forward in a slow, bleary eagerness; your necks crane unnaturally, leaving your bodies behind in your seats.

  After the movie you stumble out into the day. The sunlight makes you dizzy; you cannot remember what it is. You do not remember where your clothing comes from, but it feels too tight. You herd your children irritably, reprimanding their unruly chaos.

  All around you, everything is known. All around you, you have nothing to fear from a world you control perfectly. Your bodies sag hopelessly toward the ground, unnecessary to you, longing for the earth. Inside your chests, your hearts trip over themselves. Your breath comes fast, as if you will fight or flee, but there is no longer any reason. All the other animals are gone.

  People are saying now that there is no Princess in the Tower. That it was just a lie Hanum made up. Some people are even saying that there is no such thing as love, no such thing as destiny, no such thing as one other person who can understand you.

  You look out into the parking lot at the neat rows of cars extending over the flat pavement, and are nauseated by the lust and fury inside you that you do not even realize are there.

  For a long time, Fawn does not speak as much to Lonely as she did that day. But now she invites Lonely to work in the garden with her. Sometimes the two of them glance at each other with puffs of silent laughter, at the sound of Chelya’s excited voice in the distance followed by a carelessly slammed door, or the passion of a squirrel as it tells off a rival.

  Fawn chooses Lonely’s company in a different way than Chelya did. Her words of friendship are not spoken, but seem rather made from the gestures of her hands over her work, and her way of caring for Lonely is to teach her to do that same work which is sacred to her. She shows Lonely the way to water and weed the plants, the way to dig in and lay out the different seeds, the way to harvest the greens, the way to knead dough, the way to clean and cut a fish, the way to build a fire. Lonely learns how these miracles are achieved, and she learns the pride of helping. Sometimes the feeling of being necessary, for the first time in her life, is enough to still all her longings, all her doubt.

  Sometimes as they walk into the fields in the morning, Lonely feels a thrilling mystery like a new sea lapping at her heart, and when she turns to Fawn, Fawn ducks her head and hides a smile.

  They do speak occasionally, and over the course of many days, the whole family seems to relax around Lonely, as if Fawn’s acceptance was the door through which they could finally trust her, and the conversations at mealtimes grow more interesting. Lonely learns the basic stories that make the family what it is. She learns, for example, that Fawn has brothers, who live in the City still, if they live at all—sons that Eva had to leave behind and will not speak of. She learns that Fawn worries over Kite because of his strange fascination with the inventions of the City, his curiosity, the longing she senses in his restlessness. She learns that when Chelya is out in the evenings, she is most likely spending time with forest spirits she has befriended, and taking part in magical events of which Fawn has only vague and fearful suspicions. Ever since she was small, Chelya has been able to relate with perfect ease to everyone—whether human or animal, real or ethereal. It is a talent that has been encouraged and nourished by her grandmother.

  For a long time, Lonely does not find herself alone again with Eva, which is both a relief and a disappointment to her. In the old woman’s presence she feels uneasy, for though surely the others also know of her history, only Eva has spoken of it directly. At the same time Lonely knows that somehow, for Eva, everything about her is
all right—her father and the tower, her longing and her imperfections. She yearns sometimes to fall once more into those forgiving arms, that loving grace like milk, in which everything made sense. But she can only glance at Eva, anxious questions in her eyes, and occasionally take in the reward of Eva’s slow, reassuring smile. It is as if they share a secret—a dangerous secret with which Eva has entrusted her—but Lonely does not understand yet what to do with it, and she is not even convinced that it belongs to her.

  She only knows she does not want to leave this place now, because to leave it would mean thinking once again of where she is going, with no one to stand between her and the painful question of her destiny.

  Sometimes at night, Lonely sleeps in the fields with Chelya and listens to her whisper sleepily about the creatures and beings that are her friends. Chelya knows the otter that Lonely saw with Fawn, and all the otter’s family for three generations. She knows the love affairs of the birds—their daily rivalries and flirtations and who loves whom. She knows the most important trees, and the fairy families that live in their branches, and the work that they do for the forest.

  “It’s different talking to you, though,” says Chelya. “I’ve never had a human friend before.”

  “How is it different?” Lonely wants to know, still doubtful of this assurance that she is human.

  Chelya thinks. “I don’t know. It just is. It’s sweet, talking to you.” She turns to Lonely—cold grass shivering between their faces, moonlight in their breath. “Tell me about the sea,” she whispers, her voice barely carrying above the song of the crickets.

  “What do you want to know?” Lonely asks warily.

  “I don’t know. Is it scary, so much water? But you saw it all your life, so you couldn’t have been scared.”

  “No,” says Lonely, “I didn’t see it all my life. And yes, I was scared.”

  “Is it like a river where you can’t see the other side?”