Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Fish aren’t biting today,” he says, and his voice is tired now, the feeling drained from it. “I love to be here—I could stay all day. But we have to eat.” He looks up at her, his face blank. “I hope you don’t mind taking a longer route home. I have a couple of traps I can check.”

  Wordless, Lonely pushes forward with her thighs against the water, her body cold now, and arrives at the shore. She wrings her dress dry around her legs, not looking at him. She follows him back into the forest, shivering.

  She ducks in and out of the leaves, watching his movement fit the spaces of the trees. She stands aside and watches the patient compassion in his hands as he unwinds the dead body of a rabbit from his trap. She watches him kneel at a second trap where a rabbit is still barely alive. She watches the confident caress of his grip as he steadies its head, and the swift and intimate certainty of his arm as he slits its throat. She offers to carry his fishing gear, and he goes ahead, one pair of furred feet gripped in each sad, knowing hand.

  And it seems to her that he is the god, who can save and kill, who can survive all this, who can give life with his eyes, and who, finally, can stop himself, when she cannot.

  On the morning of the full moon, the young goats chase each other in bold arcs around their pen, and then the grown-up goats join in. The boy goats rear back, tensing their square bodies in the air, and then swing their heads together with a dull and gleeful thunk, knocking each other off the stumps and an old broken cradle that has been turned upside down for them to play on. The boy goats chase the girl goats, and shove-climb over their bodies, and the girl goats bleat and run. Then the girl goats start to hump each other, and then they chase and hump the boy goats too. All the goats gallop and bleat and groan, their little hooves like falling rocks, and climb against each other’s bodies and bump hard, and they are laughing. Sometimes they are playing and sometimes they are for real. There are no rules. In their passion they pay no attention to the quiet girl outside the fence, who watches them in a pale and shivering way, her knuckles white around the handle of her bucket.

  Chelya, their favorite human, touches the girl on the shoulder and startles her from her reverie. She leans close and murmurs excitedly into the pale girl’s ear. If the goats were listening, they would catch the words “come” and “full moon,” and “night” and “friends.” These are all words the goats know, and they know more or less what the giggles mean too.

  The two girls walk away together, and a few of the goats pause in their antics to gaze after them, as if only now realizing that having an audience was part of what made their fun.

  Later, Lonely will try to remember the exact texture of her mood, the thoughts in her mind, everything about who she was that night, in that moment when she stood in the heart of the forest facing Chelya and could not imagine what would happen next.

  The lights of the house are long gone. When Lonely looks up, she can barely see the sky, its sunset colors ripe and golden, shining like a fruit that will fall into her hand at the instant of darkness. Chelya has stopped them in a place that feels like nowhere to Lonely, somewhere between the familiar lights and distant drumbeats, which are a sound Lonely has never heard before, like a heart turned inside out. Chelya herself holds a slim, womanly-shaped drum under one arm, though Lonely as yet makes no connection between it and the sound from the distance. Her own innocence will fascinate her later, when she remembers it.

  “On the night of the full moon,” Chelya explains slowly, looking at Lonely and searching for words she has never had to find before, “everything can change. People can become animals, and animals can become people. The spirits of things come alive, and can dance on their own, and are real enough to touch. It’s hard to explain. You’ll see. It’s easier if you don’t try to figure it out. Just know that these are my friends—all of them. I know everyone in this forest, in all of their forms. Some beings are tricky. They may not even mean to be, but they’re just different from us. You have to know what you want. Do you know what you want?”

  Lonely stares at her. The drumbeats in the distance seem to grow louder. She remembers the men’s boots as they stomped toward her in her old nightmares. Chelya stands perfectly still, waiting for her answer. But Lonely can’t possibly tell her what she wants.

  “Just be careful,” says Chelya. “You can have a lot of fun. You might get kissed or worse. But be careful. Listen to your heart, okay?”

  “Okay,” answers Lonely, feeling like she is the child, and Chelya the mothering voice she never had. She can see the mother in Chelya: the abundant fullness of her love, the generosity in her breasts, the ease in her hips, and the way she will guide and gather her children someday with a playful voice and a confident hand.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” says Chelya. “You can’t tell my mother anything about this. I love her, and I tell her lots of things, but not this, okay? It would upset her.”

  “But I thought she knew you went to the forest to be with—the spirits?”

  “No, not like this. The full moon is different from any other night. She doesn’t know. She’s afraid of these things. Really, she can’t handle it. Promise me!”

  “Okay,” says Lonely. They continue on toward the drumbeats, moonlight unwinding their long hair in white ribbons, wind taking form in their wake through the leaves behind them, as they walk on bare virgin feet, and then they run.

  The trees blur around them, everything moving, and when they stop before a fire higher and wilder than anything Dragon ever spit out onto the empty desert floor, everything continues to move. The flames are moving, their light convulsing across moving faces, and the wind is moving, swaying the trees among dancing, living bodies. Someone’s eyes across the fire—narrow, with pupils bigger than a human’s can ever get—flash at Lonely. Hands slap the bodies of drums. And between the shouting, howling, and laughter, still there is also silence—loud and insistent between the drumbeats—and each beat is like a black hole in space. Lonely is glad for Chelya’s hand in hers.

  “Our ancestors are here,” Chelya whispers close to Lonely’s ear, “and spirits of plants and animals, meadows and streams. Fairy people are here. Anyone can come here.”

  Afraid to look further into such a multitude of faces, Lonely draws close to the fire, losing her vision for a moment in its depths of spirit and motion, its white and orange, its impossible brilliance in the night. But the heat is so powerful that she has to step back. Little people the size of her hand are springing around and through the flames like grasshoppers, contorting their bodies into fantastic positions. Sometimes two of them merge in the air to become one person, and then separate again into three.

  “Fire fairies,” says Chelya, and she holds out her hand. Two of the miniature people, a man and a woman, land in her palm, and entwine their hot, elastic bodies around each other—the man immediately penetrating the woman. Their bodies shine like melting glass as they thrust for a moment back and forth in that ancient rhythm, and Lonely sees the man’s penis rise into a flame within the woman, reaching all the way up to her throat and out her mouth, where it becomes a fiery tongue that wraps around the man. Then the woman overcomes him like a wild-eyed demon, and he opens his mouth wider until it opens his whole head like the hinged head of a snake. And then they are both snakes, devouring each other and spinning into a circle of flame, from which they fall in spiraling acrobatics onto the ground, where the man chases the woman around the fire, spiraling into it and out of sight.

  Lonely gasps as Chelya drops her hand and spins around. Everything happens so fast. Chelya is laughing amidst a flickering multi-colored presence that flutters all around them—brushing Lonely’s neck and ears, wriggling like a gently lecherous breeze under her hair, her arms, her skirt. Lonely clasps her hands to her body, but her dress is falling from her, dripping from her shoulders as a young man in a flurry of color and wings hovers before them both.

  “This is my friend th
e butterfly man,” Chelya says warmly, and opens her mouth to accept his greeting. The butterfly man unfurls his spiraled tongue and flicks it into Chelya’s mouth.

  Sweet as ever, says Butterfly, his voice like clanging shards of wind. And who is this? A bright yellow flower…And before Lonely can even wish for it, he is encircling her own tongue, and his is gripping and mobile, a boyish fire, well-experienced in desire. She feels the spiral in her mouth, whipping the energy of her breath round and round, sending a warm line of bliss straight downward, where it keeps spinning. When she opens her eyes, his face is so close to hers she cannot see it, and she cannot remember if it was human or animal, and all she can see is the slow folding and unfolding of his glorious, ecstatic wings as he concentrates on her sweetness. She is amazed at his delight in her, and his delight fills her even as he drinks her, and it seems for a moment that she is floating in the air, the center of her body thrust upward in offering to him. What is this place, this dream?

  Then suddenly he is gone, flown off to another flower. She hears Chelya’s voice, though she doesn’t know where it is coming from, or where she herself is.

  “Remember what you want, Lonely.”

  She lifts her heavy body from the ground, too heavy for a butterfly to carry. The light touch of his wings all over her skin has left her stinging with her own aliveness. She forces her hands to rest on her heart.

  What do I want? What do I want?

  Surrender, says her heart. Adventure. Somewhere a flute begins to wail and sing, and then the deep leaping music of pipes joins in. A goat man with a goat’s beard and smooth boy’s chest hops up to her on hooves that make the earth beneath her bounce. She hardly has time to see his red lips grinning before he takes one of her breasts in his giant mouth, and she hears herself growl like a dog. What has she become?

  Here, toss her here, says another, and the goat boy takes her hand and whirls her on. Another grabs her from behind and presses something between her legs. Only the thin layer of her dress protects her. Between them she is squeezed and rubbed, until she feels she will melt in the heat of their bodies so close and willful, playing her against one another. When they drop her, she collapses, and one of them inserts his head between her legs, and butts her with his hard curved horns. Then he trots off, and they chase each other, whooping and grabbing hands around the fire. Lonely lies hot and beaten on the ground.

  Water, says her heart weakly.

  She opens her eyes, breathing in, breathing out, but there is no water anywhere here—only fire enclosed and haloed by the dancing shadows of half-human trees. But a woman slides up beside her.

  I’m Chelya’s friend, she says. Lonely recognizes her instantly: otter spirit, with her open, smiling face and sleek, voluptuous curves. Without thinking, Lonely wraps her arms around the woman, and Otter nuzzles her hair. Her body softens Lonely’s. Their hands play over the hills of each other, at first without intention, without differentiating one body from the other. Then Lonely’s desire is everywhere, slow and big and sensuous—a more serious desire now within the play, her lips round against the otter woman’s roundness. She moves with the otter’s waves, and without knowing it she she rises; she flows now over the earth.

  She flows like water over the body of someone sturdy, whose breath echoes within his stony frame. Her head swims in birdsong. A chest thick with vines expands and rises, and she is pressed into its comforting heat by slow, muscular arms. She winds her legs around him, and slowly they rub the perfect forms of their bodies back and forth. His eyes hold her like old rock formations, and his hands around her hips are earth that her body takes root in. He is a mountain rolling its strength beneath her, its hard, sad silence filling her, soothing and anchoring her passions. In his arms she becomes a lake, deepening into her own depths, her heart pooling in his eyes which are wells of seeping tenderness that remind her of Rye’s. His beard encircles her with ivy; his shoulders are breezy mountain peaks that she collapses upon like a bird resting tattered wings, exhausted by her own frenzy. The stone of his erection supports her, and like a deep undersea current she churns against it, not letting it enter her, not thinking, not trying. Her virginity opens inside her like a great infinity of possibility.

  As they roll together, other water women are rolling with them, making love to the mountain man in all the different moods of water. One is dew, each molecule of her body a frail, sweet kiss. One is a waterfall gushing down him, wild with release, splashing down to his hard center and foaming there; her thighs rise up beneath Lonely’s, charging her with their thrill like galloping horses. One is rain, sighing against him, covering both of them with hungry needles of touch, so that Lonely begins to shiver even deeper against the man’s hardness, whose friction finally overcomes her, and her flesh melts into waves that peel over him and then gradually subside into the simple lullaby of her own breath. She keeps rocking against him gently—the drumbeats carrying her life, the water women everywhere, moaning and singing and brushing their delicate, flowering bodies over her—and she feels his continued hardness as if it will always be there, neither urgent nor desiring, but simply masculine. She can feel his voice humming deep in his belly. When the continued friction begins to pain her, she flows away from him, her passage eased by the comforting arms of the women, through whom she drifts away into the darkness and into herself again.

  The great fire draws her in, and her heart says Love. And because her love is not here, because she has not yet found him, she begins to move her body around his absence, her heart giving her body rhythm. The first joy of her life was the joy of the body, the joy of her hips that now rollick and swing, making loops over the bare, stampeded earth. The first longing was the longing of her body, her shoulders rolling around the longing in her heart now, her arms fluttering, her eyes closed, her face resting in the air, head swaying. Her waist twists and twirls, a vulnerable stretch between hips and heart. Her belly swells in and out, finding its inner weight. Her feet clap against the ground. What is desire but the need to move her own body in its special dance, to be seen, to be held and caressed by the elements into something beautiful? The fire sees her. The black sky sees her. The wild loving animals see her. The trees—who seem still yet are the only ones who know how to release their bodies to the wind, who in their rootedness have learned how to sway and swing in motions of pure whim, who among all the beings of earth are the only ones besides humans who know how to dance without structure, without purpose, without form—dance with her.

  Now she is dancing with the spirit of an aspen tree. The girl-like form is lithe and giggling, slim and silver, shaking against Lonely with winds of pure energy. Spirit of a maple joins them, and spirit of a hemlock. Hemlock takes her hand, her touch light and forgiving. When she brushes Lonely, Lonely shakes and tears come suddenly to her eyes. Her body slows. Maple is warm on the other side of her, at once big-boned and strong, and fluid as melted syrup. Her eyes, her hair, the energy dancing around her, all dazzle with an aura of pure magic. Lonely feels dizzy.

  Hemlock presses a feathery hand to Lonely’s heart and says, What do you need, dancing heart?

  But it is her body, not her heart, who cries out this need every day, every night—this longing to merge with another. Lonely understands that suddenly, that she has been confusing the two. What, then, does her heart want?

  The trees close around her and she hears the song of the wind in their hearts—that song so true and yet so treacherous, so lovely and yet so sad. The heart wants so many things it does not yet understand. The heart wants something so complicated, so much more difficult to seek than the simple hungers of the body. She hears the wind in her mind, neither friend nor enemy but always with her.

  You only want Rye because you cannot have him. You only want someone you cannot have because it is safer that way. What your heart wants is neither safe nor easy. What your heart wants will bring pain.

  Lonely is still now and the trees are dan
cing around her. The desire of her body is so simple. She needs touch: warm, satisfying touch that meets her body in every secret, tingling place, that meets her pleasure at every moment of its expansion.

  Away from the fire, safe in a shadow, Maple introduces Lonely to two stag-men, painfully perfect, their skin brown and smooth over young bones, their bodies graceful and poised and strangely feminine, their faces kind but distant, their erections straight and handsome and polite. Their hands are full of soft longing like the hands of women, submissive and questioning, sensitive to each small convulsion of her desire yet firmer where she needs them to be firmer, their brown fingers angled and confident. The aspen, who is now not one but many women connected, a ghostly and trembling chorus, rings them around and around as they play together on the earth. The stag men smile at her, their antlers curving in spires of twisted bone from their chiseled foreheads. One of them kisses her deep on the mouth, his tongue like a beast that rises from watery depths and shakes its glory in the sun. The other one kneels between her legs, licking her and the other stag at the same time, his tongue flicking playfully with hot youth against their desire. Lonely can no longer remember her promise to her heart. She wants the feeling of man inside her, and the drumbeats convulse with the sucking of that emptiness. In the confusion of tongue and bone, she lifts her hips and cries out. The second one slides up beside her and the two embrace her and roll together against her, so that she is surrounded by their heat and their tender, woody scents. They roll her over and pull her buttocks into the air, holding her in an animal position as if to be mounted. But suddenly she is afraid.

  “No!” she cries, shame tensing her face, and flips back over to look at them. But they have scattered. In their place is the snarling face of a coyote. In a single drumbeat he has pinned her to the ground, his face against hers, his teeth hanging over her. She can feel a human hardness against her wetness, human thighs enclosing her.