Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Isn’t this what you want? says Coyote.

  No, thinks Lonely. It is sacred, what I want. She knows this. She has felt it, all this night, in the arms of the many creatures, in their beautiful motions.

  But Coyote laughs. Are you sure? he seems to say. Perhaps this is what you mean. And his face turns human. Lonely gasps because it is the face from her vision long ago, when her prince appeared in the ice wall of her tower. His innocent lips, his long lashes, his high sweet forehead, his shadowy-gold skin—but still with coyote’s flashing eyes. The eyes close and the beautiful man mouths, You are mine.

  Lonely closes her eyes, too, as he twirls his tongue slyly around hers, and now around her ear. Is it really him? She tries to breathe.

  And she smells death on Coyote’s breath. No, it cannot be her prince, for he would not speak like this. There is something about sex, she realizes suddenly, that is like dying, and you have to die in the arms of someone you trust, because in that moment of death you can remember nothing; you are a disembodied spirit in blackness, a soul that could be stolen forever.

  It’s all an illusion, Coyote whispers into her ear, and she feels his lips at her neck, the way her body bucks against him uncontrollably, the way the door between her legs opens. We seem human, but we’re not. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

  Lonely thinks she hears Chelya calling her. The sound of her own name echoing in the chambers of her heart.

  “Chelya,” she says out loud, and Coyote disappears like a nightmare. She sits up, dirty and sticky, delirious but relieved. She hurries to stand, and brushes herself off as best she can.

  “I’m sorry,” she says shakily to Chelya, who has arrived suddenly from somewhere. “I…I lost your dress.” She’s too confused to feel ashamed.

  “It’s okay,” says Chelya, her voice as bright as daylight. “It didn’t fit me any more. That’s why I gave it to you. Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  She offers Chelya her hand, for she can barely stand on her own, and Chelya guides her away from the fire and dancing. The night is cool and peaceful, its silence swallowing the memory of the drums as they move further and further away. The trees are still, their boughs softening to the side to let them pass.

  Lonely cannot catch her breath for a long time. What just happened?? she wants to ask Chelya, but at the same time she can’t admit it. Was it like that for Chelya too? She is embarrassed to ask.

  Together they wash their bodies in the river, cold with darkness and milky with moonlight. Chelya doesn’t explain why, and Lonely doesn’t think to question it. It seems exactly what she needs.

  “Where were you?” asks Lonely, shivering afterward.

  “I was there. Playing my drum, mostly. You have to be careful with Coyote. He plays tricks. He knows what people want, sometimes better than they do.”

  Lonely turns away, not knowing how much Chelya knows. She looks at the little drum. She hadn’t thought about the people who created that rhythm she danced to, that rhythm beneath her that carried her through the night. She tries to imagine Chelya among them, peaceful and sure, her face radiating the simple joy of her music. She longs for that solid tree-strength inside the girl, that holds her so steady. “What are you wearing tonight?” she asks as Chelya puts her dress back on, a thing that Lonely has only seen in darkness, that accentuates her curves with ruffles of deep, blood-thick color.

  “It’s a dress the fairies made for me,” says Chelya. “It’s made of flowers that never die.”

  “Oh,” Lonely breathes, wrapping her arms around her own chilled nakedness.

  “They’re going to help me make one for you,” says Chelya quickly, “only different. One that’s meant for who you are.”

  “What is it for?”

  “What?”

  “Clothing. I don’t understand. It only separates us from touch, hides us from each other.”

  “No, but sometimes we need protection. We need warmth, too, and something to speak our spirits, like a shield that says who we are, what we want and what we don’t want. That’s what clothing is, for me anyway. It’s like art, you know?” And there is something in her hesitant inflection that reminds Lonely of Fawn.

  They begin hopping along the stones, following the river back home. The sound of the water is comforting. It knows exactly where it’s going.

  “People are the only naked ones,” Chelya continues a little later. “Trees have their leaves, and animals have their fur. I think people come naked so they can decide for themselves what they want to wear. That’s what’s so special about being human—being able to create and make choices about who we are. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” answers Lonely, remembering the abyss of Coyote’s breath, holding her virginity—all the creative potential of her body’s love—safe inside her now. She feels relieved to walk in the pleasant, easy aura of Chelya’s presence. “I do.”

  After Chelya says goodnight, Lonely lies down alone next to the river near the house, and masturbates right away. The orgasm feels small and silly but necessary. Then she sleeps instantly in the warm night, curling her body close to the sound of the water, whose sound reminds her of the first innocent days of her journey. She dreams wildly for what seems like all night, but when she wakes she only remembers the last dream: a steady, single-frame dream in which she is sitting in a field across from her prince, the two of them lightly holding hands.

  “That wasn’t you,” she says to him. “Was it?”

  He smiles, his face open like a boy’s. She remembers him from so long ago, longer than she’s been alive. “I am the only man,” he says, “and you are the only woman. Nothing else is real.”

  Then he draws her inward with his spiraling eyes, and she knows that he is everything, everywhere; she knows that every time she makes love with her body, whether by touching another or by taking food and water into her mouth, she is making love to him. Everything else is only another expression of him, and her longing for it only another expression of her love for him, and one day she will cleave against him in his original form, and know what it feels like to fit perfectly.

  She begins to cry. “There’s so much I have to tell you,” she says. “I’ve journeyed so far, and I have a new story now, about being the daughter of a magician who is destroying the earth. They changed my name to ‘Lonely’, and it hurts.”

  He squeezes her hands. “I know,” he says, his voice stretching out to her, reaching for her. “I miss you. When will you come?”

  She wakes up crying. She has known him since the beginning of time, since before any of this happened. She must go to him, immediately. And she remembers, she has another name. Lonely is not her real name; it is something else, a name she always had, more real than this one, in a life more real than this one, that started long ago. She would recognize it the way she recognized the drumbeats and the birdsong, if she heard it. She knew the name in her dream. She remembers knowing it—that deep confidence within her, that certainty in who she was and her place in the world and her connection with everything, as she held her true love’s hands.

  But she can’t remember it now.

  Delilah doesn’t know what happened to her after she walked away from Dragon’s boiling lair that night, and she doesn’t want to think about it.

  But what happened is that she hardened up inside—hardened until she is even harder than she was before. Whatever bloomed inside her with the wonder of the white goddess girl who so briefly passed through—Delilah didn’t know what to do with that, and so it shriveled, and around it thickened a layer of shame that she refused to acknowledge. And around that hardened the belief that she could never be like that girl, could never be anything but what she was. That belief was all she had to cover her shame with. And around that belief hardened forgetting.

  She forgets Dragon. She never thinks of him. She goes on living her life as she a
lways has. It’s such a relief.

  And yet that isn’t entirely true.

  She cannot forget him, not really. Moon’s visit made her forget for a little while, but now that Moon is gone, she cannot ignore the fact that her world is undeniably changed. She no longer has the desert all to herself. Somewhere out there, in this wide and blessedly empty universe of soft blown sand, another person is existing every day. Every day living. Every day walking this dust, every night breathing this cold starry air.

  She can feel him out there. He made his home there, in the dragon caves where before only strange men came, pillaging. Dragon.

  “No,” she whispers to herself in the morning, washing her face in the pool, accidentally thinking of him. What the hell is he doing? It never occurred to her that he could live here, too. That anyone, besides she, could make a home here.

  Sometimes she imagines herself walking back there, throwing stones into the water until he rises from it, and then demanding an explanation. But of what? All she knows is that it’s not okay. This is not okay.

  She finds herself having cruel fantasies. She lures him out of his lair, wet and steaming, and she’s wearing just the little brown skirt of leather he first saw her in, and his jaw hangs open, and he is hard already, of course. She tells him she will teach him to be a lover. She’ll teach him how to go slow. She’ll teach him what that girl wanted. She teases him. She makes him touch her in all the ways she wants to be touched, and she doesn’t let him get inside her, and she doesn’t even let him touch himself, not until he’s satisfied her. Only then will she let him satisfy himself. She will teach him….

  She catches herself smiling as she stares out, unseeing, at the horizon. Then she realizes what she’s thinking, realizes that her fantasy is no longer cruel, but hungry, and her own horrified fury at herself makes her curse out loud.

  She keeps thinking he’s going to come back, and she plots how she will refuse him. Because he’s going to get desperate again, eventually, knowing him.

  But the nights pass, and worst of all the days, and the moon is waning again.

  And he doesn’t come.

  The hope of the high blue mountain, which seemed a perfect promise from the top of a tower long ago, is no longer simple to Lonely. Untold mazes of rugged dark forest stand between here and there, and she fears the loneliness in between. The nightmare of that inevitable, humming blackness below the island has returned, and she does not dream of her prince again. In a subterranean cavern within her own self, she doubts for the first time that he is real.

  It seemed so clear to her at first, what she was looking for. Those days in the fields coming from the cold sea, she didn’t have to think. She moved toward the light like a tree. She moved with the grasses. The wind, though it teased her, felt good. But then she met other humans, other loves, none of whom rest easy in her heart. What if he can only be reached in dreams—that face on the mountaintop?

  Two things haunt her, and she cannot reconcile them. First, there is the memory of fire and drums under the moon, ecstasy in the arms of spirits, where her body fell like a river from butterfly wings into the arms of a mountain god, where she passed through the songs of tree goddesses to the face of her prince shining as if the moon looked back at her and made her divine.

  Then there is the memory of her wet dress slapping ugly against her legs, and Rye’s cold dry back moving before her, and the dead animals—forever dead—in his bloodstained hand.

  He did not turn around that afternoon; he did not look back again. They returned to the house, and they ate the animals, and Lonely—even throughout that night of passionate spirits—was still human. For the first time, she had seen that killing. She had seen what it took for her to live.

  It has taken her a while to recover that other memory, from underneath the memory of fire and drums and body-joy. It has taken her this long to realize that this memory—of the dead rabbits in Rye’s hand, the hand that would never touch her—is the reason she can no longer fully believe in her dreams. She watched those hands, all the way home. Those hands, and Fawn’s, made the life she lived. Those hands asked her, What more do you want, than these things I have killed for you? There is a sorrow in each day now. As eating once made the structure of the days, now sorrow also makes their substance, and there is a sense of obligation, too, crushing and impossible to understand.

  Now it rains for many days—more days, says Fawn, than it should ever rain in the middle of summer. Almost every day from morning until evening, the whole family is out in the gardens, trying to rescue drowning crops. Plants that Lonely spent days carefully sowing and tending with Fawn are broken from their stems by the deluge, or washed away in the mud. Watching it happen makes Lonely feel a kind of despair, but Fawn and her family do the best they can. They bale out the puddles. They cover the new rows. They build up the soil and start again. Sometimes they can’t do anything, and they sit inside and keep busy, trying not to think about the loss that is happening right now, constantly. When they enter through the front room of the house, their feet are underwater.

  Sometimes Lonely goes out to the fields alone and sits in the rain, feeling lonely, hating herself for feeling sorry for herself, imagining she will wash away and never have to feel anything again. She stares out at the mountain until she can’t think any more, until Chelya finds her and, without asking questions, offers her hand.

  The day the sky finally clears, Chelya is wild with joy. “Come on!” she says to Lonely, when she finally finds her. “My uncle’s family has come!”

  Lonely stands for as long as possible in the shadowy kitchen near the back door, waiting for her eyes and emotions to adjust to the explosion of so many people into this small space. Several moments pass before she can differentiate and count them, amidst the blur of their surprising noise and laughter and all that touching.

  The touch between Rye and Jay is firm and quick, their hands sounding hard against each other’s backs, as if at once both testing and admiring the sturdy structure of each other’s manhood. The hug between Fawn and Jay’s wife, Willow, is so softly complete, at once full and whispered, that Lonely wonders if she might not need the love she thought she was searching for—if only she had that. The hug between Willow and Chelya is tight and fast and laughing, and Jay hugs Fawn and Chelya both at the same time, at the same time that Willow is hugging Kite, and Kite is standing awkwardly in her arms and looking away. Chelya is the first to bend down and open her arms to two little boys, smaller than any human Lonely has ever seen. The smaller one throws his arms around Chelya, while the taller one leans shyly into the edge of her embrace.

  “…Lonely.” Someone is saying her name. She hears it more by the silence afterward than by the word itself, which she has become used to now. All of their faces turn toward her at once. For some reason it is Willow’s that catches Lonely’s eye first, quiet and appraising. Willow is beautiful in a different way than Fawn. There is no innocence, nothing childish in that face. Her skin is rough, her hair rough, her eyebrows thick and rough, but the contour of her face is smooth. Instead of fear or confusion in that face, Lonely sees a knowing but suspicious curiosity, as if perhaps Willow does not believe that Lonely is her name at all.

  But it is the littlest boy who breaks the silence. “Are you a goddess?” Lonely can feel the familiar tension clenching the bodies behind him when he says the word, and she is aware of fourteen eyes watching her. But she is comforted by the trust of the boy, who walks to her now with his belly leading him. She thinks suddenly of Delilah, the way her head and shoulders led her, and even Kite, the way he hunches over his own chest, pressing it slightly behind him as he walks. This is the first she understands of children: adults lead with their heads, children with their bellies.

  “What’s your name?” she asks the boy instead of answering him.

  “Morgan,” he answers readily. “And my brother is Blue. And I’m going to have a little
brother soon, and then I won’t be the littlest any more.”

  “Oh, well,” says Willow. “There goes our surprise.” And then again there is so much laughter and touch and crying out that Lonely is forgotten. But she will remember later that it was the child who broke down the wall between her and them. If it hadn’t been for Morgan, with his happy belly leading him, they might have stood there forever in the doorway, staring coldly at her, shocked by her presence—and explanations would have been required, right then and there, and those explanations would never have been sufficient.

  She goes out to draw water from the stream, and takes her time, knowing no one will come into the greenhouse to talk—it’s too hot. Then she gathers wood for cooking, even though Rye has already brought some in. For the first time she wishes she could be old and left to her own space like Eva, hidden away in her home in the hillside, not expected by anyone until she decides to come out. How she longs now for that cool darkness.

  By the time she returns, Chelya is outside chasing the boys and jumping out at them from the tall grass, and Rye, Kite, and Jay are examining the tools and blades that Jay brought. Fawn and Willow are sitting on the floor of the main room giggling. Lonely has never seen Fawn smile so constantly, her hand circling over Willow’s belly.

  “Can I start dinner?” Lonely asks. She’s hungry and suddenly irritable. She wants to be doing something, so she doesn’t have to wonder how to interact and with whom.

  Willow looks at her again with that strange and distant curiosity, and Fawn looks surprised. Too late, Lonely realizes it wasn’t her place. Fawn will decide when the cooking begins. It is Fawn’s home, Fawn’s gift to give. Lonely has nothing to give. She remembers again that she is an intruder here, an outsider. She looks down, away from the fleeting shadow that passes over Fawn’s face, wishing herself gone.

  “Come sit with us,” comes Willow’s deep voice.

  Lonely sits, feeling much younger than they are, envious of Willow’s easy, brash grace. She looks down at Willow’s belly. She knows what pregnancy is. She has seen it in the goats, and Chelya has explained it to her. But she can’t believe it when she sees it in a human being, and doesn’t know whether or not she herself came in such a way. Who was her mother? The question makes her own belly ache. That glowing ball. That peaceful ruminating, the beginning of a world inside. Lonely stares at it.