Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Fawn seems to relax a little, then, the curves of her body spilling out more freely over the sheets. She breathes into Lonely’s ear, “What is it?”

  “I can’t go back out there,” Lonely cries. “I can’t go back out into the cold and the forest. I’m scared. I’m scared, too.”

  “No, you’re not,” says Fawn, and she flicks her tongue against Lonely’s ear. With her arms around Lonely, she brushes the edge of her hand against the backs of Lonely’s thighs. In her mind, Lonely feels Rye’s tongue rolling around her ear and down her neck, and feels Fawn’s body rising beneath his, and feels their hunger for each other, and feels Fawn’s uncertain, feminine version of his breath—delicate and windy—against her skin, feels Fawn’s hunger for her, and Rye’s hunger for her through the body of Fawn.

  Now Fawn’s palm curves over her hip bone, and Lonely rolls onto her back again to give Fawn room. And she opens her legs, waiting in tearful expectancy as Fawn’s hand brushes the insides of her thighs, up and down, up and down, like wings. She’s still crying as Fawn cups her hand over the raw, round heat of her, and just holds it there, while Lonely’s whole being froths and pounds against it.

  The rain is steady and the thunder has stopped. The night is complete around them, and Lonely can see Fawn’s eyes in the dark.

  “You’re going to find your love someday,” whispers Fawn. “You’re going to forget this.”

  Lonely closes her eyes again. She feels only one thing, and her whole being is that feeling, and her whole being is here. She feels utterly at home.

  Then there is a creak on the ladder and a light.

  Fawn sits up fast, and Lonely rubs her own face, grabbing at her tears, confused.

  Rye doesn’t speak. He doesn’t tremble as he steps onto the floor of the loft. He’s unbuttoning his wet shirt as he walks toward them in bare feet, and Fawn gazes up at him. Lonely looks at her as if for the first time. She is beautiful. The low arched collar of her dress hangs askew across her neck, and her legs are bare to the tops of her thighs where the cloth bunches around them.

  There is a moment of silence where all decisions are made and done. Rye’s jaw clenches as his gaze wavers over Lonely’s body, and then finds its way to Fawn. Fawn smiles up at him with the innocence of a child. Lonely looks into Rye’s eyes, and sees what he realized after stealing that kiss out in the fields, and then riding all this day alone in the forest. And it isn’t that he wants to be with Lonely.

  Fawn reaches for him, pulls him down into the softness of her body. Lonely is so close she can feel the wind of him falling.

  She rolls over and stands up. Her body feels cool and quiet for the first time. She watches Fawn and Rye forget her, even as they must know she is there—so comfortable with her that they do not mind her watching. She watches the heartbreaking story of Fawn’s flesh: her long bulbous breasts, the lined swoop of her belly that carried his children, the hair below as dark and wild as the night forest Chelya travels through on the way to her full-moon orgy. She watches Rye re-tell that story that he knows so well, with his hands, with his mouth. And she knows it is a good story—a story that she, Lonely, has been grateful to briefly witness.

  Everything is clear to her. Rye rises above Fawn, kneeling between her legs and helping her pull the loose dress over her head. Lonely watches them and understands how she herself was a vehicle for their love to express itself, a spark to rekindle the flame between them, and she sees how they ride on, on their own now. She sees how their mouths fill up with each others’ mouths, and how in a moment their pelvises will lock and rock, diving into each other as if their lives depend on it, each one pushing forward and forward as if to get somewhere, but the only place they get is into each other.

  And they love each other. Even though they argue. Even though Fawn is afraid. Even though the world is changing all around them, and the fruit trees and the honey bees are dying, and the crops are flooding and the City has turned its back on them, still they love each other. And Rye will never betray Fawn. Even if he touched Lonely, and kept touching her, he would still love Fawn. And Lonely wants that kind of love.

  So she leaves the bed while they cry out, and she pulls on the dress she was wearing—an old one that Fawn no longer wants—even though it’s damp. She climbs down the ladder that Rye climbed up, and she dips a cup into the water basin near the fire and takes a long drink.

  Then she goes out of the house and breathes the wet air. The rain is falling only lightly now, and she can see the stars in some places. Fawn’s whispers, her listening, her breath still linger around Lonely’s throat. She can still feel the cup of Fawn’s palm against that tortured, magical core of her own body, like a blessing. She breathes in and out, in and out, in and out.

  Then she starts walking over the hill toward her horse, and tries not to think about how much she wishes she could see Eva one more time.

  Because she can’t. She can’t wait here any longer.

  It is the memory of Lonely that finally brings Yora down from the sky.

  She crosses the heavens, borne by her goddess sisters who, for her, have become mighty winds. The winds cradle the heavy spirit of this most sorrowful river, rocking her gently as they lift her over the desert. In only a day, she travels from the mountain tops to the valley—a journey that will take Lonely, traveling in the opposite direction, an entire moon. Yora blows at high speed, but from the ground she seems to move at the rate of a dream, too slow to be noticed, inching across a distant sky that never looks real except when the rains touch the earth with their fingers of water.

  Over the spires and turrets of the desert, Yora hovers for a day and a night, like a long-ago queen haunting her abandoned castle. Through the oblivion of the dark moon, her sisters, the winds, nudge her. But she will not go yet. She will not rain. She will not be reborn to flow among people.

  The desert is far from the City, they tell her. No pain here, only a fresh expanse in which to start anew. The desert needs you. The desert needs water more than anywhere else in the world. But Yora does not wish to be needed again. And she knows the desert is not far from the City at all. It is a part of the City, as intimately as the sea is a part of the earth, and the earth a part of the sea. The river runs everywhere, from the top of the world to the bottom.

  All night they wing about her, whispering encouragement into her dark, eyeless mass, trailing the mist of her cloud body into streams of starlight.

  You have chosen a form that is distant and vague, without substance, without identity, they tell her. But the nature of such formlessness is change. You cannot hold on. You have nothing to hold to.

  In the night sky, other water droplets join the cloud that is Yora, huddling together in the high cold air, as if pieces of her, numerous as the stars, were scattered across the sky long before she can remember, and from everywhere return to join her now, weighing her down. So much self. And yet what is this self, after all? All rivers are one. There is only one water.

  There was a time when Yora willingly took in the pain of the people. That was the identity of the river: something that purified, that washed clean, that soothed. But she had a body too, just as humans do, and that body had limits. When that body of pain became too much, she thought she could wash it away in the sea. But even under the sea someone called to her, needed her. She traveled as Lonely walked, as if forever under the waves, but in the other direction—toward that black hole of unspoken need at the center. When she arrived, it drew her in—the same pain, only deeper—and she stayed there for a long, long time, in human form beneath the island.

  What was it that made her leave? She is only water, surely with no will of her own. What turned her briefly human, swimming back then under the waves, then rising from the sea into mist, into cloud, and now floating over the Garden in the mountains, and now revolving slowly over the desert? The sun! The sun is what made her rise into the sky.

  And o
h, when it did, when that light, that god of gods, lifted her into heaven, evaporating her water body into mist, how joy dissolved her! She was nothing but light, with no memory and no past, leaving the tear-salt of the sea and all the impurities of the earth far below. She transcended all that had weighed her down for years upon years, all the impossibility of suffering, and was rescued in the warm arms of the sun. She was the purest form of water, and then she was not even water but only misty air.

  Why ever leave such brilliant love? Birds drifted below her, and even that layer of atmosphere where they flew seemed too low for her now, too heavy.

  But in actuality, she never reached the sun itself. The sun lifted those pieces of water up only so high, so Yora hovered in between that light and the earth, where the air was very still and cold. She wanted to stay up there, as close as she could be to that warmth. But a sitting cloud collects things—smoke and dust, ash and pain—just as a pool upon the earth collects debris and clay and sometimes life. Those little particles of the suffering she gathered—for even in the sky, somehow, they reached her—began to weigh her down. Still, still she resisted falling. Why would she ever return to such ugliness?

  Because the longer you stay up here, grey cloud, the more you block that light from the earth. And the earth needs it more than you do.

  Yora hovers in the black night. Above her, other clouds hang in even colder space, a space so high they will not fall—made of pure ice. But Yora is low enough to feel the body of the earth lying still below her, waiting for morning. She doesn’t mean to steal the light from anyone else. She only wants to dissolve in it, and disappear.

  But you can’t. Don’t be afraid: you will find the sun again on the earth. You will find it in a human being, half god, who walks and breathes and whose love will wake you with fire.

  Then Yora remembers Lonely. She remembers a young woman who looked back at her with eyes like her own but filled with light. Someone she rescued from the bottom of the sea—one more person who suffered, one more person who needed her, when she thought she could do no more and had nothing left of herself to give. But this person was different. This one weighed nothing. This one went down toward gravity and up toward light, and nothing interrupted her. She was like the way water was once, before it got clouded. She fell down from the tower, she fell upon the earth, and there was the fierce earnestness of a child in her eyes. She was so easy to help, and like rain she would help the world without even trying. Simply lift her above the waves; simply set her face toward the mountain, and she would go forth instinctively toward her dream.

  Yora seems to cover the whole sky now, she is so big. She is so heavy that her mist already bleeds downward toward the earth, so that the people of the earth can see the rain coming.

  But it is the memory of such light, walking on human feet upon the earth, that finally allows her to relax. She remembers the way it was in the beginning, when loving was natural, joyful, and effortless. She is so much water that finally the water must separate, hurtling through space at terrifying speed, faster than a waterfall, faster than a look passes from one pair of eyes to another.

  When the sun rises in the morning, it radiates through the clear blue eyes of the sky, all memory of darkness gone from it.

  Yora lies upon the thirsty earth and falls in.

  the deer passes between the drops; she can almost feel its animal heat against her skin, but it is only the intensity of her own body’s warmth in contrast with the cold water.

  She knows now that the deer asked her to take it into her body so that it could tell her something. Something that can only be said in the language of the body. Something she has forgotten. But she still doesn’t feel ready to remember.

  She looks up, squinting, and watches the grey mass disintegrate into the atmosphere. Right before it reaches her, she can remember the exact weight of Dragon’s hands on her hips.

  Raindrops kiss her skin, and her skin, unbidden by her, kisses them back.

  5th MOON

  At the beginning of her fifth moon in the world, the last of the food Lonely carried with her becomes part of her and is subsequently lost. But she’s still made no progress toward the mountain, and the forest still feels unknown.

  The river has many arms, spreading out to nourish all the mountainsides, and there is no straight path to the source. Every time she leads the horse up a hill for a view of the high mountain again, they are somewhere different than where she thought they were, and seemingly no closer than they were when they started.

  This morning they came upon another farm. Though the horse lingered in the trees like a frightened deer, Lonely quickened her pace when she saw that house, especially when she saw two figures, a man and a woman, bending over their garden. This house was made of logs and surrounded by crumbling walls of stone. Flowering ivy grew over it. Lonely hoped for food, but more than that she hoped for another brief respite from loneliness. She thought she would tell them about Fawn’s family; she would tell them there were other farmers out here who wanted to know about them and who were lonely too. Then someday Chelya and Rye would thank her for the new friends they had found, and Lonely would have found one small way to repay them.

  But her fantasies dissolved when the woman hurried into the house at the sight of her, and the man walked fast at her with tensed and swollen chest, wielding his hoe like a weapon.

  “Who are you?” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

  Without thinking, following an older instinct than the friendlier one she’d learned at Fawn’s home, Lonely ran.

  She remembered what Chelya had told her when Lonely first came to her home. That the mountain people didn’t trust anyone. It was something new—something different—for them to take her in.

  Tonight as she lies in dead, forgotten leaves, crying for the ache of the woman’s cold back and the man’s angry mouth after so many days of separation from all contact, she thinks seriously of turning back. But she does not know the way. Her instincts are like wind, with no obvious sense of direction. And she cries because, in all this vast miracle of forest, she could not possibly find Fawn’s home again by chance. She cries because she was so busy longing, when she stayed there, for that one love she could not have, that she did not appreciate enough the love that surrounded and comforted her all the time, that comfort of friendly human companionship.

  Then, without realizing it, she grows still, and her eyes run dry as she stares unblinking at the black windows of sky and remembers that final night. No, she cannot go back anyway. She could hardly look at them again, after what happened in the loft that night. It was shame enough when Chelya came running, just returning from her full-moon revelry while Lonely attempted to slip off unseen.

  Chelya was laughing, her hair falling out of the band that held it back, in dizzying spirals that stuck to her damp, flushed face. She looked beautiful, with a trace of elegance beneath the childish fullness of her face, her white teeth flashing when she smiled.

  “Lonely,” she said, taking both of Lonely’s hands, and her smile trembled. “I’m in love!”

  Lonely stiffened.

  Immediately, with something that Lonely could only remember now as pure grace—a grace far beyond her years—Chelya forgot herself and became all concern, grasping Lonely’s forearms and rubbing them as if Lonely were cold. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyes searching into Lonely’s, but Lonely looked away. Like so many times before, she contracted into a cage of awkward pain in the face of Chelya’s easy warmth. She wanted to be so free.

  But those hands did soothe her, with their unthinking, confident warmth, as comforting as food. Lonely relaxed a little. “I don’t know,” she said, feeling that she might cry.

  Chelya looked at her, her expression as perplexed as it had been that morning Lonely first awoke to this new world, and Lonely remembered that Chelya was only a child, after all. She pulled herself together a
nd said, “I’m sorry, Chelya. But it’s time for me to go. I have to leave here.”

  Still it sounded so abrupt, almost cruel. It hurts Lonely now, to think of saying it. Chelya swallowed hard and stared at her for a long moment. Lonely had never noticed how lovely her eyebrows were, perfectly arched and even, like the wings of a bird whose body was invisible at the center of her forehead, its heart beating between her eyes. For a moment, in the moonlight, the girl seemed to see right into her, but her smile faltered and she answered only, “How mysterious you are, Princess from the Tower. I guess you won’t tell us where you’re going?”

  Lonely looked at her, her voice caught, and did not know what to answer. What she left behind seemed more real than where she was headed. Chelya interrupted her confusion. “Never mind. But will you wait a minute, please?”

  And Lonely turned away as she ran back to the house, wondering if she had hurt Chelya, wondering if she was being selfish with her own life. What had she ever given these people, who had given her so much?

  After several long moments, in which Lonely hovered in the dark, backing further into the shadows and glancing around for her horse, Chelya returned with three things.

  The first was a sack of food—dried fruit, dried meat, bread, honey—with a strap made of horse hair to sling over her shoulder and across her chest, where it pressed between her breasts and scratched against her heart.

  The second was the dress Chelya had made for Lonely, with the help of the forest spirits.

  “Wear it when you go to meet your prince,” said Chelya with a grin, “because it brings out who you are, and it will light you up.” The dress was wrapped in rags and tied with yarn. Lonely attempted to speak, but Chelya hurried on. “I was going to tell you about each part of it, and what it means, but now you’ll just have to figure it out on your own. I’ll tell you one thing, though. It’s made of silk. You’ll understand silk when you touch it—it’s like you. It takes a thousand years to make. It’s the most beautiful material, like from another world, but it’s made by worms. Remember that.”