by Mindi Meltz
Each has his or her own way of drinking. Some lap with their tongues and others scoop with their lips. Some press their mouths to the water and do not seem to move them; others lift their heads with every swallow and glance around. Many come quite close to where Lonely is holding still, as if they do not know she is there. She wants to ask them questions about Sky, about this place, but she is silenced by a sense of sacred order, a sense of ritual around their meeting with this water that she does not understand. Something happens to the animals when their mouths touch the lake, and a fervent, deliberate peace falls over them.
Once, in the warmest part of the day, she watches a beetle walk to the water, close to her foot, and lift his mandibles as he bows down to drink. But then a gust of wind arises and sweeps the edge of the water a fraction further over the stones, and the beetle is caught up and swept out struggling into the abyss. Lonely finds it strange, for up until now the day has been perfectly still. Without thinking, she leans forward, her back stiff from a long time spent hunched over her knees, and lifts the beetle with her finger, placing him back on the stones.
Carefully, he steps forward again to drink. But the wind strikes up again, lifts the water higher, and pulls him back out.
“Oh!” says Lonely, and lifts him onto her finger again. “Stop that,” she mutters to the wind. Whether or not it heard her, it does not blow again. But the beetle is nervous now. He crawls around the stones, looking for a safer place to catch a small drop of water that would quench his thirst. Lonely watches him. Long ago she knew what it was like to thirst and hunger, though she never feels it now. With her fingertips, she sculpts a little depression in the pebbles near the edge of the water, so that it catches a tiny pool that is separate from the lake itself.
“Come,” she tells the beetle, and nudges him toward it, and watches him finally drink. As he walks away, stopping occasionally to wipe his antennae dry, she feels soothed.
That evening, after the darkness has already gathered, a doe slips thoughtfully down to the water and takes a sip. Lonely envies her graceful humility—something she wishes she could feel.
don’t you wonder, asks the deer suddenly, why all the animals came so close to you to drink?
Startled, Lonely looks at her and doesn’t know what to say. The doe looks back. it is because they want to be near you, she says.
“Why?” asks Lonely.
But the doe disappears into the darkness.
On the second day, all Lonely does is cry. She feels almost sure, sometimes, that Sky is never coming back. She follows the river down from the lake. She glimpses one of the birds and, thinking it is him, splashes across, the water clamping its icy jaws around her calves. But if it was him, he is gone now. She follows the river back to the lake. The sun weighs her hair heavy against her back. Sometimes her mind rests for a while, but then she thinks of him again, and the tears come. She walks through the forest, then along a jagged ridge like a broken castle wall. In the distance a herd of elk are moving over it like muscular spirits, following their noses as they nuzzle the grass. For the first time she longs for the silent presence of the horse beside her, her friend, like a comforting truth she held close to her all through her journey without ever understanding what it was.
All the world is soft and silent, the wind puffing through it and ringing, higher up, against space. The tears are still falling when she comes to a meadow, arrayed with rooms made of clustered spruce trees. Passing through one of these shadowy rooms, breathing deeply, she finds that suddenly the doe she saw yesterday is walking beside her without sound.
i was wondering if you might help me with something, says the doe, as they step out into the sunlight again.
“What? Me?”
yes. will you follow me a little way?
“Okay,” says Lonely, who has nothing else to do, and can’t help but feel gratitude at being needed by someone. They cross the meadow. Most of it is still covered in snow.
The doe says suddenly, do you love him?
Lonely, in her surprise, stops. The doe looks around warily, tilting her ears. “Sky?” The doe looks back at her. “Yes,” breathes Lonely. “Why doesn’t he come to me?”
The doe keeps walking. oh well, she says. there’s a time for that, i’m sure. the stags never come for me unless it’s the right time of year—and that’ll be soon enough now, come autumn. they don’t come all the time, you know. at other times, it’s better to be alone.
Lonely says nothing.
i’m asking about love, though, the doe continues. what is it like—this love?
“It feels,” says Lonely, starting to cry softly again, “like every part of everything that I feel about him—even the suffering, even the pain of not knowing and missing him and being hurt by him—is beautiful. So beautiful that I would always choose it, over any other feeling that wasn’t connected to him.”
Now it is the doe’s turn to stop suddenly, and she doesn’t even look around her, or bother that they’re still standing in the open. ah yes, she sighs. i can almost remember that. She lifts her head a little as if she will look toward the sky, which a deer would never do.
“Did you love like that once?” asks Lonely, though she’s not sure if it is possible for an animal to feel such a thing.
The deer does not answer immediately but leads her down into a valley where Lonely has never been. In this valley, the field bends into a softer, more mountainous distance, peopled with occasional small spruces; at the end of it, further valleys lead on to the other side of the world in a fading tunnel of successive V’s. Lonely never imagined before what might lie on the other side of this mountain—the mountain where all her dreams pointed her. Yet here it seems almost visible. There is some perfect curve, some pattern of indefinite beauty, that catches together all the images of this place—the shape of the meadow, the neat and distant triangles of the trees, the V’s of the valleys—so that it all has a kind of meaning, like an arrow that draws her vision toward some important beyond. Lonely stands still and stares quietly. For the first time since she arrived here, she feels mountains rising around her, holding her.
once, the doe says, a long time ago, there was held in this place where Sky lives a great Council of Beings. the Unicorn made it happen. she called all of us together. she asked us to be at peace with one another, and she gave us a language with which to understand each other. certain things were understood then, like the kind of love you just described, but i have forgotten them now.
Lonely fills up with questions, but the doe stops now before a gnarly bush with withered leaves and faces Lonely in a way that seems surprising for an animal normally so reticent.
my daughter is dying, says the deer. the winter has gone on so long—for as long as any of us can remember. but the flowers of this bush have magic in them that i know will help her to last a little longer. they may even heal her. please will you pick a few with your hands, and bring them to her? i have only my mouth, and hands work so much better. hands can create and change things, not only devour them, like a mouth does.
“But there are no flowers,” says Lonely.
oh, says the doe, as if it is only a detail she has forgotten to mention. just breathe there, on the bush. i am sure it will bloom again.
Bewildered, but wanting to be kind, Lonely leans forward and breathes on the little branches of the bush. The warmth of her breath gets lost in the cold, and nothing more happens.
no, of course not like that, says the doe, though her voice is still patient and gentle. with your heart open. i mean, if you are able to love us, as you are able to love him.
And what Lonely thinks first is, Of course I can’t love you—or anyone—the way I love him, but then she feels so sorry for the doe, her heart bleeding with compassion for this sweet animal-woman with the silent voice and the earnest plea. For the first time in her life she sees that others suffer as she does, and she sees
that everyone needs love. What the doe asks undoes her. She had no idea how tightly and fearfully she had held the doors inside her closed, or even that there were any doors at all.
Her eyes sting with tears and her breath is more of a gasp that struggles through, but as it touches the bush, the bush bursts into flower. The flowers are pink, and the color tastes good to her eyes, after so long living in this white wasteland with only the enduring grey-green of the trees. She gathers a few of them into her hands, feeling the doe’s gaze upon her and unable to look her in the eye.
we’ve never had a woman here before, the doe says.
Then Lonely follows her deeper into the valley, and through another meadow she could not see from where they stood before, and into a thicket where a little deer lies, her legs splayed thinly around her and her breath difficult. Lonely kneels and feeds the flowers to the fawn, one by one, and as she does so she strokes her hard, bony head. And without sound or words, but in some language that Lonely can feel, the fawn cries as Lonely cried when the doe asked her to open her heart. Then the fawn stands and walks to her mother.
thank you, says the doe to Lonely. it has been so long since magic was made here. we Animals were called here once, but now we are like ghosts, passing lost from field to field with no reason. you could bring us all together again, if you wished. together, you and Sky make One. you, together, are the Unicorn.
Lonely can only look at her.
She and the fawn lead her back out of the valley, to where the doe first found her. Then, discreetly, and without glancing back, the two deer pass into the trees and are gone.
On the third day that Sky doesn’t come for her, Lonely enters the lake.
Her own desperation carries her forward until the water almost reaches her breasts, before she even notices that it’s as cold as the sea. The day is warmer than most, but it doesn’t matter. She begins to shake, but keeps walking. The earth under the lake alternates between a slick caress and a slime-coated stubble that eagerly encloses her bare feet. She tries not to think about it. She tries not to think about the darkness around her body as the water rises up to her neck. She tries not to think about the deeper abyss before her or the unknown that swirls against her legs, her hips, her belly. The white birds, still circling upon the surface, do not look any closer, nor do they seem to notice her.
When the water reaches her chin, she leans forward and tries to swim, but at the same time she calls out, involuntarily, “Help!” because she doesn’t know how to. As she splashes about, she feels suddenly her wrongness in this place, the gruesome commotion she is causing in this eternally placid calm—this sacred center from which, yesterday, she watched each animal draw its life. Though she waded into it desperate to speak to those birds, now she is terrified that they will notice her.
They do. As she struggles back the way she came, trying to get a foothold again in the fickle softness beneath her, she turns in a panic and sees them coming.
They float in wavering lines, like a handful of lost prayers from the distance, sliding over the water and leaving delicate threads of darkness in their wakes. Lonely is gasping, shivering so hard that her teeth knock against each other and her shoulders clench around her spine. She wraps her arms around herself and watches them come, feeling nothing but fear.
When they are close enough, she can see the beauty in their feathers and the pale sorrow in their eyes, and they stretch their necks out long and tilt their heads toward the water in a gesture that seems to Lonely full of emotion. They surround her. Then she is submerged in quivering softness, blinded by hovering white light, and their feathers seem to cloak her in comfort so that the water no longer feels cold, but rather warm and kind. She can see nothing but white light, and yet it is not a bright light, and now it is easy to close her eyes and rest on the deep down that seems to lift her up and support her.
Are you afraid? they ask her.
I was, thinks Lonely. I was, because he is. Isn’t he?
He is, say the birds. And to her surprise, the voices are female. Maybe she isn’t remembering right now, but she thought he had always called them his Grandfathers. She thought they were all male.
For him we are, they say, hearing her thoughts. She can feel the softness of feathers all over her body, melting her muscles. It seems that as she spreads her arms and opens herself wide, it is she who has wings, and that inside this lake is the true sky—in which she glides now, with no effort at all.
Why is he afraid? she asks.
Because where he comes from—where all of us come from—something frightening lived in the water.
But you’re not afraid, says Lonely. You’re here all the time.
Because we surrendered. He hasn’t yet. He hasn’t learned. You are the one who will teach him.
Lonely turns her body into the light, surprised. But how?
You already asked one question, they answer. We will give you two more. Is this one of your questions?
Lonely hesitates. No.
Then speak.
She decides she will save the question she came with for last. It seems less important now, somehow, in the slow comfort of this feathered dream, and she wants to make sure it is really what she wants to know. Before that, she asks the question that comes to her right now, spontaneously out of this moment.
What is the Council of Beings?
It is Love.
Lonely holds her breath without meaning to. She wants to know what kind of love, and if it is the same kind of love she feels for Sky—and now she wishes she had asked about love to begin with, and whether or not Sky loves her the way she wants to be loved or the way the Witch demanded. Now she is overcome with all the questions she could have asked, about why she is here and where she has come from and all that she hasn’t told Sky because she was afraid, but she only has one more question left to ask, and she begins to cry.
The powerful wings embrace her, and she feels their compassion pour into her, entering all of her empty places the way water immediately finds all the spaces between stones. She feels the warmth of their bodies and hears the soft and sorrowful clacking of their beaks like rain around her.
There is only one Love, they say. Yours for Sky, and Sky’s for you, and the Unicorn’s for the world—it is all the same. It only appears sometimes in different colors.
What is your last question? What did you come here to ask?
Lonely opens her eyes. She feels the earth, rising beneath her, and the water lapping against her skin with the reverberations of her passage. They’ve been floating her back all this time, and she is almost at the shore now.
“Can I stay here, with Sky, forever?” she asks, and then adds timidly, “He said that he would ask you.”
No, they say. That is not up to us. Only he can decide that.
Then without sound or ripple, they rise on outstretched wings and float away from her across the water.
Lonely sits at the edge of the lake for a long time, still naked, before she begins to feel cold again. During that time, she thinks only of Sky. She thinks of his fear. She thinks of where he comes from, which she has never seen, and what haunts him, which she doesn’t know. She thinks of the smiles he gives her, the adventures he shows her, and the way he found her that day with his heart open and not understanding why she walked angrily away. She thinks how rarely he gives words to the sadness in his eyes, and she thinks of the gift he gave her with his tears the other day.
When she is cold enough, she steps out of the water and clothes herself again in her dress, something that lives and breathes with his words, his voice, his naming. She looks around at the snow-covered rock, the grey shrubs, and the still pines, and sees the loneliness he lives with. She sees the eternity of his life here—never changing, never touched by anyone until she arrived.
She walks out into the field of snow and drops down to her hands and knees. She breathes agai
nst the ground, the way she breathed upon the bush for the doe.
I offer this love to you, she prays. I offer you to this love.
First, the snow becomes clear, and then it becomes water, and then the soil softens and drinks it in. Then the soil begins to fuzz over with a light green haze, and then the swords of the grass press through.
Laughing with amazement, she crawls forward, careful not to crush them, and breathes again. For the first time in a long, long time, she remembers she is part goddess.
She crawls and breathes over that meadow, until the paths she has melted begin to connect with each other on their own, and the grass begins to spread. Then she stands and goes to the bushes each in turn, and to the earth between the evergreens all around the meadow, and lilies sprout from her breath.
To every living thing that she breathes upon, as the doe taught her to breathe, she says the same thing:
I offer you up to this Love.
She falls asleep that night in the center of a field of flowers, surrounded by birds that call to her from the surrounding trees in joyous songs of goodnight and gratitude—for the insects have woken, and seeds are ripe that have not been ripe in many years. She doesn’t know what will happen next. But she feels happy.
When she wakes in the morning, he is lying by her side. He isn’t sleeping, of course; she has never seen him sleep. He is looking at her, his eyes serious and his face very still. A butterfly shivers around him, and then spins off deliriously into the summery air. Lonely leans close to him and touches her nose to his. She takes his hand between their two bodies. Without moving, hardly breathing, he grips hers tight.
“I love you,” she tells him, and tastes his tears with her lips.
This day is like no other. They hardly touch, and yet they are closer than ever. They wander their world together, scarcely speaking, and they gaze at each other constantly as if they have never seen each other before. They speak to each other without their voices, as the animals and plants speak, and use their mouths only for kissing.
