by Mindi Meltz
There is silence all around the circle.
“It’s like meeting a god,” the spider says. “Or like fate itself. You never know what’s going to happen. You can never understand. But maybe it makes you question, in a way you might not otherwise think of until after you’ve died, what it all means. If life could be different than you thought. If reality could be different.”
More silence, and then, “A human child once picked up my beloved,” says a phoebe, “when he was wounded by the cat. And I thought she would eat him. But then, a while later, she brought him back. He was whole again, and he flew to meet me!”
“Yes,” says the cat. “Sometimes the humans stop me, when I’m killing something. They make me drop it. They carry me away. But they don’t want it for themselves. I don’t understand!”
“They picked me up,” sings the snake in a long, hushed breath. “They picked me up and held me there, and made noises, louder and louder, and then they let me go.”
“But you can’t trust them,” interrupts the mountain lion in a voice that stills the others. She settles down with her heavy paws stretched out before her. Her eyes are beautiful, like rain falling over the moon. “I don’t, anyway.”
“It’s true, they are very clever,” says the squirrel nervously, chewing on something in his hands. “Cleverer than even you, Coyote.” Coyote just smiles.
“No, what I mean is,” says the mountain lion, “they are clumsy. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t see you and they don’t know where they are. That can be dangerous.”
“Exactly,” says a glossy, diamond-shaped beetle with a complex purple design on his back. “They can crush you.”
Lonely looks over at Sky, who has dropped her hand and sits very still, his eyes closed.
“They have to do with the killing river, don’t they?” asks the deer suddenly.
“What’s that?” asks the otter. Lonely remembers her, and is touched by her warm, feminine curiosity. She lounges on her side, voluptuous and easy, her quick eyes concerned and loving as she looks at the gentle deer.
“I mean—the other river,” stammers the deer. She is so pretty and shy. “The one with the bright lights at night, out of nowhere, and the rushing that grows and fades, all the time, but without any rhythm—without any meaning.”
“That’s the road,” says the raven. “We get a lot of our meat there.”
“It’s so sudden,” says the opossum, “when you die there. Like getting taken by an owl, only there’s a noise first, absolute and terrible. You feel the world has ended.”
“But owls are taken there, too,” says the owl.
“Even cats and dogs,” says the cat. “Those animals don’t care. They’ll kill anything. They are vicious.”
“They’re not animals,” says the dog. “They’re cars. You can get inside them, with the humans. It’s fun.”
The cat looks at him. “What?”
“Never mind,” says the turtle. “It’s best to stay away from that Other River. The things that come are faster than anything you can imagine. They don’t make sense. There is no escaping them.”
A seal sighs. “There are so many things connected with humans that we don’t understand,” she says. “I don’t know about this other river, but there are things changing everywhere that we can’t explain. Sometimes you eat a fish and it isn’t a fish. Or some dead-like thing catches you under the sea, and it traps you, though you cannot see it, and it follows you forever until you drown.”
“Or you smell them near,” says the wolf, “and then a noise—always the earthquake, horrible noise with the humans, that’s how you know they are around—and then you are dead, or pain and blood stream from your body. You don’t know how it happened. Your brothers lick your wounds and ask where is the enemy. You don’t know how to answer. And soon they, too, are dead.”
“I know you are dying,” the deer says suddenly to the wolf. “Your people are dying.” Lonely looks into the wolf’s eyes, old and moonlit, and sees that he has loved the deer since the beginning of time. Always, always he has desired her. This, she thinks, is the kind of love the deer spoke of, the kind of love the animals remembered when the Unicorn created this space for it to happen. “I know you have always chased me,” says the deer. “And I always run from you, and that is the way. But I don’t want to see your people die. Without you, my people are lost and afraid. They don’t make sense, anymore, to themselves. They outnumber themselves, and die slow deaths. And in our souls we feel lonely. I mean, not lonely like when you’re missing from the herd and you’re afraid and vulnerable. Lonely in some other, deeper way. I don’t know if lonely is the right word.”
It is, thinks Lonely.
“The humans feel like that, too,” says the dog eagerly. “They feel that kind of loneliness.”
“You love the humans,” says the chicken to the dog.
“I do,” says the dog. “I was born to love them. They need me.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“They love you, but they hate me,” says the wolf. “I can’t understand that.”
Lonely can. It’s like the way her father loved her but hated his own wife, even though they were both women, even though—maybe—they shared the same blood. You can love half of something and hate the other half, but unless you love the whole thing, she thinks, with the strange knowing that comes in dreams, it is not real love.
“They’ve forgotten you,” says the dog. Lonely thinks she can hear his heart beating inside his chest, big and proud and longing to be good. “They’ve forgotten that I am connected to you and so are they. They have forgotten their wildness.”
“Remind them,” says the wolf.
“I try,” whines the dog. “But they don’t always listen to me.”
“And for this you love them?”
“No. I mean, I don’t love them for a reason. I just love them. You love them, too,” he charges the cat.
The cat looks aside. “I do,” she murmurs. “When they’re good.”
“Maybe you can help us understand, then,” says the eagle. “Why they do what they do, and how we can protect ourselves. Myself, I oversee a long, long food chain. Through what I eat, I keep track of the health of many, many fishes. There was a sickness being passed to me, through them. The water is sick, and I don’t know why. But that whole system of life lived inside me through what I ate, and then my children died. I know there is something wrong.”
“We die from it,” adds the salamander. “We breathe it into our skin. We die by the millions, and the water is poor without us.”
“The trees tell me,” says a woodpecker, “that it’s in the air, too.”
“I don’t know,” says the dog. “I think the humans are sick. I think it leaks into the world.”
“Also,” says the loon, “we can’t always make it to our summer homes, where we love and make children. Where we used to rest on the way, now the lakes are gone. They are filled in with hard earth; they are full of noise and people. What is this?”
“The humans,” sighs the dog, after shifting on his front feet, turning in place, and settling down again—anxious with the attention that is placed upon him and longing for approval—“are always making new places, to go on top of the old ones. They don’t want the old places. They want new ones.”
Lonely feels something happen in Sky, beside her. It is very subtle. Not a movement or any tangible tension, but like something falling inside him, as through a long tunnel.
“But why?” asks the dragonfly.
“Because—because of Entertainment,” says the dog desperately.
“What is that?”
“Something to do. Something to play. You know…play?”
Most of the animals do not. The fox says, “Our children play, when they are young, so they can learn to hunt. Does this have something to
do with learning? What are the humans trying to learn? How to hunt?”
“I don’t know. I think, yes—they want to get something. But not food. I don’t know,” the dog whimpers. “I think they are trying to feel alive. They don’t feel alive.”
“Can anyone else here speak for the humans?” breaks in Lonely. “Who else knows them? Who else besides the cat and the dog has lived with a human intimately, and knows a human’s longings?” She feels Sky turn toward her, but out of the corner of her eye she cannot read his expression.
“What about the cow?” someone suggests.
“I don’t want to talk,” says the cow sullenly.
“The cow was created by humans,” explains the horse. “It is hard for her to speak with the other animals. I’ll tell you what I know about humans: they want to be in control. They have incredible power. What the dog says, that they don’t feel alive—well, maybe they are not exactly alive. Maybe they are gods. Maybe gods are not really alive. I mean, they’re not always down here, in their bodies.”
“What does that mean?” asks Lonely. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” says the goat. “But it’s true. It’s a funny thing. I like to tease them, check them out. They take themselves very seriously. They forget themselves. They are thinking all kinds of things up in their heads. I wonder what?”
“We must help them,” says the dog. “It’s the only way. They are suffering, and they don’t understand, and they don’t know how to love. Men need to learn how to cry.”
“And women,” says the cat, settling down companionably beside the mountain lion, “need to learn confidence. They need to remember themselves, trust themselves, like we do.”
“Humans are angry,” says a yellow jacket, his voice a hot, painful hum.
“They have no elders. They fear death,” says the vulture.
“Yes,” says the bat. “And darkness. They keep the night lit up. They are afraid of it. But you can’t live without darkness.”
“They need to remember silence,” says the cat. “They need to sit still and remember their souls. Whatever this Entertainment is, it makes them nervous, and crazy like fools.”
“They have forgotten their community,” says the bee. “Their great Mother.”
“Maybe,” says Lonely, and everyone turns toward her again, “they long for themselves. They feel lost from themselves, from their own flesh. They feel lost from themselves because they don’t remember the earth—the earth which carries them. The earth which Sky remembers.” Lonely looks at him and sees him stiffen further, as if she has spoken a forbidden word. Why doesn’t he speak?
“And,” adds Coyote, looking pointedly at Sky, “they have nightmares. So they refuse to remember their dreams. What are you going to do, Sky? What are you going to do about the nightmares?”
Sky shakes his head. “I fight the nightmares. They were not created by me.”
“Do any of you live in the City?” asks Lonely.
“What is that?” says the snake. Lonely remembers that most animals cannot travel as far as she can. They have no sense of the big picture. She looks at the eagle, but he looks away now.
“My people live there,” says the pigeon, stepping forward. “We can live there because we can eat whatever they leave behind. Because we’re ugly, and they don’t care about us.”
“What is ugly?” asks the butterfly.
“The City is ugly,” says the loon. “It’s when something doesn’t fit right with the rest of the world. You are not ugly,” she tells the pigeon.
“But I think there is something beautiful about the City,” says the pigeon. “Something I can’t explain.”
“Yes,” agrees the rat. “Some kind of magic.”
“It’s like a community there,” says the ant, and when Lonely looks at him, she sees not one ant but hundreds, holding together like one body. “A higher mind, like ours, that guides them all together. But it doesn’t help them. They are not conscious of it or of us. It lives beyond them.”
“Whatever it is,” says the bear, gazing steadily at Sky, “we feel that the world is falling apart. We feel that not only are lives being lost but also souls. There are animals who are not present today. Who will never be present again.”
Sky nods. “I know,” he says.
“But what are people for?” asks Lonely passionately, standing up. “You said there was beauty in the City. There has to be some reason why we exist. There has to be something good that human beings can do.”
There is a dark, low murmur of voices now, like a river bending close to where she stands. Sky feels far away. But she hears his voice right behind her.
“The purpose of human beings,” he says, and she feels the coldness in his words, the absence of her name in them, “is to hold the sacred rituals that keep the world in harmony and the cycles turning as they should. Humans mediate between the animal and the sacred. They are meant to assist in the spiritual evolution of life, and they must do that by honoring each being, and keeping the sacred order of all things.”
Lonely listens carefully.
“All of that has been lost now,” Sky concludes. “The City knows none of that.”
Lonely turns to look at him, and all of the sudden she recognizes the emotion in his stiffness. All this time she thought it was fear, but it isn’t. It is anger.
She says it anyway. “There must be something good in the City. There must be something beautiful in all that.”
“Haven’t you been listening?” says Sky. “You weren’t there. You haven’t seen how it crushes everything beneath it, how it rules out all life, how things are not even seen before they are killed, how everything, everything—is lost.” She knows that he stops because he can’t go on. He is shaking so hard that she wants to drop down and wrap him in her arms. And she wants to cry because she knows he will not let her.
Go on, she thinks. Say it. My father killed your people.
“I don’t believe it,” she says, not even knowing what she means. She can feel—whether from Sky or the other creatures she does not know—that she isn’t supposed to be standing, but she doesn’t sit down. She can feel that she isn’t supposed to break the circle, but she walks right through it now, underwater, and kneels down before the dog. She knows that he, at least, will not reject her. “You spoke about a kind of love,” she says, “that only humans can give.”
The dog licks her hand. He is calm and solemn now. “They have compassion,” he says. “When the cat wounds a bird and leaves it to die because she doesn’t want it, they might save it. When a deer abandons her child because the winter is too hard and she cannot feed it, they might save it. Just because they want to, for no other reason. Even a person in the City can do that. Compassion happens all the time, when you don’t even expect it. It can happen to anyone.”
Lonely turns to the cat. “What do you think?” she says. She can feel the whole circle listening.
The cat sniffs her hand and turns thoughtfully away. Lonely can tell she won’t be rushed, and that to pressure her would only cause her to refuse. So she waits.
“The humans can certainly do a lot of strange things,” the cat says at last. “I’ve watched them all my life, and I don’t understand a single one of the machines or the magic that they make. I will not judge if it is good or bad. But it is very powerful, what they can do. It seems to me that such power can be put to good use or bad, depending.”
“They can put it to good use,” comes a new, turquoise voice from the other side of the circle, and Lonely turns to see two dolphins floating beside each other, their bodies comfortably touching. “Humans have great intelligence, beyond what we can even imagine. They are here to make meaning out of the Universe. They are here to make it matter. See?”
Lonely looks around the circle, and she does not think that the other animals can understand, exactly, but she can f
eel them listening hard, as if something like wonder opens their senses. She is close to the center of the circle now, and she can finally see what lights it. It is a Unicorn’s horn.
“Yes,” murmurs the spider, as if to herself. “I remember now. They make art. They write.”
“What is that?” asks a firefly.
“I don’t know,” says the spider, walking around and around in her spiraled web, weaving lines into shapes. “I know but I don’t know…I know but I don’t know…No, I do not remember. But all of this began long ago, and it has some reason….”
“Who remembers?” cries Lonely. “Who knows what the City is for?”
She cannot see Sky now, so she walks around the whole circle, past every pair of eyes, until she finds him. It seems to her that he is fading from her, that she can no longer clearly see his face, and this terrifies her. She kneels and clasps his hands in hers. “It’s us, Sky,” she says. “We are the humans in this circle. It must begin with us somehow. The love between us—this love is the beginning. This human love.”
But Sky shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way,” he says. “Personal love like that feels good, but it does not change the world. In fact it can tear the world apart. It can separate us from the world completely—from our community and from what is right.”
Lonely drops his hands. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying we called this Council to unite our wisdom and our powers, to understand the suffering that humans cause and how to fight it together—as one.”
