Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “‘He will come for you,’ he began to tell his daughter, as he grew old and his mind began to confuse things. ‘He will rescue you.’ He said it with a finality, a sense of inevitability that he could not help, because in his nightmares that boy with the hateful, anguished eyes was always fighting him, fighting him into forever for the right to possess that sacred feminine beauty. How those eyes haunted him! Those eyes—unlike the eyes of the woman or the rest of that people—were a brilliant blue, just like his own. Those eyes seemed to know him. And in his nightmares, those eyes knew the worst of him.

  “Now Hanum felt that, after all, the boy would win. Because he knew something Hanum didn’t or had some power in that community of love that Hanum had never known—some purpose, some sense of order in that ancient ritual that Hanum had not understood. Now, in his failure and despair, Hanum almost wished that the boy would win after all, and take the woman back from him, and that none of this would ever have happened.

  “‘He will rescue you,’ he said to his daughter, for in his delirium of old age he hardly knew the difference between his beautiful daughter and the beautiful maiden on the bridge whom he had once loved. He knew only that he wanted that boy to win: to save both himself and her. He wanted that boy to take the girl back, and complete that ritual which he, Hanum, had never understood. Because more than anything else in the world—more than immortality, more than power, more than all the brilliance and excitement and dazzling magic of all the great, ever-expanding kingdom that he had created—he wanted that sense of unquestioning loyalty and rightness that the boy must have felt when he risked his life for his simple, peaceful village. He wanted the quiet understanding that those people seemed to feel when they walked and swung through the misty moss together, hardly ever speaking, frequently touching, frequently looking into each others’ eyes. He wanted what he’d never had in his whole life: to be loved like that, to belong.

  “Only his daughter loved him, at least more than anyone ever had before. And when he died—”

  The children are breathing quietly. “When he died,” Lonely whispers again, and then she opens her eyes, horrified that she could tell such a story to children, and she doesn’t know the end.

  He just wanted so much to belong, is her final, stunned thought. The boys are asleep. Their faces are peaceful, carefree; they have forgotten their crying mother, forgotten pain and fear, forgotten the frightening story, forgotten everything—in a way that Sky never once allowed himself to forget.

  They are asleep, and so they do not see her crying. They do not hear her sudden breaths as she holds her shaking head. She doesn’t know where she is, or remember who they are. But she knows that her father is dead, and her mother—? She can still hear Willow’s screams in the distance, quieter now. The moon has turned away from the window as it moves to set, and the room darkens.

  As if still in a dream, she bends low and kisses each of the smooth, still foreheads, though she doesn’t know why. As if still in a dream, she stands, wipes the heels of her hands against her eyes to dry them, and creeps back through the winding hallway like a dark birth canal into the main room. As if in a dream, she walks to the curtain—a short distance, but longer than the distance from wall to wall in the tower she lived in for all the years of her childhood. As if in a dream, she sees the familiar silhouettes of kind, warm-bodied people bending over the tub, and hears an old woman’s voice crying,

  “She’s coming now, she’s coming—just a little more now, it’s almost over.”

  And a man’s voice, “You can do it, love— I love you. I love you.”

  And the woman’s cries, so weak.

  As if waking from a dream, Lonely sees the woman, squatting in the bathtub with one arm around her husband’s shoulders and the other arm around her mother’s, and the hands of Fawn—the friend she has loved since childhood—reaching strong and sure beneath her, covered in blood, the warm water red, the head of a human being emerging into them. When the baby comes out of the water crying, the mother is lifted, astounded and weeping, out of the bloody water, and dried and wrapped in blankets, and laid in a soft bed by a crackling fire. And Lonely sees her mother in that cave all alone, and hears her hopeless cries, as she watches the baby girl lifted up into layers of eager loving hands, and then pressed against the mother’s breast, the mother’s face collapsing in exhausted, disbelieving joy, the pink helpless skin of each being folding into the other—and Fawn turns to Lonely kindly and says, “Come, Lonely. Do you want to see her?”

  But as Lonely moves between the warm loving bodies to kneel beside Willow, obligingly touches the baby’s tiny wrinkled shoulder with one finger, and looks at Willow’s face, she seems to remember screaming helplessly into that blackness—she, a newborn human creature, as small as this, screaming until she lost her voice—for the lost mother whom, so many years later on a bitter, deserted island, she would not even recognize.

  “Friend,” says Dragon solemnly, “I want to ask your advice.”

  Malachite doesn’t say anything, but Dragon can tell he is listening. It’s dawn and though neither of them would admit it, they’re walking slower now, now that they can see the City in the distance. A shroud of murky fog seems to hang around it, graying the already gray shapes, and nothing in those shapes welcomes them.

  Dragon takes a deep breath, and the breath is heavy, something he has to lift up from the bottom of his chest. “There is another being somewhere with whom I have a destiny.” How to explain? “Once when I tried to unite with a woman I loved, this creature stood between us. I used to hate it. I used to want to kill it. This creature has battled my people, the dragons, since the beginning of time. But then recently, before I found you, I—I was initiated. I became a man. Since then, I no longer believe that creature can stand against me. Sometimes I don’t even know if I am supposed to kill it after all. But we have a destiny together, that I am certain of. I think now that this creature is female, but I’m not sure.”

  Dragon glances at Malachite, and Malachite’s brow is furrowed in concentration. He doesn’t change his pace or look at Dragon. For a terrible moment, Dragon imagines that the boy will have no idea what he’s talking about.

  “So what is it?” Malachite asks at last, abruptly. “What is the creature?” He sounds irritated, but Dragon hopes he will take him more seriously when he hears Dragon’s answer.

  “The Unicorn.”

  Dragon waits. The boy says nothing.

  “I am seeking the Unicorn,” Dragon says importantly. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. If you have heard about it, in all your studies, and if you know where I can find it. You say that truth and knowledge lie in the City, so I will begin there. Perhaps there I will find a clue.”

  Still no answer. The comfortable silence that they have shared for days now begins to make Dragon a little angry. Why does his friend not respond to this important confession? Why does he not recognize the respect and honor Dragon gives him by asking his advice about this quest so close to his heart?

  “Kite,” he says, remembering to use the boy’s preferred name. “Why don’t you answer me?”

  Malachite sighs, shakes his head. “Sorry, Dragon,” he says. “I really don’t know. I don’t know about things like that.”

  Dragon is still staring at him, even as they walk. He raises his eyebrows. “No?”

  “No. To tell you the truth, I don’t believe in things like unicorns. I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in gods.”

  Dragon stops, forcing the boy to stop, too, and look back at him. “I am a god,” he says.

  Malachite’s eyes are distant. He shrugs.

  Dragon turns and plows on again, his body leaning over his stride, his eyes boring into the ground, too furious for words. Malachite falls into pace beside him, and neither of them looks at the other.

  “You were my friend,” growls Dragon. “I trusted you!”

&nb
sp; “So why don’t you trust me now?”

  “Because you deny me! You say I am not—you say I am not real!”

  “No, I’m not saying you’re not real. I’m only saying—”

  “What? That I am not a god? Where do you think that fire comes from that I make you, you ungrateful—”

  “I think it’s great!” Malachite shouts back at him, stopping just as suddenly as Dragon did only moments before, and Dragon stops ahead of him and turns back. “I think it’s amazing. I want to understand how you do it. I want to understand everything, because I think we can all do whatever we want to do. Why do you have to believe that the things you do, I can’t do, too? I can make fire, just differently than you can. Why do you have to think you’re so special? Why do you have to believe you have this special destiny with this special creature? Why can’t we just be two people, two friends?”

  Dragon draws himself up sternly. “There’s something you don’t know,” he says. “I come from dragons. And the dragons—they are the energy—” He struggles to remember now, for he’s never spoken it aloud. “That’s where the energy of the City comes from,” he says with relief, finally, feeling certain now that Malachite will be interested. “The City’s energy comes from the bodies of dragons, who died long ago and melted into the earth!”

  Kite shakes his head, drops his gaze.

  “Don’t you believe—?” Dragon’s voice is choked. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “What makes you believe it?” asks Kite quietly, not looking up.

  “They told me. In a dream.”

  “Who?”

  “The dragons.”

  Kite looks at him now. He doesn’t look angry, which unnerves Dragon. “Look. Dragon, I need to figure things out for myself. I need to see and understand things, or I don’t know if I can believe them. I can’t—I can’t trust something that just comes from anger, or fear, or passion—”

  “But it doesn’t—”

  “I can’t trust it.”

  Dragon is strong. He is a man now, and he is also a god. But he feels a little shiver go through him, and though it’s so minute that perhaps the boy would not even notice, he is ashamed of it. It is the same shiver he felt in the presence of Yora the first time he beheld her, and needed her from then on to survive. It’s the same shiver he felt when the Unicorn passed over him. At the end of that shiver, he has to turn away, and something closes inside him.

  “You cannot be my friend, denying who I am,” he says in a low voice chiseled cleanly from the stone he feels inside. “You don’t believe in gods. You say you don’t need the power of a god to help you. So I’ll leave you. Good luck in the City. Don’t follow me.”

  He turns and starts walking, carried hot inside his own anger, feeling the cold, quiet respect in the silence behind him—the absence of Kite’s footsteps, as he stands still and waits for Dragon to traverse the next hill and be gone.

  All through the waxing moon, Delilah is barely hanging on. It’s not only the disappearance of the river that stops her, or the too-soon frustration of this ending after the exhilaration of finally traveling again—the fire inside her for so long needing to move. It’s not only the fear that she really is trapped, after all.

  It’s that she’s so sick. It takes all of her energy to keep herself alive: to gather up enough strength after nights of vomiting to fish or hunt for food again. Then, when the food is in her belly, it won’t stay there. It’s as if her body has turned into something she doesn’t recognize, a creature no longer human, no longer able to digest human food. Her stomach turns upside down into her chest, and her heart thumps scared in her belly. She cannot even surmount the basic challenge of survival each day enough to think clearly about what will happen next, or where to go from here.

  “Is this it?” she cries to Yora one grey dawn, still hating her own weakness. “All that I had to change in myself, all that I had to realize, all that I had to let go, all the courage it took to finally decide to make this journey, to leave everything behind, to find Mira, and this is it? It ends here?” She hates the sickness, she hates the stuckness, and she hates having to sit with herself again, understanding nothing but her own fury. The river, of course, gives no answer, except its own surrender.

  Yet something sustains her. She feels safe under the damp rock overhangs where the river goes galloping into the earth, for inside the noise of it no one—if anyone were around—can hear her cries, and she cannot hear the noise of the machines in the distance. No matter how much fire moved her, Delilah—like Mira—has always loved the power of keeping a secret hidden space for her very own. Some tiny flame within her keeps her going now. She doesn’t know what it is. Maybe Mira’s spirit, after all. But it’s like something is still alive in there, something tough and wild, even after she’s coughed up everything inside her—a spinning light at the base of her spine, whirring below her belly.

  The strangest thing of all is that plants begin to speak to her. This has never happened before. Animals spoke, in dreams and when she was a child, but never plants. They don’t speak in words, or into her mind, but sometimes she’ll wake from a pained, nauseated sleep with a certain scent in her nostrils, and she’ll have to search half the day to find some small winter flower that makes it, and then the leaves of a tree overhead will suddenly seem to shine, so that she cannot refuse them. She touches these things to her tongue. She takes a bite, wary but with a rising desperation she did not even know was in her. Like maybe there was this other hunger she never knew about, beneath all the familiar desires, and that’s why her body has twisted so uncomfortably inside itself all these years—because her diet lacked the purity, the innocent transmutation of light, the rainbow of nutrients that would come to her in the bodies of the plants. Deep inside her belly, even now, where the mystery turns and digests, the deer seems to sigh.

  I don’t know anything, she thinks to herself quietly sometimes, without realizing it and without speaking it aloud. Each time I think I’ve let go of everything, I have to let go again of what I thought I was.

  Dawn now, and they have not slept, but Fawn wants to be home again as soon as possible. Lonely tries to guess why. Did the birth make her long to be closer to her own family? Did it make her remember the birthing of her own children; did it make her need Chelya all the more, and feel that being at her own house was the closest she could come to being with Kite again? Willow and Jay urge them to stay: they have plenty of room, and she and Lonely should get some rest. But Fawn kisses Willow and her baby and says she will be back to visit soon enough, with the whole family. “The whole family,” she says meaningfully.

  Fawn’s silence on the way home doesn’t feel the way it did on the way. The fog of light beginning under the forest’s boughs feels to Lonely like her own exhausted mind; at once bright and clouded. She is fitfully, drunkenly wakeful. Her thoughts move fast and impatiently. She doesn’t know where the story she told the boys came from but she knows it is true, and it belongs to her father. It bewilders her. She feels the hollowness of her mother’s loss, stretching long between her hips and her heart, and she has always felt that hollowness—not an abyss beneath or above her after all, but within her—and only not fully recognized it until now.

  The secrets that are kept from her in this life! What her mother never told her. What her father never told her. What Sky never told her. The gifts they could have given her—the truths they could have given her to fill in those hollow places inside! She is angry at all of them; yes, anger is what she feels. That is why Fawn’s silence, now, finally, is intolerable.

  “Talk to me,” she says. “Fawn.”

  “What do you want me to talk about?” comes the soft answer.

  Lonely is surprised to get any response at all, and it makes her hesitate. “I don’t know—anything. I don’t understand why you never talk to me. Why you’re angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry with yo
u.”

  “So why don’t you talk to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The ‘I don’t know’ surprises Lonely too, because it admits to that silence. At least Lonely knows she’s not going crazy, to imagine that once this woman was her friend, and now is no longer. She closes her eyes and leans her head on the back of Fawn’s shoulder. The owl calls again, and now they ride on into the cold expanse of forever between here and home. Lonely feels that forever clinging about her: the dawn so cold, starving in its empty light, and every vestige of warmth from the previous day’s sun, so long gone. It’s cold like the dawn when she woke in a cloud and waited and waited for Sky, who never came. Cold like the dawn she woke on the beach, and Yora left her with nothing but longing and a horse. For the first time in so long she feels a physical desperation, feels the horse’s rough rhythm rubbing between her legs, feels the full reality of Fawn pressing into the empty spaces of her body, and she needs someone warm to hold onto in this nothingness; she needs that touch that will make her body more real than the whole senseless universe around her.

  A light wind sings some song now, and Lonely knows it is a song only she can hear, and she thinks suddenly that she doesn’t belong to anyone, that she is utterly free, and that even if she comes from evil, it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

  She wraps her arms more tightly around Fawn. She leans forward, pressing friction and hungry sensation into the body of the horse, and whispers a kiss against Fawn’s neck. She doesn’t care about the silence Fawn is trying to keep; she doesn’t care about the rules she doesn’t understand and has been trying for so long to follow. Sleeplessness, loss, and the heartbreak of a story she could only tell to children who fell asleep before the end make her careless. She feels Fawn tremble, and she loses herself in the rub of the horse, sighing into Fawn’s hair—how can she not feel it too?—and falling into a dream of sad, never-satiated pleasure that goes on and on into the morning. Lonely’s eyes are closed. Slowly, slowly, she lets her fingertips tell stories over Fawn’s belly, under her breasts, over her throat. The winter layers are thick, but she imagines she can feel Fawn’s body responding all the way through them, and at the very least Fawn does not resist. Lonely can feel that heat. She can feel the way Fawn’s legs tighten ever so slightly around the horse. She can feel the tension between the rise and fall of Fawn’s breath, pulling tighter and tighter together, until the rise and fall are like one quick, tripping cry.