Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The humans move north and build shelters to withstand the cold. Sky is only ten years old, in love with Lonely, a girl who has never looked into his eyes. After a forest fire across the river, while the forest is still smoldering, he braves the smoke and the heat to creep up to the edges and steal a still-smoldering branch. He only wants her to notice him, how brave he is, how he will do anything for her. And she does. When he returns, holding that branch in the air, the whole village stares, and some of the women start screaming in fear. But the girl smiles and takes it from him. It’s warm, she says, and, shivering, some of the others creep closer. I give this to you, shouts Sky. I give you fire!

  So it becomes a tradition. Whenever a boy wants to win a girl, he must steal a branch of fire for her. But what if the fire goes out before he gets home? What if there are no forest fires, no lightning storms, and the only fire lives inside his own body, as he waits for many moons, itching with longing?

  They must learn to control the fire. They must learn to make the fire themselves, and channel it for their uses. They must learn to harness this energy for good.

  Another life, and another. The lives happen closer together in time now, for the years pass more quickly as the earth grows old. Now Lonely is a girl who sits quietly with her elders around a campfire. She has done something wrong. Sky, her grandfather, stands up and tells a story, to teach her the right way. Lonely looks into the flame—that dazzling, feathering, blue-hot dream where imagination lives, where all stories begin—and lives out in her mind what her grandfather is teaching her. For this teaching is a matter of survival.

  In her next life she is a mother, and times are hard. Animals are dying out, and the weather is changing again. Sky is her infant son, who dies of starvation before he is one year old—his life shorter than the life of a butterfly.

  Thousands of years later, they live in a land of ice, in a world where everyone takes for granted that life is hard. This time Lonely is a man and Sky is a woman, and they have just fallen in love. Life has been cold for as long as they can remember. No colors; only ice, and the red blood of their prey. There is fire, and there is making love, and these are the only warmths. One morning, the man wakes in his new lover’s arms, and spring is coming—the first spring in three hundred generations. They hold the first flower in their fingertips and gasp, It is our love that made it! Our love made the spring come! We make the world, and re-make it again!

  But the man will live the rest of his brief life in that memory, because later that day the ice begins to thin and crack, and homes begin to melt, and many people—including his lover—are suddenly drowned.

  You ask how to shapeshift, says the river, but you have been doing it forever. You cannot stop changing.

  I’m afraid of never finding him again, cries Lonely, and that is why I keep changing. And I’m afraid I will lose myself inside him, and that is why, when I do find him, I have to change once more.

  And she is a rabbit, and he is the fox; she is a chickadee, and he is the seed.

  She is a heart, and he is the eye it shines through; she is the moon, and he is the lake she shines upon; she is a rainbow, and he is the nothingness beyond.

  She is a fish, and he is an eagle; she is moss, and he is stone; she is a flower, and he is a girl’s long hair; she is a path, and he is a bridge that carries it over the water; she is a geyser, and he is the still, measured moments in between; she is laughter, and he is shame; she is an ant, and he is the dirt she drags over a grave.

  How many lives pass does not matter; there is no time. Now she is a tree, and he is one of her thousand leaves—finally, finally part of her—but she does not know it. It is winter and he hung on desperately, though brown and cracked, for no reason he could remember, through wind and snow. When the spring comes, the new leaves will bud through, and he will fall. He will become part of the earth which nourishes her, and part of her again, forever lost and forever gained.

  Again and again they will reach for each other, the way the river stretches forever toward the center of the earth.

  And what are their names, the names they can no longer remember? Their names are what they call to each other, when they need.

  Their names are the answer to a prayer.

  and destroy the most basic elements of life.

  Why is everything covered, and so carefully white? Because birth is dirty. Because touch is dirty. Because babies are dirty, and more than anything else, mothers are dirty. The black hole of woman opened in this white room, and the red gush of blood poured out, and keeps pouring.

  How strange it seems to another mother, in the adjoining room, when the doctors tell her that her body is not designed correctly to give birth. It will be easier if they cut her open, and remove him by force. There is no cause for alarm; this is now common procedure, the way most babies are born these days. It keeps the hospital running more efficiently. After they cut her open, they will lean on her chest to force him out, and for a moment she will not be able to breathe.

  The most important choice in this human being’s life is taken from him: his birth. White hands lift him, and white faces carry him away. The only place that should ever be absolutely safe—the mother’s womb—is unsafe now. It was broken into. It could not protect him after all. It was not up to him, after all, when to enter this world.

  The baby feels powerless. What can he ever control, if not this? The mother feels powerless. What can she be sure of, if not the ability of her own body to perform its most ancient rite? The nurses, tired, swarm around her, snapping commands. She is not holding him correctly. She is not nursing him right. They grab at him with their synthetic hands. The mother begins to cry. The baby holds tight to her breast. He can still remember only seven moons before, when he breathed through gills, and swirled his primitive, knowing tail in that darkness that no one but the unborn should ever be allowed to see.

  He can remember when he was a fish. He can remember when he was an amphibian, and why he wanted to emerge. He can remember the entire evolution of life. But he cannot understand where he is right now, or how all of life could so suddenly have been wiped clean.

  And in the shock of that confusion, he begins to forget.

  10th MOON

  They say the outskirts of the City are dangerous, but Delilah has never felt afraid. It was easier for her to learn the rules here than in school or in her own household. Behaviors are more or less predictable among people who are only trying to survive. By contrast, the home she grew up in was chaos: reality changed constantly, and people shape-shifted without warning. Different kinds of pain happened that came from no definable cause or enemy. In school, the rules made even less sense, and other people played games she was forbidden to play but which involved her in ways she could not control.

  Here in the outer City, life functions like wilderness. You are careful lest the shadows in the alleys stalk and eat you. You search for sustenance, and you fight for it once you find it. Compared with hunting, stealing is easy. Compared with starvation in the desert, the shadows are hardly frightening at all. Delilah walks with confidence. She needs nothing now from anyone, and there is not much they can take from her.

  As she crept back into that maze she had once sworn never to return to, she remembered she was a predator. She remembered that a single straight line always connected her to what she wanted, and that she always got it. All her life she had tried to hide her own fire from Mira and her family. But now Delilah hunts her own sister, and she will find her, and there is no shame.

  “I have food to share,” she tells a group that huddles around a fire at twilight, in the courtyard of an abandoned temple that long ago burned halfway to the ground. “Food in return for a safe place to sleep. I’m only staying for one night, and if anyone tries to rape me I’ll stick you in the balls with one of these two knives.” She presents them both.

  “Humans have advanced beyond knives in
recent years, cave girl,” someone mutters. She can’t see their faces in the dark. “You’d better put those away.”

  “Maybe we have and maybe we haven’t.” But Delilah obeys and stands respectfully, waiting.

  “What have you got?” asks a woman finally.

  Delilah unloads her pack. As they lean in, she catches glimpses. The men have haunted faces with eye sockets like deep closets, bright lit from within as if their eyes are all they have left. The couple of women in the group won’t look at her directly. She can see one child, who does nothing but look, reach, and cry.

  For sleeping purposes, she judges it safer to pair up with someone. She chooses an old man who has kept quiet all night, not eating. He doesn’t smell too badly.

  It would have been easier to keep sleeping during the day, like she’s used to. She could keep to herself, she’d be safer, and there would be none of these games to play. But during the day in the City, there are other dangers. There are those who enforce the rules, and the rules of the City are that people sleep at night. There are those with uniforms and clubs for whom the breaking of rules is so terrifying it drives them to madness.

  When she crouches down before the old man, she is startled by the intent, animal honesty in his eyes. She thinks of Moon.

  “Would you share your blanket with me for one night?” she asks, her voice gentled unexpectedly.

  Without answering, without seeming even to twitch any other muscle in his body, he raises one arm and opens the blanket for her. The resemblance to Moon disappears. She sees cooled lava in those muscles.

  She slips under the wool blanket and tenses, but nothing bad happens. The man turns his face back up to the hazy, starless sky, so Delilah does too. In the silent moments that follow, she begins to relax, and yet she knows now that she won’t sleep tonight. Not only because of the closeness of another human being, but because the noise doesn’t stop at night, and she’s come to take silence for granted. She feels so closed in. How do people survive here? She tries to remember. They learn to make their homes between these battering shards of noise in the same way that she made her home between dry and jagged stones that some people would find forbidding, that some people would find inhospitable to life.

  Dry leaves flip and turn through the winds along the temple walls. Winter is no longer truly cold in the City. Whether on purpose or by accident she doesn’t know, but somehow those who created this world have altered even the sky, so that it traps the heat against the earth, keeping everyone comfortable and dull and sleepy.

  Delilah has not slept beside anyone other than Moon for more years than she can remember. But of course she can remember, if she tries. Before Moon, there was Mira, like a tiny kitten curled tight beside her, her body seeming to hum in her sleep. Delilah didn’t think about her own love then. She was too young to feel any sense of separation, or responsibility. She held Mira against her like her own heart—something she took for granted, something she needed so much she never thought of losing it.

  She can feel the old man’s body close to hers, giving off very little heat but surprisingly solid. For one strange and inexplicable moment, she can feel his body as if it were her own. She can feel his bones touching at the joints. She can feel his shoulder muscles flexing against the earth. She can taste the dry air in his mouth as he opens it, about to speak.

  “I know you,” he says.

  Delilah is silent. This could mean anything.

  “She carried your picture,” he murmurs, each word whispered as if it were heavy, like a hoof dragging in soft dust. “Showed it to me all the time. You look like her. Even though she was white.”

  Delilah wracks her brain. Does she know this man? Impossible, in a city of millions of people.

  “She died though,” continues the man. “Died a couple years ago. We had a flu here, came through—killed thousands of us.” He clears his throat. She can hear the stuff in there, like there’s not much room left for a voice. She wants to turn and look at his face, but she can’t seem to move.

  “She always wondered where you were.”

  No, thinks Delilah. No, she didn’t. She wants him to stop now. She wants it to stop.

  “Stop,” she says.

  She can hear him breathe. After what feels a long time, she thinks he may have fallen asleep. And then she needs to hear him again, desperately.

  “Who—?” she starts.

  “Oh, I’m no one,” he says. “Just someone who loved her. I loved her, that’s all.”

  “But—” Delilah presses her hands to her sides—tries to stay anchored to this reality, whatever it is. But that’s impossible, she wants to say. Impossible for another man to love my mother. Impossible for her to be anywhere other than where she was in my memory, always at my father’s side. She was the woman who lived for my father. That’s all she was. She had no self of her own.

  “Delilah,” he says. “That’s it. Right?”

  Delilah swallows, all the moisture gone from her throat. Her voice like a little girl’s. “That’s it.”

  Then, like it makes sense, he says, “Do you pray, Delilah?”

  “No.” Why? she’s thinking. Why is it I can never lose myself, never get out of this dark, dark hole? Why is it everywhere I go, I step in this muck of my past? “Do you pray?” she asks back, so he won’t think she’s feeling anything.

  “I’m a warrior. Of course I pray.”

  “Well I’m a warrior, too,” says Delilah. “And I don’t.”

  “I can see that. What are you fighting for?”

  Delilah shakes her head. It’s a damned good question. “Maybe just for myself.”

  “And who are you fighting?” he says quietly.

  Delilah kind of laughs then, and it comforts her. “Maybe also myself.”

  He grunts.

  She wants to ask all the questions now. Did her mother live here, in the ghetto, in the old temple? How did he know her, what happened—? But she doesn’t trust her voice.

  “What do you fight for?” she asks instead, because it’s easier.

  “I fight for the ones they call mad—which is all of us—to keep them from taking us away, locking us up where we lose our voices.”

  Delilah turns toward him in the dark. She admires his sturdy self-sufficiency—his body at once relaxed and focused, restful and awake, completely uninterested in her woman’s body beside him, watching the sky as if the enemy might cast its shadow there when it arrives. How did her mother awaken the love of this hard, quiet man? How could her mother love again, after existing as nothing but the shadow of her father for so many years?

  She doesn’t ask if he knows of Mira. Did her mother carry that picture, too, or did she disown Mira once Mira no longer served the purpose of “comforting” their father, once she failed him and went crazy? Her mother wanted everything normal—that’s what Delilah remembers.

  “Where do they take the mad ones, when they take them?”

  “To an island in the sea. Under the tower.”

  “How can I get there?”

  He turns to look at her now. She fights to keep from averting her eyes. She senses that she must prove her courage or he will not answer.

  “No one can get there,” he says.

  “I have to get there.”

  He turns back to the sky. “Then you will, won’t you?” After a moment he adds, “Your mother, she was like that, too. Determined. A warrior, like you.”

  “My mother?”

  “She wanted to get there, too. Thought your sister would know something—some magic. Some magic to make your father come back or communicate with him or something.”

  The fury hits Delilah hard from inside, behind her face, but it feels good—familiar. That’s the mother she remembers. Of course she didn’t give a shit about Miri. “So why didn’t she go?” she asks from between her teeth.

&nb
sp; “She couldn’t. Couldn’t think straight any more. She wasn’t herself. She was weak, sick.”

  “What did you love her for?” cries Delilah. She can’t help herself.

  “I don’t know. She loved someone. She believed in something. Almost nobody believes in anything, any more.”

  Delilah looks up. She thinks she can see one star, struggling to make itself real in the haze. “I’ve never been to the sea,” she murmurs. “Is it far?”

  “No. But people are scared of it.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason people are afraid of what’s under the earth. Dump their trash there. Then they’re scared of their own trash, scared of what they stuffed away, what they denied—their own lies rotting out there, feeding on themselves…” His voice disintegrates into a growl and he clears his throat again.

  “But some people live out there,” he adds.

  “By the sea?”

  He grunts. “Some live there. Worship that goddess who once came to us, saw our suffering, and cradled our heads in her arms.”

  “Who?”

  But he doesn’t answer, just grunts again. Maybe he regrets having said so much to a stranger. The wind sings above their heads but the earthen courtyard holds them close. Little moans and whispers escape from the bodies near them. Somewhere within earshot, two people are quietly making love. Delilah feels a wave of sorrow pass over her, so heavy and fast that it feels for a moment as if it will kill her. Then it is gone.

  Did her mother love other men besides her father? In her mind, Delilah looks suddenly out a window at a landscape she never knew. She has never thought about her mother—who she was, what she wanted, what more to her there could have been besides her father.

  “What’s the matter with you, girl?”

  And Delilah realizes she’s breathing hard; she is gasping because she’s so angry at this man who claims to have known this whole other woman, this other woman who should have belonged to Delilah but whom Delilah never knew, and now never can know.