Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Such a simple story, a story they both know and could have told a thousand times, and yet Delilah stops because she cannot go on. The white mane is turning black, the Unicorn is falling to her knees, and the horn is blinding. No, she must go on. There is no choice now.

  “The older daughter could see from the first that there was only pain and cruelty in this marriage. She decided not to believe in love and never to go seeking after it. She left her parents as early as she could and fought her own way. She built a hardness around her heart. But the younger daughter’s heart bled when she saw her father’s sorrow, from the time she was old enough to see. She alone could see through the defenses of each person in her family, and she alone grew up to love each one’s real heart with her own pure heart.

  “But Mira, her father betrayed that love. Her father used the younger sister’s love to keep her silent, while he—” Delilah pauses again, afraid. But she can feel her sister’s hair now, in her fingers, and the damp heat of it. She can feel the body of the girl sweating against her own. She can feel that Mira doesn’t know what she is or where she is, that she is helpless inside this story, helpless in Delilah’s arms—and that she, Delilah, has all the power. She, the predator. So she has to be brave. “While he violated her. While he hurt her. He thought that he could save himself in her. He was selfish. And yes, he was selfish because he was suffering, but he was still wrong. He was still wrong and Mira, I’m so sorry—” Delilah presses her tears gently, like an offering, into her sister’s now horn-less head. “We all betrayed you. All three of us. I left you for the boys. I thought it was the only way I could be loved.”

  “I thought so, too,” says Mira.

  It’s a voice Delilah has never heard. Not the voice of madness or the voice of the wise child, but the voice of an elder whom Delilah has never seen. Delilah pulls back and looks into her face—a child’s face baffled by its own womanhood, eyes afraid but determined inside their own beauty.

  “Tell me your story now,” she whispers to Mira. “If you want to, I want to hear it.”

  Mira shakes her head. She swallows several times, as the words seem to crawl up her throat, trying to emerge. “You—” she begins hoarsely. “You’ve seen it. What they did—what they did to the earth.”

  “I know,” says Delilah. “I’ve seen that. But you are not the earth, Miri. You are not the whole world. You are only one girl, one woman. He was looking for the universe inside you, and he never found it, because it’s not there. At least, not for someone who doesn’t truly love you.”

  “But he did love me,” sobs Mira, and then she seems to break, enfolding her face in her hands like something she has decided to wrap up again forever. Delilah reaches for her.

  “It’s okay, little sister,” she says. “Of course he did. And he’s sorry, Miri. He told me to tell you so. He told me to tell you he’s sorry, before he died.”

  Mira keeps sobbing. The moon inches across the sky above them, as slowly as if they have all the time in the world. Delilah, holding her, has never felt such peace.

  “Do you know this place?” she asks Mira after a long time, when Mira is quieter and her body sags lightly against Delilah’s. “How did you know where it was?”

  “Of course I knew,” Mira sighs, her breath clearing a little, her voice sweet as if beyond all the rage and pain of her past, through all the years of numb forgetting, she can pick out some little pebble of beauty. “He told me all about it. Where he came from.”

  “So you can see it, too?” asks Delilah, suddenly excited, pulling back again to search her sister’s face—as if she could see the forest she walked so alone in for so many years in her sister’s eyes. “The boar—our father said it was only a dream.”

  “He must have meant,” says Mira, “because it’s all gone now.”

  “What do you mean, all gone?” asks Delilah quietly, but a shiver passes through her and roots her to the ground. She looks past Mira’s shoulder. She jumps backward and grips the dirt. The dust. She looks out into the air.

  There is no forest here, only a vast area of clearcut land, most of the stumps already rotting or gone. The land is so barren that not even a crow remains to pick through the pieces. There is nothing but moon and sky and earth.

  “But where is it?” she murmurs stupidly.

  “You said it yourself,” says Mira. “They cut it all down, and that’s why Father had to leave.”

  “So it was never here? I only dreamed it?”

  Mira leans forward and kisses Delilah’s face, in a gesture so strange, confusing, and beautiful that Delilah almost doesn’t care about anything else. “Not ‘only’,” says Mira.

  “But why did he want me to burn—?”

  “Because it takes a fire to make the pines grow again.”

  Delilah stares at her. What part is so difficult for her to understand? She doesn’t know, but she feels lost. Suddenly Mira is the wise one, like always.

  “See, sister,” says Mira. “There is nothing to be lost. Now make a fire.”

  With hurried and desperate hands, as if dumbly obeying orders in an emergency that is too much for her own mind to handle, Delilah rips off pieces of the stumps and twists them fast. This she can do. She makes a fire. She thrusts the torch at Mira.

  “May this heal you,” she says at the last minute, because she knows that long ago—in her father’s time—people made rituals to transform their lives and their world, and those rituals had blessings and words that held power. She doesn’t know how to make a ritual, but as she hands her sister the fire, she feels that it is making itself.

  Mira lights the dry peeling layers of the stumps. She lights the decaying twigs upon the ground and the dead pine needles of a hundred years ago. They ignite as if by magic, as if they had been waiting, as if the fire had been inside them all along. They light like jewels behind Mira’s human feet; they hesitate, then dart forward, as she walks around and around in a widening spiral of flame. Delilah closes her eyes.

  It’s okay, she thinks. Give in. Let the hunger take you, for once. Be the awful, uncontrollable thing you are—be free.

  And she is so relieved by the fire’s rage, by its wild forgiveness as it devours and rises and roars around her, that not until the smoke makes her cough does she remember her own humanness.

  She opens her eyes, still without fear, and the Unicorn emerges from the flames like moving stone. Delilah, a dark and laughing spider, clambers on and, wrapping her arms around the humanly warm white neck, allows herself to be borne away.

  She wakes to the sound of rain and does not open her eyes.

  In that rain she feels Moon’s kisses all over her skin. She feels his nostalgia for being human, and she knows he is reminding her how delicious it is to be alive in this body. She feels the comfort of his love that encloses both her and Mira, and she knows that Mira is sleeping nearby, in this meadow—this new meadow that dawns in this new day, where she is traveling with the people who love her to the first real home she has ever been to.

  She listens to Yora’s voice in the river that runs nearby, and the old woman inside her remembers a time that the child Delilah never knew—a time when everyone understood the language of water, though it did not speak in words. Everyone wanted to eat near water; everyone wanted to build their homes near it, not only for drinking, bathing, and washing but also because it spoke to them. When families gathered by lakes or coves, their voices softened, their laughter was easier, and they forgot their petty quarrels. When lonely people sat down beside babbling brooks, their sadness felt peaceful instead of painful. When lovers lay beside waterfalls, they were transported into fairy tales. Poets got their poetry from that music, and story-tellers their stories. The water spoke every language, and could cure every ailment. The ocean helped people forget. The rivers helped people remember. And the rain was something personal and tender, someone you knew by name and longed for.
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  Now within the sound of the rain, Moon is calling Delilah’s attention, gently, lovingly—knowing she is ready for it—to something else.

  When she realizes it is the sound of Dragon crying, and looks up through the kaleidescope of the rain to see the terrible twistedness of Dragon’s boyish face gazing down at her in tears, she isn’t angry or afraid. She looks back at him, feeling older than she is. You are wiser than he, Moon seems to say. Be kind.

  She still feels that strange deep peace, unlike anything she has ever felt in her life.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Delilah, I have to know,” Dragon sniffs. “I have to know.”

  “What?” But she knows. It is time to tell him. How could she have waited so long? How could she have been so selfish with the life within her, which belongs to them both and which, truly, belongs to neither of them? “Okay.”

  “You’ll tell me the truth?”

  She looks at him, confused. “Of course.”

  “You love him, don’t you? Tell me—has he touched you? How long have you known him? When did it start? How long have you known each other?”

  Startled into complete wakefulness, she pushes herself up, pushes him off of her. “Known who?”

  “Malachite.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me the truth, you promised you would.”

  It takes her several moments to take this in. Then she knows it’s true, that he is still the same Dragon after all. She has to struggle not to laugh. He is the crazy one, after all, so much crazier than Mira ever was.

  “Dragon, listen to me. I just met Kite. When you introduced him to me half a moon ago. He’s a child. Of course I don’t want him, love him, like that. Of course I’ve never touched him!” She tries to keep her voice low, hoping Kite hasn’t overheard. She’s not sure exactly how far away he is sleeping.

  To her surprise Dragon seems at least tempted to believe her. He looks hard at her. She realizes then what will help, and when she finally says it, she says it for that reason—to help him. “Dragon, this child is yours. This child I’m carrying. I haven’t touched anyone since we—since we last made love.”

  To her great embarrassment, he flings his arms around her then and begins to fully weep. She wraps her tired arms back around him. Sometimes he can be her god, it is true—sometimes the force of her own desire for him has allowed him to own her almost completely, for a few delirious moments—but at other times, he is that same ridiculous boy after all.

  “Dragon, when you say you want to be the lover of the world, how can you expect me to be yours…?”

  “I know,” he sniffs into her shoulder. “I know.”

  “It’s okay.” But she can’t hold him up any more. She unwraps his hands, unwinds his arms, and leans into him so that he falls a little back from her body. Then, because she doesn’t know what else to do with them, she lays his hands down on her belly. She watches him slowly smile into her eyes; she recognizes the pride there. And she can’t help but smile back, a smile that cracks her dry lips.

  “Feel this, Coyote,” Dragon whispers. “Feel this. Mother.”

  They sit there, quietly and foolishly smiling at each other. Two clumsy, broken halves of a miracle that neither of them will ever be able to explain.

  Thank you, thinks Delilah. Thank you, Mira, for rescuing me.

  “It feels good to be a woman again.”

  “Do you like being a woman?”

  “Yes. Do you like being a man?”

  “I don’t know. Right now I do.”

  When they stop speaking, the water murmurs between them, as if they still speak. How long have they been here? They cannot see anything, nor smell. They continue to hold each other. There are no boundaries around them, no walls. The water fills them peacefully; there is only touch.

  “I wish we could stay here,” says Sky.

  “I wonder if we’re under the sea,” says Lonely. “I wonder how we’re speaking?”

  Sky doesn’t answer.

  “Are you human now?” she whispers.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember, any more, how that felt. I don’t feel hungry.”

  “We’re both awake now, at least.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever killed anything?” she asks. “Did you hunt for food, where you lived?”

  “We fished,” he answers thoughtfully. “But with fish it’s different. You’re not really killing them, in a violent, personal way. You’re just moving them from one world to another: water to air. That change kills them, all by itself. Isn’t it strange?”

  “Yes.” She thinks a moment. “Sky?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need to go back to the City, I think.”

  He is silent.

  “I mean not in a dream form, not in some other form, but as we are now.”

  He is silent, like a little boy. She strokes his head. “Are you afraid?”

  He seems to melt a little into her chest; he allows himself to melt, which moves her. “I’m only a dream, Lonely,” he murmurs.

  “No,” she insists. “Sometimes the dream and the real worlds merge. Like you and me. That’s when things really do change.”

  When he doesn’t answer, she adds in a deeper whisper, “I have to do something, Sky. Those people need to see me as I am, finally, and I need to see them. I owe it to them. I owe it to my father, or he’ll drift for all eternity, regretting. Don’t you know that?”

  It’s what Sky has always wanted her to do, she thought. Isn’t this her destiny? She thinks he will be proud of her now, that he will respond with that stiff opinion in his voice like he did long ago on the mountain, when he told her she must follow her own destiny and not get attached to personal loves. Truly it does not matter now, she tells herself, if he comes with her or not. She will hate to leave him, but she will do it anyway.

  Yet he only asks, “And you, Lonely, are you human now?” The question is so gentle, almost teasing in its irony, but also so sad.

  “Almost,” she says. “But my name isn’t Lonely any more. I forgot my real name, so I’ll need to think of a new one, at least for now. Will you come outside and help me find one?”

  He pulls away and strokes her floating hair. “You’re not lonely any more?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just that everyone is lonely. That’s what I learned, when I came through the City in the other form I was in. If everyone is lonely, it isn’t right for me to take that name for mine alone.”

  Sky nods, and that distant look passes over his eyes, like a mist. “I guess not,” he says thoughtfully.

  For a moment, she wishes he hadn’t accepted it so easily. Her heart pulls childishly in her for a moment, wishing he would take her in his arms and tell her he understands how truly lonely she has been, how she has suffered as no one else has, and how he is here for her now, rescuing her from that loneliness. But she knows it is better this way.

  “Come on,” she says.

  She takes his hands.

  “Lonely.” He looks at her. “I don’t know how. How do we wake up?”

  Lonely smiles, remembering how once he taught her to fly. You have to imagine it first, he’d said. Imagine the ground is gone. She stretches her limbs. “Put your feet on the ground,” she says. “This is our dream, so let’s dream the stone.”

  They do.

  “Now stand,” says Lonely.

  They do. A wave of water cascades from their heads, over their bodies, and crashes to the stone. They stand dripping. What was the fountain is only a puddle at their feet, and it is dawn on the island, where they stand out in the open again, under the grey sky and the wheeling gulls. There is no hole, no darkness below. Nor is there a tower. Only the two of them, naked on the surface of the world. He shivers in the wind. She buries her face in his chest, her eyes shut
against the pain of the sun.

  “I knew you’d come,” she says.

  “I didn’t,” he says, still shivering. “I didn’t know.”

  “But you told me, remember? You said the world is round. So I knew we’d come back to each other.”

  “I know. But there are things that I knew in my mind, but not in my heart. I told you so many things that I knew, but I did not really know. Maybe I was only telling you all those things to remind you of what you already knew, because I knew if you could remember, you could help me.”

  “But I didn’t,” she says sadly. “I didn’t help you.”

  He thrusts her away from his body and holds her there, so he can see her face. “You did,” he cries softly. “You rescued me!”

  She looks into his eyes, searching, and begins to smile.

  “What is your name?” he laughs. “What is the name of my rescuer? Aren’t you going to tell me who you are?”

  She laughs, too, but she is afraid. She turns aside. “Okay.” Get it over with, she thinks. Don’t make a big deal of it. You can always change it later. “Maybe a word in your language, in my mother’s language.”

  “Ah,” he says, still teasing. “So you will make me guess? It’s only fair, I suppose, after all I made you guess about me.”

  “How do you say ‘wind’?” she asks.

  He makes a sound with his breath that she finds impossible to imitate.

  “Never mind. How about ‘love’?”

  He makes a deep sound, like the song of the oldest whale, that takes her breath away. “That kind of love?”

  “Never mind,” she says again. It has to be an easy word for other people to speak, not something that takes your whole being to make it every time.

  “Maybe it’s not something so big and universal like that,” says Sky more gently, seeing her fear. “You’re only one woman, after all. Even if perhaps you are the most beautiful woman in the world.” He smiles a sincere, elegant smile that neither hurts nor flatters.

  “You’re right!” cries Lonely. “Here I am, doing it again. I’m wasting all this time on my big idea of myself, when out there so many people are suffering, and we don’t have much time.” She turns and begins to walk in looping circles, as if with intention. “We’ll just look around. I’ll find something that feels right.” She turns her eyes to the ground, acting casual, and then she scans the air. Yet inside of her things are being wrenched apart. She feels like she is killing herself. She feels like crying out, But it has to be big! It is my NAME! Yet she stumbles forward, trying to find something beautiful. She picks up a lovely pebble, striated turquoise and pink, but it has no name. She looks up at the sky, and finds the frayed wing shape of a pretty cloud that will never come again, but it has no name either. She bends down and touches the cold layers of the water, and feels the shadows in between them, but they, too, have no names. So many beautiful things in this world have no name.