Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Then I will call you Lonely, since that is what you call yourself. Lonely shall be your name.

  Lonely began to cry. It was an easy thing, and it melted her down into herself, where she found comfort in the hollow of her own chest. “But I don’t want to be lonely,” she sniffed, missing her father.

  I’ll be your friend, said the wind, but Lonely thought she heard mockery in its tone.

  “I don’t want you!” she cried. “Leave me alone.”

  But the wind is in charge of the path voices take, and finally it whipped the girl’s voice down to the old woman’s ears. The woman turned, very slowly, her stooped back rising and her bent head following. Not moving her eyes, she lifted toward Lonely a crumpled, nightmare face, and in that face Lonely saw—though she would later forget—the same sorrow she’d seen every day of her life in her father’s eyes. But something in these eyes wasn’t right.

  The Witch said, without expression, her voice creaking as if she sucked her breath in instead of letting it out when she spoke, “Your father is dead.”

  The wind stopped.

  “Why?” said Lonely. She had heard of death, but she didn’t think it was possible. Not for herself and her father, who were gods, and needed nothing.

  But the old woman did not speak again. Her hair webbed her face in the wind as she turned back to the sea. There was an old chair there at the foot of the tower, made of driftwood and bones, and the old woman fell down into it and dropped her face in her hands, as if exhausted by the four words she had spoken. Yet Lonely felt certain that she must be a powerful witch, because she did not seem to suffer from the cold, and all around her there was nothing but grey barren rock and grey churning sea and grey heartless wind.

  Inside the room Lonely paced until she was dizzy. She screamed and breathed against the frozen door, but it was thicker than the walls and she only melted it a little, turning it slippery with small rivers of water that freed themselves and ran to the floor like tears. She caught them and touched them to her tongue, and then she beat the door with her fists. She punched it until her skin broke, and then she curled up at the foot of it with her knuckles in her mouth, tasting her first taste: the salty, mineral taste of blood. In that taste she sensed, vaguely, what death was. But still she did not understand where her father had gone.

  She dreamed a white bird flew into her room through the hole she had screamed into the wall. He perched on her chest, his feet so thin and light, like spider webs, that she barely felt him. Tenderly, so that it did not hurt her at all, he pierced her breast bone with his long beak, and pulled out her wild, throbbing heart. He dropped it into his feet, upturned like hands, as he lifted off her chest into the air. He flew with it to the frozen door, where, glowing like an ember in his grasp, it melted a hole big enough for her body. Then he came back down to where she lay, and held her heart out to her. She reached for it with trembling hands, saying, “Thank you.”

  The bird said, “It was already there. I only wanted to show you.” He looked at her in a way that was familiar, then flew up into the open sky above her.

  Waking was like spinning upward, as if she were a leaf that spun in the spiral of the bird’s wake.

  When she opens her eyes, she is only a puddle of glassy limbs down on the windy stone, with the wide universe open around her.

  There is no tower.

  But there are people below the tower, within the sea, of whom no one ever, ever speaks.

  And on this night they cry out, with a cry that makes no sound but shakes the earth under the waters, and makes the waters rise a little, and the ground tremble beneath the buildings of the City.

  No one is hurt, but in a factory where Things are manufactured, glass breaks and chemicals are knocked together which start a fire—and the fire burns up part of several buildings before it is put out. And you do not think about what fire is or where it comes from, and the men who work with the chemicals do not wonder about the magic they are using, or what it means to handle such power.

  But the tremors, even after they end, make you uneasy in a way you have no words for, as if the foundations of reality itself are unsafe.

  Maybe there is more to this world than you remember. Maybe there are still goddesses turning under the sea, and gods in the sky who toss the rain sadly from hand to hand—hoping that someone will once again pray for it, will dance for it, will cry for it, will need it to grow food. Maybe there are people who still live real lives outside of the City—in the desert, in the forest, in the mountains, and even in places that do not exist any more.

  Because you still dream, in the City. Only you will not admit to it, so your dreams cannot help you. No one has time to sleep, in the City. No one has time to stop.

  But the dreams still come. Someone—did you not realize this?—someone has been keeping them alive for you.

  comfortable warmth. The comfortable beauty. The only love she had.

  If only she had never woken. She did not mean to make this choice. Or did she? To stay, too, was impossible.

  But nothing more happens now. The rhythm of the little waves, at once feminine and deep, feels like a new heartbeat near her own. One that carries on without her, whether she wills it or not.

  Lonely sits up.

  At least the universe is easier to meet for the first time at night. The darkness makes it fade quickly into the near distance, where her mind can rest in the intimate plunk of wavelets falling. Though sometimes a big wave hisses, or the darkness rushes at her in a sudden breeze, for the most part the air feels calmer down here than out her window up high. But not far away looms the outline of the Witch’s chair.

  Lonely watches the back of that chair, making sure it doesn’t move, making sure that face stays hidden behind it. A thin thread of moon curls like an old woman’s hair between the clouds, just beginning, but Lonely does not see it. Everything around her is slow and quiet but something is picking up speed inside her chest. Something hot runs through her, deafening, and she does not fit herself suddenly—she twists away from herself. She does not know what this is, this feeling—

  fear, says the wind helpfully.

  Lonely glances back up at the chair, silhouetted against the paler mass of the sea that swirls up to it. She feels vulnerable. She took her height for granted in the tower. She struggles to stand up now, but her head spins, and she falls back down on one knee.

  I want to go back, she thinks again, her heart tensing.

  come down, the rocks say. don’t be afraid. we’ll hold you.

  She maneuvers her body down close to the rocks, gripping them hard and not taking her eyes off the chair. Their cold sears into her breasts and thighs, but she remembers she is a goddess, and it cannot hurt her. The cold is only the way the rocks speak to her, turning her body white and hard, strong and stern. She realizes that nothing is going to happen until she makes it happen.

  So she stands and walks toward the chair, her feet silently folding over the uneven ground. The cold vibrates upward through her soles to her core, so that by the time she reaches the old woman, she feels split open, her muscles shaking.

  She comes around the side of the chair, listening to her heartbeat running, waiting for the rush of that face turning toward her.

  But the old woman does not turn her face away from the sea. In the darkness, that face is less frightening; it is only stark, and full of peaks and shadow, like the stones. The body that meditates under those black folds of cloth is difficult to differentiate from the ragged landscape around it. Lonely cannot see where the woman’s hands are; she cannot see where the shadow of a limb could burst out from, or where the cloth ends and the ocean begins.

  “Why do you trap me here?” Lonely asks.

  There is no answer, so she forces herself to continue around, to stand in front of the chair, between the Witch and the sea.

  Now the Witch raises her eyes, but tho
se eyes do not register Lonely. Lonely sees only the ocean there, much bigger than she.

  “Just like a child,” the Witch says in a tired whisper, her voice like the voice of the wind when you’ve been alone for too long and it begins to sound human. “Just like a child, you think everything is about you.”

  “There’s no one else here!” Lonely cries, though she’s relieved to hear the woman’s voice. “Just me and you.” She wraps her arms around herself, cupping her body’s own warmth against her. The wind whistles.

  “That’s what you think.” The Witch sighs and, to Lonely’s relief, closes her giant eyes.

  “Why did you trap me in the tower?” Lonely tries again.

  “I! What could I do?” She draws a breath in, and then her voice escapes a little from whatever it’s caught beneath, but there is no tone to it, no blood warming it, no feeling. “Your father trapped you. He thought that would save him.” She sighs again, as if the words exhaust her.

  Lonely does not believe her. “Why did he die?” she asks, trying to say the word confidently like she understands what it means, like she does not feel this thing: fear.

  The Witch’s eyes snap open and she grins a wicked grin that makes Lonely shrink into herself, because there is something inside this woman that Lonely thinks she can never understand, and that can never understand her. And at the same time she stares past Lonely, so that Lonely cannot help but glance behind herself into that rocking, churning mystery, afraid.

  “Because he was not all god,” the Witch hisses triumphantly. “Because he’s human, too, just like me. Just like you. Someday you’ll be old and ugly like me, Princess. And those nightmares will get you, like his nightmares got him.”

  Then suddenly, like the wind bursting forth, the Witch grabs Lonely’s wrists and binds them in the quick claws of her fingers. “I always wondered what you felt like,” she says. “But you feel like me. I can feel your heartbeat.” Lonely pulls back but the Witch won’t let go. “I know your heart. You’re afraid of being alone, and ending up just like me. Your fear is your fate. Your fear is your fate…!” The Witch looks up as if pleading, and in this moment it is the silent pleading that Lonely hears, more than the words. A long moment passes as the wind circles them, watching without eyes, hearing without ears. The first pain that Lonely feels—the first pain in her whole life that she can name—is not her own. It feels like her father’s pain, but closer to her body.

  “Please,” she says finally, her heart drenched and heavy. “Let me go. I want to get off this island. I want to live, and I want to find love.”

  The Witch lets go of her wrists and presses her face into her own hands.

  “There is no such thing,” she murmurs.

  “There is,” says Lonely. “There is someone just for me. Someone who was going to come and rescue me. My father told me.”

  “Who?” The old woman looks up suspiciously, her hands outspread in the air.

  “A Prince he knew long ago. Someone who was meant for me. Someone from a green, quiet place where birds walk on water and people live in—in trees. There was a white horse—My father told me!”

  The old woman’s eyes are somewhere else. She seems almost to be smiling. Suddenly, Lonely glimpses someone else in her face—someone beautiful, someone young. But then she lowers her head and growls,

  “So where is he? Why hasn’t he come?”

  “I don’t know.” It’s true. She is supposed to stay and wait for him. Didn’t her father tell her to wait? That her love would come for her? But how long? Now the tower is gone. And she could not wait there any longer. There were the nightmares, the white bird, the scent of her own body, her own heartbeat coming and coming, and the wind….

  She stands there desperate, watching the old woman, not knowing what to do or where to go, feeling that she cannot turn around knowing that this awful presence watches her. The older woman is shaped so differently from Lonely. Lonely knows nothing of aging, but she sees that this body has become less and less human over time, and more and more a part of the stone and wind and sea, her shape craggy and uneven with the black dress catching around it, her voice rising sharp and falling hazy. In the dark the older woman looks rooted in the eerie bone chair with its wily curves and gleaming white spokes above her head.

  “Go,” the Witch says. “I cannot bear to feel you near me.” She drops her head and murmurs on like the sea, like the mind whirling around within itself, like Lonely’s own mind spinning alone in that tower for so many years. “He will betray you. He will ask you to give up everything for him. Then he will see his humanness inside you, and he will be afraid. So he will leave you. Then nothing…nothing….”

  Lonely thinks, There is something sweeter beyond all this. Far away from this island, away from this woman with her empty voice, away from the memory of the tower, there is a high mountain kissed by the sun, and in its valleys are wide fields of flowers. And in those flowers a face…. It is that mountain that holds the answer, though she cannot see it now. She is sure of it.

  “I’m leaving here,” she says, making her voice brave.

  The Witch looks up. “Thirteen moons,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Up there.” The Witch points, without looking. “The other earth, the ghost earth! White ghost that pulls the seas. Grows round and belly-full—grows pregnant—and then she loses everything! What happens to the full moon’s child? What happened? Suddenly she is gone! Suddenly a thin sliver again! Don’t you see?”

  Lonely nods, terrified, not understanding at all. But she sees the sliver of light in the black sky behind the woman.

  “When the moon dies for the thirteenth time, when she’s lost her child again, and has nothing, come back to me then with proof! Find your love, bring back proof that he loves you, bring back proof that he will love you forever!”

  Lonely stares.

  “Isn’t that what you want? Isn’t it? To know you will never be left again?”

  “But what is the proof?” whispers Lonely, who does not even know what love is, but wants it.

  The Witch leans back, and the great chair—which looks so much heavier than she—tips back with her, its front legs floating in the air. “Ah, I don’t know,” she answers. “I don’t know.” With an echo, as if the very stone, deep down, is hollow, she lets the chair fall forward again. “You don’t know it, but we are trapped on this island forever. Whatever happens to you when you leave it—” She stops, shakes her head. “You will think you have escaped this. You will think you have found the real world, and that it is more real than this one—but you are still trapped here with me. Only the proof of that love will break this world open and free us, yes? Isn’t that the story? Isn’t it? I want to see it, Princess.” She looks greedily, hungrily, toward Lonely’s eyes, but those eyes still do not see Lonely, and those eyes water blackly, like mouths. Suddenly Lonely sees their darkness. She sees that they are not like her father’s eyes—that glass blue—but like her own. What does it mean?

  “Don’t think promises are enough. I do not want to hear his promises. Promises are not proof. If you fail, you will find yourself here, again. Thirteen moons. You will wake up in exactly the same place. Like you never left. Like the happiness you found in the great big world was only a dream. I tell you.”

  “But there is no more tower,” Lonely whimpers, and though she knows it is true—though she can see the emptiness behind the witch’s head—she is afraid now to believe it.

  The Witch laughs. “Oh, but that was only a silly thing—a little dream your father made to comfort himself. What lies below this island is real, and it is what killed him, and it is what will kill me, and when you wake up here again, that is where you will be.”

  Lonely feels her jaw freeze, feels her stomach drop. Fear. She remembers the dreams her father dreamed. The monsters below. “Why?” she cries, restless in her own terror. “Why are
you bringing me back here, if you hate me, if you don’t even want me?”

  The Witch drops her head and shakes it as if to shake off sleep, muttering, “I’m not doing anything. Oh, Goddess, there is nothing I can do any more.”

  “I thought you were powerful,” Lonely says loudly, trying again for courage, “sitting out here in the cold wind, but now I see you are only a crazy old woman. You have no power over me. My father loved me, and his love will guide me.”

  To her surprise, the Witch does not scream or lunge at her or do anything in response to this. She considers Lonely for a moment as if trying to remember something. “Your ancestors are many gods,” she says at last. “You have the sea gods in you, and the earth gods and the fire gods, and the sky gods. You have all of them. Most of all you have the ideals of air, like him. But you are also human, like me. Humanness is that dark, fifth element, that nobody ever remembers until it is too late.”

  “I don’t care! I don’t understand. How do I get off this island? How do I get to the mountain?”

  “Just go. I am tired of talking. I am so tired.”

  “No!” cries Lonely, who is still learning about wanting, and cannot bear the feeling of it. “You have to tell me how!”

  Suddenly the Witch shoots up from her chair with the impossible strength of a fish leaping out of water. Her face is inches from Lonely’s and her breath smells like salt, and her whirling eyes threaten to suck Lonely in and drown her.

  “I’ll tell you once more,” she says, and for the first time Lonely notices the way she speaks words—differently from the way she herself speaks them or her father spoke them, as if they are slightly foreign to her, “and then I am done with you. Again you trap yourself, blaming someone else! There was no frozen door! There is no one holding you to this island! Do you understand? I do not care! I tell you, I do not care.”

  “But you told me—”

  “It is up to you now, Princess. It is up to you.” Such insistence in her eyes, such sincere, tearful fury—and Lonely will not understand it for a long time to come.