Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  He is not an eerie voice in the wind, but closer and smaller, a voice with a beginning and an end that she can catch onto and hold, though tinny and distant with the chill of a reptile mind.

  She crawls forward, following him into the open to a flat rock that still glows with the heat of the day. She lays her body against it, pressing tight, her face up close to the lizard as he flees to a far corner of the rock and watches her. The rock is low and protected from the wind by smooth pink sandstone that looks almost gentle in the evening light.

  where i am warm, says the lizard’s body, its stillness watching her. Lonely is comforted, and melts like the sun into a dream. In the dream she feels the lizard dreaming. Most of the lizard’s life is stillness, and in that stillness there is room to understand the greater dream of the desert: its caverns the rooms of an ancient sea castle, its hills and turrets still guarded by stately cacti with hard spiked armor. But she feels the warmth fading now, and in her dreams she is running up and down the hills, searching for the lost sun.

  “How can you bear the cold?” she asks the lizard.

  i am cold.

  “I am cold too!”

  no, says the lizard. you only feel cold. i am cold.

  And Lonely understands then that the desert decides the temperature of the lizard. When the desert is cold, the lizard’s body becomes cold, and is still and stony like the cold. But Lonely’s body is still warm, and the cold hurts it, and it shivers. It fights the cold.

  And the voices rise up again in the space of her lone wakefulness, and she feels that the night has gone on forever and will not end.

  “Who are you?” she whispers in real fear to the wind.

  I am, I am! I am the one! I am strong, I can do it, I am worthy, I am unworthy, I want, I hate, I hurt, help me, I need, I love—

  be careful, says the stone beneath her, and Lonely recognizes its still voice, and holds on with her mind and her body to a thin film of reality, as thin as the space beneath the body of the lizard. She listens to the depth of the stone which, though it offers no comfort, is sturdy. do not trust the voices of the desert wind, it tells her. they are the voices of lost ghosts, fragments of things people were not brave enough to say, things they regretted. if you listen, you make them stronger. they are desperate.

  And the girl-goddess grips the rock with her human fingers, concentrating on the meditation of the lizard, trying to block out the voices of a loneliness even greater than her own.

  Every time Delilah kills an animal, she cries. It’s the only time she cries, and it’s not the kind of crying that almost destroyed her when she walked into the desert for the first time, leaving behind the only world she knew, a world she hated. This crying is quiet, but still the tears bewilder her as they touch her face, and they still her inside. She never cried before she came to the desert. Nor did she ever have to ask for her life from anyone or anything that she respected. The tears hurt a little, as if her cheeks are made of some fine stone that dissolves at the touch of water, but she feels that she must bear them somehow. It is the least she can do.

  It’s okay, you don’t have to feel guilty, Moon had told her. He would not kill anything himself because he was immortal; if he took life, he said, that life would be trapped forever in some nowhere place, unable to move on. But he told Delilah, You’re part of the cycle of life and death. For you, life is like water. It flows through you, in and out of you, and cycles around again like the rain, and someday the life in you will no longer be in you either. It will be in other forms, just as beautiful. You need to kill and eat to keep the cycle going.

  But it isn’t that she feels bad about it. Maybe she cries because of the relief in it, because killing feels so natural to her. Natural and painful at the same time. When an animal falls from her arrow, she runs to it, kneels by it, and looks hard into its blazing eyes. It’s the way those eyes look back at her that makes her cry, as if the animal recognizes who she really is, someone she herself does not wish to see. The animals know she is a killer. They know she is someone so driven by desire she will stop at nothing to fulfill it.

  Moon once told her about a tradition long forgotten, where the hunter takes the warm heart from the animal after killing it, and eats it. But she could never do that. She buries it in the ground instead, wherever the animal falls. Surely the earth knows better than she does what to do with someone’s heart. She barely knows what to do with her own, and is sometimes surprised that it knows how to keep beating, day after day, with no help from her.

  For a long time she never killed anything big. She has seen the signs of bears in this forest, but would never dream of going after one. Too dangerous, and she’d end up wasting most of the meat. It took her so long to learn how to dry leftover meat without it spoiling, and even then there was the problem of bringing the animal’s body home to her cave, and then removing the remains.

  When she first went hunting for boar, she was so excited, so agitated, she didn’t even think how she would get it home. She didn’t think about what would happen after she’d gotten what she wanted. She knew only that she fell in love with those hefty, brutal swine, following and watching them downwind, knowing they could kill her as easily as she could kill them. It took her several nights to find them, crawling through the mud after their stampede of tracks, gathering the stiff spears of their hairs from the bark of trees. Moon had recently left her for the first time, and alone in the desert, she’d had a strange dream. It was not a dream of wings and animal movement, as she would have later on, but a dream of long ago, from some other lifetime. She saw a shield with the face of a boar painted upon it, the ancient symbol for warrior, and a knight stood behind it, stoic as a statue with his helmet’s visor drawn down. As she approached him there was a ringing of metal and his sword shot out from behind the shield, and then the sword was the white tusk of a boar, its tip thrusting upward in defiance. She’d woken up sweating with desire, her body sizzling with the memory of the man who had betrayed nothing, not even his face, until she was close enough to see his weapon, clean and white and insistent. She had woken up alone, feeling that she could never sleep again.

  She spent the night climbing the cliffside and roaming the pine forest, her body beating out the desire through movement. Without Moon’s gentleness to temper her, she felt the old fighter in her awaken.

  When she got close enough to the boars, she could follow their hot scent, a scent like sweating earth, like sex and death at once. She came to a part of the forest she didn’t know, wetter and thicker with trees she did not recognize; breaking through underbrush caked with mud and hair, she came into a clearing that had been flattened completely by heavy bodies. She wanted to wait for them to return and then kill one as it slept, but the brush was too thick for her to see through unless she came very close, and then they would smell her. She feared them, and her fear excited her. Maybe it was her excitement that guided her; maybe hunger itself was her intuition. She kept on, pausing every now and then to listen.

  When she found them, near dawn, she had to laugh at the strangeness of dreams, for these sows were the opposite of that stoic male knight in his faceless armor. As they plowed their snouts through the earth, they grunted with the joy of consumption, of take-what-you-want, of delicious, greedy, body-driven aliveness. Their short legs seemed only paddles for the forward motion of their mountainous shoulders; a proud mohawk of stiff hair ridged the back of each one, bristling with danger. Sometimes they raised their heads like great ships from the mud and looked right at her, but their tiny eyes could not differentiate her skinny form from the trees. They were not concerned with images; they were all about snorting and roaring and the scent of power, a scent they dredged up from the bottom of the earth. Their bare-skinned noses twisted and wrinkled, as flexible as fingers.

  They were led by females: a group of sows with their children and their children’s children. Delilah watched them all night from above, stra
ddling the branch of an oak as they gobbled up its acorns in the dirt. All night they wallowed, occasionally rolling in the mud and shimmying their great shoulders into it, crying out from deep bellies. Whenever they moved they looked defiant, their shoulders weighing them forward as if perpetually charging. All night they swatted flies with the tassled ropes of their tails; all night they thrust their heads against each other as they dug in the dirt with their long snouts, their curved, magical tusks flashing in the moonlight.

  A memory came to her then of her first day at boarding school, when she was twelve years old and had just lost her father, and the pretty pale-skinned girls had taunted her in their subtle ways. They did not surround her all at once but tossed sarcasm and barbed giggles as they passed her in the constricting halls. At the end of the day her roommate, who Delilah guessed was some semblance of a girl beneath the paste of her makeup, had two friends on her bed with her, doing their hair or something. Delilah was burning up like a caged animal.

  Can we call you Lily? one of the girls had asked. You’re so much like a Lily—so fair and lovely. The other girls laughed into their hands. The roommate said, under her breath, More like something dragged up from underground. Then they giggled openly, one of them leaning her face into the other’s shoulder where she held the braid she was doing, and Delilah—who still cared then about being loved, whose heart was still raw from the scraping of a shovel over her father’s grave—ached at that gesture, the way the girls’ bodies could so easily tumble together like that, soft as the layered hems of their skirts.

  Lilies grow out of the ground, you idiots, she growled. There’s nothing evil inside the ground. If there was, they wouldn’t put dead people in there.

  They let these comments float by them, too complicated to warrant a response. She knew she was smarter than they were, but she envied them anyway.

  Why is your skin so dark, Dee—lie—laah? Where’d they drag you in from? Why is your hair like that? Did you get electrocuted?

  Her roommate got off the bed and sauntered toward Delilah, her skirt bouncing against her white knees, her curls dazzling in their perfection, as if chiseled out of sunlight. She looked down at Delilah’s legs and said, Why don’t you shave your legs, Lily? But her eyes held fear, and Delilah saw that, and she would always remember it. She punched the girl in the face, and then the face wasn’t perfect any more.

  Because I’m a warrior, she said. That came from nowhere, saying that, but she meant it. That night, after she got done with detention and the hour-long lecture from the headmaster about how they would give her one more chance, only because her mother loved her enough to advocate so strongly for her to stay in school (but Delilah knew her mother only wanted her and her crazy sister as far away from home as possible), she stood before the mirror in her new, single room, and chopped off her hair.

  But the mockery only got worse. When she began fucking any man she wanted, not caring what anyone said, they said she was the dark hag from the sea—the ugly wife of Hanum, the one who dragged men to their deaths when they came seeking the princess. Delilah had never heard of such a person but she did not care to be associated with such a desperate deity. She wasn’t desperate. She wasn’t needy. She was a warrior. So when she left the City, she turned away from the sea, and headed to where water was sparse and the creatures tough and solitary. When she first watched the boars, she remembered that question from another lifetime—Why don’t you shave your legs?—and she laughed out loud, knowing those girls would have shit themselves in terror at the sight of these beasts. It was so hard for her to get how she and those girls could belong to the same gender, or even the same species. Who determined such things? It wouldn’t have hurt so much if she had not believed, at the time, that those girls were the only example of womanhood. She hadn’t known any better. Now she knew they would never grow up, never stop being girls. They would never come over and over again from the touch of their own hands. And these dark hairy monsters with their weight hurling them forward, the white horns rising from their faces poised to strike, their close sisterhood held tight by raw, primal sounds—these were Delilah’s idea of womanhood.

  She spent the rest of that night determining whom to kill, or rather, whom she could not kill. She would not kill the matriarchs, with the spiky silver along their backs like the spines of dragons, who held the herd together and made her heart shiver with a more fragile longing that had nothing to do with the hunt, nothing to do with hunger. She would not kill the babies, or their mothers, even though it was autumn and she thought the young ones might survive on their own now.

  Around dawn the wind shifted, and one or two of them turned toward her, raising their snouts as if to howl at the moon, frankly questioning the air with their flaring nostrils. She had to act now. She chose a half-grown female who blended in with several others, still oblivious to her, ignoring her, drinking from a little pool. But as she shot the arrow, an old matriarch butted the younger one aside and stepped in front of her, sudden as the sword in Delilah’s dream, and tilted her head toward Delilah to take the arrow in the center of her forehead. She fell quietly, and it was Delilah’s cry of dismay that scattered the herd. They stampeded past her tree as she clung to it, and then she scrambled down, ripping her only pair of pants on a branch.

  The old boar’s eyes gripped her, swirling around pain in an attempt to focus, as if trying to tell her something. But Delilah could not—like Moon, like the gods—understand the languages of animals. She could only understand the pain.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried over and over. But it was herself she was sorry for. No one would stand between her and that pain. No one could make it stop. But the old boar had taken the arrow for the young one, and the young one was saved. There was a reason for that. A reason embedded deep in the communal soul of the boars, a sacred reason that all of them knew. A reason that Delilah could not understand, because no one would ever do that for her. Because she wasn’t a part of anything, except her own solitude. Because she had no elders.

  Back then, at least, there was no pain in Delilah’s body, no exhaustion. She was young and fierce and could live in the desert forever.

  She learned to survive. She learned to dry meat in the sun and the wind, and to store it in leather wrappings deep in one of the caves. She learned to clean the animal skins and soak them in the river to make leather—or at least something like it—and her body adjusted to eating almost nothing but meat. That first time she killed a boar, she had to leave most of it behind for the wolves and ravens. She didn’t understand its body, didn’t know how to take it apart, and she was covered with blood in the darkness, hungry and panicked and ashamed. But she learned. After that she brought sacks with her to carry the meat home. There was still a lot of the animal left behind. But she did the best she could, and she knew it did not go to waste, for there were others who would come after her to scavenge. If it was a boar, she had to take the meat in two or three trips, which might take hours. She was strong back then. Her back never hurt.

  Recently, on the last full moon, she killed a male boar. It was spring, and she wanted to avoid the females altogether, in case some of them were pregnant. Besides, she knew the males would be more careless now, their minds blurred by desire. She hunted with confidence, following the dream of a man on his hands and knees with greedy eyes and a black, bloody face. It was the greed she saw in his eyes that reminded her of the boars. And she felt easy hunting a male, for she knew how to hunt men in heat—how helpless they were.

  She found him eating, and his face was bloody because it was buried in the gut of a baby deer. Delilah came upon him in a clearing, having smelled him but not realizing how close she was, and they surprised each other. The boar reared his head up with a challenging snort. Delilah forgot herself for a moment, not realizing that boars ate such big meat, wondering if he had found the fawn already dead. She saw his dark shoulders tremble and bulk toward her like a gathering storm, and wit
hout thinking she pulled her knife from her belt and slung it at him. She had never been so close before. When it imbedded itself between his shoulder blades, he started to charge her anyway, but she did not run. She didn’t move until he fell on his knees in front of her.

  Not until he closed his eyes with a shudder and the tears broke her did she feel the ache in her own shoulders, and realize she’d been standing with them pulled up close to her face with her arms lifted halfway into the air, as if preparing to fly away.

  For many days afterwards, a tension she could not relieve with her own hands lurked around her shoulder blades. When she let Dragon fuck her that night in the sand, the tension released, but only for a night.

  She still eats from the body of that male boar—dried strips of meat that she sliced off in warm blood the night she killed him, hurrying while the ravens waited with restless cries from the tiered branches of the pines. She cooked her first meal of that meat right there in the pine forest.

  Maybe it’s the boar’s spirit inside of her that makes her unafraid of Dragon, who is bigger than her but, she knows, softer. She clutches one of the boar’s tusks in her fist while she sleeps, in case Dragon gets crazy in the night and comes after her. It’s not his lust that is dangerous, she senses, but rather a desperation that comes from somewhere else, a belief he has that some woman, somewhere, owes him something. She doesn’t want him to get her mixed up with that woman, whoever she is.

  Not that he could find her anyway, deep in the belly of a cave beneath layers of animal skins and darkness—the mouth of the cave thin, only big enough for Delilah and the bats. She used to sleep so deeply during the day, dissolving into the skins like something that died with them, and loose herself fully to dreams. Back home in the City she slept during the day, too, sneaking back in the morning after her family was gone because she wanted nothing to do with them nor they with her. So the nocturnal life was already natural to her. But lately she has trouble sleeping. She lies awake during the day, while the heat of the sun creeps in, and she tosses to relieve herself of the weight of those animals, and then lies naked and restless. She holds the boar’s tusk in her fist, watching it glow just barely in the ever-dark cave.