by Mindi Meltz
“I always loved Mira,” she manages to say. “I always tried to love her and she wouldn’t take my love. It couldn’t help her.”
“You tried to love her by holding back who you were, and that’s not real love. Maybe she needs you to be yourself, be the hunter. Maybe she needs to be hunted. Maybe you’re the only one, Lil, who can find her, wherever she is.”
“Dammit, Moon, I already went through this. You know I already did. I looked. I looked fucking everywhere, I asked everyone, I went to every office—”
“Lil!” he cries. “Stop. I know you did. I’m just saying—”
“She’s my sister,” Delilah interrupts, turning her face away.
“I’m just saying maybe you need to hunt her in a different way. Not in that world. In another world.”
In her world, wherever that is, Delilah can’t help but think. She lies still for a long time, feeling in her belly that emptiness where hunger comes from, that emptiness that must be filled. As always, there is no way out of life and its needs. Or is there? Maybe Mira found a way out.
“Okay,” she whispers finally, “I don’t know why, but I’ll do it. But I’m doing it for you, not for her. I won’t try any more for her, do you understand? I made that promise to myself a long time ago, Moon. It’s the only way I could survive.”
Malachite was named for a stone, because his people are Earth people, but in his dreams he flies beyond this place, and that’s why they call him Kite, for short.
While his parents are arguing he runs out the back of the house and into the field. His sister, Chelya, who is almost two years older than him, is crying. That’s the worst part of their arguing—the only part he can’t stand.
A swallow bursts from her nest under the eaves of the woodshed as he passes roughly by. “Sorry,” he mumbles. His legs are strong, and he runs all the way over his grandmother’s hill and into the woods beyond. He runs up the thorny hill that would suffocate anyone else in its tangle; he has a secret path. At the top of it, he climbs the tree that always remembers him, and roosts himself at the base of a branch that has thickened itself to support the weight of extending outward and upward above all the other trees around. Above him, it shakes its jubilation of leaves like a flag of freedom.
I won’t let them destroy the life I’ve made with my family, his mother had said, her voice never raised but frightening in its fear. It took my mother and me all that we had to make this life. And the people there—they only know how to destroy. That’s all they know.
And by holding on so damn tightly to what you love, his father had retorted, that voice big but helpless against his mother’s shivering tightness, you’re going to destroy it yourself.
From here, Kite can see the source of all the argument, or at least imagine that he sees it. It’s too far away to see, actually, but he thinks something catches at his vision when he runs it over the white mirror of the far-off desert beyond his mountain home. Whoever lives in the City doesn’t know about him and his family, doesn’t know about the other families scattered throughout these mountains who once gave sustenance to everyone. But he knows about the City, because its power leaves no place in the world untouched. The river talks of it. The earth moans with it. The trees sigh in its dark breath. He tries to picture the houses taller than the tallest trees, the lights that burn all night, the speed at which things move. He doesn’t assume anything about it. He will not listen to anything either of them says, good or bad. He just wants to find out for himself.
At night, he’s sure he really can see the glow of it: a grey-white light, ethereal and sooty, like a halo, like an idea.
Lonely has changed, though she doesn’t know it. Her legs are wiry and dirty; her dress, a ragged remnant, is torn from one sunburnt shoulder; her hair is bleached paler than ghost-wings. The flush of life stains her cheeks from within now, and four or five freckles, like stars, have landed near her nose. If someone could see her now who knew her before, they would see those changes. But there is no such person.
There is only me, whom she does not yet know.
She knows only her horse, still walking beside her for no reason either of them can name, and he has changed a little too.
They enter the forest as through a door, and as it closes behind them Lonely turns quickly, catching a last glimpse of open sky. She can feel the silence settle around her even before she can hear it—not the passionate windy silence of the desert, but the inward silence of dreams.
She walks in, and instantly, she is intimate with an enormous connected being, a being that is a whole world. It brushes her skin again and again. It leans close. It blots out the sky, so that she stumbles as if under the sea. It breathes. The horse’s heavy footsteps press into layer upon layer of the forest’s history. The top layer of leaves crunches with the recent ache of death; the layers below it hiss more softly with the mellow perspective of the very old; the deepest layers, the fertile black remains of forest hundreds of years before, compress without sound.
Around her head, the green leaves of this year’s life hover expectantly.
Trees. She begins to differentiate them, like giant strands of an interconnected nervous system. Other green life climbs up the trees or crouches beneath them, or hangs from their tips like hair. She feels their presence like solemn kings and queens with their feet underground, their children tangled around them. They seem to ride their own growth effortlessly, being what they are without words, rising as if in worship of some great and gentle deity she does not know. The wind makes love to them, rolling in their arms, and they catch it and pass it one to the other.
Lonely keeps one hand wound tightly into the horse’s mane as she walks close to him. She hears a great nation of beings scurrying with invisible tasks around her: hammering and swishing and crying out in the dark. Shadows move, holes gape in the earth like questions, and spider webs collapse over her like broken dreams. As she and the horse break through tight networks of branch and leaf, patterns long undisturbed, Lonely seeks hungrily ahead for some sign of the mountain. Now they seem to have left the main river. Now they follow a quieter stream. The birdsong, that endless conversation, comforts Lonely a little, though here it is different, less exuberant, more subtly crafted to ricochet through needle, leaf, and vine. She fights off the feeling that she has entered a maze with no destination, no purpose, no end.
The river forks and then dissipates into marshy thickets, impenetrable thorns, and murky, sullen silence. They stop. In front of them, a spider web remains fully intact, inches from Lonely’s face. She doesn’t see the spider, hiding at the corner, but she sees the design of the web like a far advanced language and knows someone mysterious must have written it. Following the light along its thin, icy wires, she sees other webs running innumerably across every space, and wonders suddenly if these webs hold the entire forest together in their careful silence.
Where will she go without running into them? All around her the forest weaves itself like a fate already spun, a mass of life she cannot push through or climb out of, only enter deeper into. She sinks down and takes her own feet in her hands to warm them, staring at the horse who seems unsure now as he nibbles around the trunks of the trees.
“Where do we go?” she whispers.
Where do we go? teases the wind back at her.
Without meaning to, she grabs onto the thought of Dragon. Not that many days ago, she was with someone; now she is alone again. Her mind begins to spin around the pain of it. How sorry she feels to have disappointed him! If only she could have surrendered, if only she could have answered that bright innocence inside his eyes, that trusted her to answer him! She could be with him still. But she denied him, until he was forced to turn away from her, turn to another. Her heart strains inside that final memory: the hurt in his howling yell as he stood up after her, the shaking in his body. Even then, he would have melted right into her if she had walked back to him. She kno
ws he would have. But now it is too late.
The truth of it seems completely different now. She cannot remember why she left. What could be worse than this loneliness, after all? What is she seeking, that she left him for?
And why did her father leave her? Why?
She leans back against a tree, closing her eyes.
When she opens them, a dragonfly is hovering before her face, looking directly into her eyes. His head is nothing but eyes, like a thousand different ways to see.
follow me, he seems to say. i’m as old as the ferns, as old as the moss, as old as water.
“Show me,” she says to him urgently, leaning forward. He must be a sign of something, he must be. “Show me the way home.”
But then he is gone, gone so fast she can’t track him. And she is left with only the word she just spoke, a word she has never spoken before: “home.” It makes her cry.
So she stands up and keeps wandering, aimless in that shapeless stillness of marsh, where the trees are sad and heavy in their soggy roots, and the forest is so thick she has not the slightest sense of its bigness, nor of the curve of the earth’s body beneath her, curving into greater and greater mountains. She wanders in a small dark circle, her mind lost inside her own questions and spun into the spirals of spiderwebs, until the sun shrinks within the trees, and the light turns cold, then drains away as if forever.
She stumbles through the brambles in search of dry land, thinking only of rest, pressing her body with senseless force through the tangle, crying continuously, her face dirty and wet.
She has forgotten her horse again, but when she lies down finally under a cloudy sky and a hidden half-moon, too confused to feel afraid, he is suddenly there, and she feels a twinge of gratitude. She rests her head upon his flank as he, for once, lies down beside her. But he remains alert.
She keeps her back pressed to the tree behind her, drawing comfort from it in her sleep as if to keep herself anchored within the drift of her own mind. Its simplicity is touching: she feels clearly its lack of question, its earnest life, its sincere growth upward, neither hopeful nor afraid. The wind sounds so much kinder as it passes through the tree’s branches.
hush, says the tree to her mind. i’ll sing you the old lullabies, and you’ll remember. you’ll remember the Heart is greater than all of this. feel, now, how easy it is to love…
Or maybe she is already asleep. Somewhere above her, she remembers, the tree has contact with a sky she can no longer see.
Yet she dreams the same old nightmare, the black hole of nothing beneath the tower, and this time she is crawling on her hands and knees through that putrid blackness, and something desperate is happening in her belly, a howling, painful kind of loneliness, and the very air she draws with her breath tastes so empty it vibrates. She knows for the first time, tasting that nothingness, that she will die. Her belly growls, and in that animal growling is the panicking knowledge of her own humanness.
When she wakes, she still feels it. She doesn’t know that she is hungry, because she has never felt hunger before, but she has felt the hunger of her body for another, and this is worse than that. It isn’t swollen and sweet but acid and angry, and it grates at her, this emptiness. She feels her mouth flush with wetness, and she looks wonderingly around her, wanting to take something inside her, wanting to bring something into her and make it part of her. The ripe fleshy scent of living wood assaults her, and the rich texture of earth-scent, and the sweetness of flowers, but none of these can fill her. She rises and thrusts on through the forest; she feels her body coming apart, her fluids dissolving her belly. She touches her tongue to each leaf, but they repel her with their bitterness.
On and on she walks, plowing on now without care for direction or spider webs, her hunger driving her like fury, and the emptiness sprawls inside her, until her spirit begins to hover around her starving body, leaving her legs weak and her head spinning. She is thirsty, too, her throat sticky and chest burning, but she’s lost track of the river.
This is being human, this need. It is nothing but need, and the pain of need. It was not Dragon she needed, not another person but something more essential, something that must become part of her own self or she will be lost and cease to be anything. It is something of the earth that she needs, something that must die and be reborn inside her. Something so basic, something her very bones are made of, but she does not know what it is.
When her body collapses in the afternoon sunlight, she no longer feels the hunger wracking her belly like a nightmare, but only the slow, delirious song of death in each of her cells. The sky tumbles down in shards through the great loving canopy of the trees, their shapes warm and shifting and tender, their hugeness relieving her of her struggle.
I am mortal, after all, she thinks, and whereas immortality felt like the great open distance of her future stretching out before her to the mountain, mortality feels like this: the closed space of the forest, the going inward, the relief of giving up, the comfort of earth and trees. Mortality is the raw pain singing through all her body, singing it down into the earth. Mortality is the lift of her spirit into the treetops, separating in this way, watching as an earth-born, human man climbs down from his horse and scoops her into his arms. Mortality is his dense body calling her back into her own, and the smell of his heavy sweat, and her desire to press tighter against him as he holds her loosely over the body of his horse and rides with her, perfectly balanced, back to his home. But she is too weak to do so, and when she opens her eyes she cannot focus on his face, and so she closes them again, and sleeps.
You prefer, I know, the gods of Air. Hanum was one. His powers were those of idea, of fantasy, of the ever-expanding mind. There was no problem of life that could not be overcome by that mind. The entire City is still run by it, and the jobs that pay the most money are the jobs run by minds. And when you die, you think, if you have lived good lives, you will go up into the air, and finally escape all this. Perhaps you will even join Hanum there.
It is the lower races that belong to the other gods, you say. Everyone knows that the peoples who followed the gods of Fire were dangerous, vicious, bloodthirsty. Everyone knows that the gods of Water are weak. Or perhaps they are treacherous, seductive, or crazy. And everyone knows that the gods of the Earth are simple and stupid, the subject of comical tales. They think of nothing but food and sex. They are like animals.
The Princess daughter of Hanum is of course a goddess of air. And the Prince who will rescue her—he, too, must be of air. His identity is a cloudy mystery, as it should be. He is the Prince, you say, of some hidden kingdom. Some kingdom far away and up high, in a realm no human being can reach. It is a kingdom of golden light, of white billowing clouds, of song and wings and—and what, exactly? Something that cannot be defined, but that you long for.
When he rescues her, when they finally join! Then that magical kingdom will, perhaps, be revealed.
Nothing is wrong in the City. The City is everything and gives you everything you need.
And yet you believe in this story with a fierceness that not one of you speaks of. This story helps you to survive miseries you do not even realize you are surviving, such as boredom, self-loathing, and despair.
You do not believe in fairy tales. You do not think of such things. You do not dream, you say.
And yet, when she finds her prince, when he rescues her, when true love uplifts you from the daily trials of this dull earth and you find perfection in each other’s arms and “I love you forever” shall save you, finally, and none of this shall matter any more….
You know this story, that lives up in the sky, where your dreams are. It is the only myth you still have to live on.
And I know it, too.
Everybody knows it.
are the brightest colors—brighter than anything found in nature. They can be bought for small money in stores, and beyond that you do not know, or wonder,
where they come from.
Will it hurt you if I tell you? They come from giant buildings, windowless and hidden in grey uniformity on the outskirts of the City. Inside the buildings, machines do all the work. A couple of plants, engineered to perfection, seem to meet all your needs. These plants are mass-produced in vast compartments, protected from insects and rain and drought and wind, their water measured, their soil stimulated chemically, their light made by artificial bulbs fueled by the decay of prehistoric creatures under the earth. You do not remember that these creatures died, or that the City still runs on the everlasting fire of their transforming remains. You do not believe that those remains will soon run out; in fact, if asked, you would say you do not even believe that those creatures ever existed.
What makes the meat, which is all you really want, is hard to name. They look almost like animals, in that they seem almost to be alive, but they have no feet or legs, and the birds have no beaks or wings, and the mammals are just giant, milk-producing breasts with tiny bodies attached. Each meat-producing lump of flesh is fattened and kept in a compartment until ready to be cut up and sold. A heart must beat somewhere inside each of these compartments, but there is no movement; there is no sound.
But no, it could not hurt you to know this. How could you sympathize? You sit still for most of your days, too, and hardly need legs either, though you still have them.
I will feel this for you, then, which you cannot feel. I will feel even this, which is yet too shameful for you to feel.
i’m afraid, says the deer.
That’s how Delilah recognizes her: she can feel her fear, so strongly that she wonders if the deer has actually spoken. None of the other deer can see or smell Delilah—she’s sure of it—but this little doe is standing still while the others browse the new buds from the trees, and she’s looking right at the tangle of thorns where Delilah is hiding. She looks so young.