Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  i’m afraid to die.

  And Delilah realizes that she did speak.

  This deer knows her.

  This deer is waiting, waiting for her own death, with such trembling peace. It doesn’t matter that Moon crouches lovingly in the trees just a little distance behind Delilah. Nothing matters but herself and the doe.

  The moon is full, ripe for hunting. It highlights the introverted delicacy of the deer’s body, her hard, poignant brows, her long face creased with gentleness beneath her obsidian eyes. Her fragile, innocently courageous stance in direct view of her killer reminds Delilah of the girl Dragon desired, that strange angelic human. And Delilah feels herself slain in that moment by her prey—by her eyes of pure night, her thin, beautiful feet, and her unearthly femininity.

  I’m afraid, too, thinks Delilah, wanting to say it aloud, but not knowing how to speak back, and not wanting to hear the sound of her own voice. She wants to make herself as vulnerable as the deer, if such a thing is possible. Like every animal she kills, she owes it her life.

  The deer keeps standing there, her people flowing around her. Delilah can feel how she wants to stay with her friends, like a frightened bride who feels safer staying with her fellow women, laughing with them from afar, but feels irresistibly drawn to that other who will ultimately claim her. Delilah remembers the girls from school again, so secure in their crowd, and she feels the familiar envy. She wants to feel the hard anger she felt for Dragon’s white girl—for that prettiness, that perfection, that pretense at purity and goodness—but she only feels crippled, as she did throughout her life with Mira, by her own inadequacy. How ugly she is, compared with this animal’s grace. How unworthy of living, when that living will cost this other her beautiful life.

  Now Delilah has watched the deer for long enough to see that, unlike many of the others, she does not have a fawn. Not this year. She is still too young. How could she be so young? Like Mira, who lost her life to madness before it began….

  what will happen when i die? asks the deer. And Delilah thinks that this was always going to happen, because it was what she expected of herself—to do something utterly wrong. It is wrong to kill this young doe. Yet she is being forced to do it anyway. It is her destiny, to fulfill her image of herself as bad. Maybe it was her father’s image of her, when he used to say drunkenly, angrily, to her mother, That one will never come to good. She has too much fire. She can only bring destruction.

  And she understands, too, that the deer will not comfort her, will not tell her it’s okay. It is the least Delilah can do, to comfort the deer, whom she will kill. But she doesn’t know the answer to the deer’s question.

  Carelessly, she shifts her weight backward, and last year’s leaves snap under her heels.

  what will happen when i die? the deer asks again, twitching once.

  You will become part of me, answers Delilah, because that is all she knows.

  why?

  Because, answers Delilah, the passion she normally feels on the full moon rising into her womb and aching, echoing against the emptiness she keeps there, I need you.

  they say when we die to become part of the coyote, or the mountain lion, continues the deer, her voice coming silently through her eyes, through her nostrils with her breath, we continue in the ancient cycle. we remain animal. we keep who we are and are reborn again, safe in the circle of the earth. but what happens to us when we become part of the human? i am afraid. we do not understand you.

  I don’t want to kill you, Delilah thinks helplessly.

  i know, says the deer. that is why i am afraid. tell me you will take good care of my spirit. tell me you will remember me always.

  I will, says Delilah, and she feels her own womb like a round circle of pain in which she and the deer face each other forever: desire and surrender, warrior strength and helpless fear. But I don’t even know you. I don’t understand who you are.

  you know me, responds the deer, stepping toward her, and the herd parts as she takes a different direction from the rest. we are both women. take me into you, and know me. stop denying me. i am afraid, and i need you too.

  The deer’s silent voice, in the end, sounds like Mira’s. In a blind rush of love that she barely recognizes as her own, Delilah aims her arrow and, perfectly and without thought, shoots.

  It’s like any other time she’s shot an arrow. There is no effort, no force. She only straightens the three fingers that held the bow taut and, by doing so, lets go.

  Up on the round mountain, the goddesses draw together beneath the cloud that hovers in the Garden’s mind.

  This cloud is heavier than stone. Its sigh as it settles into the sacred tree is audible. They can smell its stench: a burned, wasted, oily smell. They know it is water that holds all this wrongness together. But the water does not show itself; it is clear and selfless, showing only the color of that which colors it, smelling only of that which pollutes it. And the pollution, in turn, holds the water together—makes it a thing, a cloud, unable to dissipate.

  “Yora,” whispers the leader, “we know you. You are safe here. Be yourself again. Be beautiful.”

  “Yora,” whisper the others, and they murmur words of love for her, this goddess of the earth’s blood.

  Yora holds forth her foul darkness helplessly. This is all there is, she seems to say. Only this darkness. There is no Yora. Only this. But something about the Garden draws her. She is not aware of making choices, but she remembers this place.

  “You are water,” says the leader more firmly now. “You are pure. This virgin water flowing here is also part of you. Though it seems long ago, it is happening now, too. Your youth, your age, your suffering, your death, your rebirth—it is all happening now. All of the river is happening at once. Return to yourself.”

  There is so much suffering, says Yora. I was not enough. Never enough.

  The goddesses are silent, gazing up at her, their eyes tearing humanly from the toxins that evaporate from her.

  “She cannot evolve in this form,” says the leader. “She is stuck.”

  “But in this form,” says another, “it is easier for her. She does not feel anything. Being in human form is so painful!”

  “But how else can she transform this pain? This pain comes from human beings. She must feel it as a human being in order to let it go.”

  “Yes, otherwise it will return to the waters, causing only more suffering, more sickness.”

  “Who can help her, then? Who can help her to take human form after she rains down finally upon the earth?”

  The goddesses sit in meditation. They know Yora more intimately than they know anything. They have seen her born and born again, eternally; every day they watch her fresh, unsullied youth laugh and gurgle through the Garden, flowing down from the spring at the top of the world. They know why she came back here, even if she does not. She still wants to heal the people with her song; she still wants to—she must—communicate the message of the river. There is no other choice. What would become of people’s souls, if not for the river goddess who transforms the river’s voice into a language they can understand? How would people ever be brought to listen to their hearts again; how would they ever remember?

  Yet this dark weight, too, is part of the story. The leaves of the tree, shrouded in the cloud, begin to wilt. The cloud does not want to kill the tree, but she has no will of her own to stop it.

  Every part of the deer is almost too elegant for the eyes to bear.

  Supple hills of muscle, vulnerable ridges of bone dipping inward under the knee, beneath the quiet, child-like bristle of her yellow-brown fur. Her eyes still glowing, though the hallways of her body’s house are dark now. The blood at Delilah’s knife-tip bursting impossibly soft, like the skin of roses. The red of it reflecting black in the night, but with a black that ripples and shines.

  The flesh undone from the skin, falling
in slick handfuls of pure, tender life—absolute nourishment. The heart loose and nearly ungraspable in Delilah’s small hands, bubbling its once precious rivers helplessly all over her wrists, her arms, the ground.

  Moon cooks two portions of the meat over a magical, moon-white coal, while Delilah hangs the rest of it in strips with twine as best she can. She has never come up with a really good system. She will have to stay around every night for the next several nights until it dries, to shoo the other predators away when they come to steal it. She doesn’t feel angry with them; she would do the same.

  She and Moon do not speak while they eat. Delilah feels as if she will never again have anything worthwhile to say. The flesh of the doe surrenders to her mouth before her teeth even touch it, and kisses her throat as it goes down.

  When they lie down in the afternoon, she’s still thinking of the words this animal spoke to her. It seems a natural cruelty of her life, a natural consequence to her own greed, that the first animal that ever spoke to her was an animal she had to kill. She wishes she hadn’t had to. She wishes she could still hear the deer’s voice. And she remembers now the comfort in it, after all. She remembers Mira in it. She had been so close, through listening to the deer, so close to hearing that voice again—that voice when it was still wise, when Mira still saw her clearly as sister.

  She can’t sleep for so long. But Moon’s embrace has been her only comfort since childhood. When she finally does sleep, enclosed in his gentleness, she dreams of the deer again. This time she is not only a haunting abyss of eyes, but the whole form of herself, flowing like water through space, and one by one the faces of the other animals Delilah has killed and eaten emerge behind her. The mighty male boar with his bloody tusks and his grunt of ferocious confidence, the old female boar with her majestic sorrow, a pheasant whose wings lifted like a thousand whirring fans, a grouse who drummed her wings against the ground like the heartbeat of the earth itself, and a rabbit who appeared first in Delilah’s dreams as a white wisp of fear. And the hundreds of others, pouring as if over a hillside toward Delilah, in herds and flocks.

  Then behind them come the animals she ate in childhood, animals she never knew: the listless, shapeless animals whose meat her father brought home from the meat factory where he worked, the only food they could afford sometimes because he was given the unwanted parts for free. In each haunted, empty face she sees her father’s eyes, and remembers what a human being looks like when robbed of his spirit, his selfhood, his pride.

  And still the deer stands before all these, sure of herself, unafraid now in death.

  Was it hard? Delilah asks. Was it painful?

  i can’t tell you, answers the deer, because my death is a different kind than yours will be. but you shouldn’t fear it any longer.

  Are you coming to tell me of my own death? Somehow Delilah is not surprised.

  no, we are coming to tell you of your life.

  You are haunting me.

  i’m in your body. this is an instrument of love, this body.

  Delilah wants to laugh. My body is sick, broken.

  reclaim it, says the deer, and as she speaks she becomes the Unicorn, who dashes across her vision as it did the night the white goddess girl ran away. Only this time the creature turns right toward Delilah, pointing its spiral into Delilah’s skull, and Delilah wakes in a flash of pain and light.

  Moon is awake, his eyes sweet in the dark. “What did you dream, Lil?” he asks.

  “Did I make a sound?”

  “No. Your body jolted. Like it used to when we were kids. That’s how I used to know you were a fire goddess. That energy jolting through you. You were so tiny, but it was like a fire came through you.”

  “I’m not a goddess,” says Delilah, remembering the dream and suddenly sad. “I’m going to die someday.”

  “But maybe it’s all relative,” says Moon. “Maybe it’s all what you believe. You’re very powerful, Lil. I think maybe inside you are a goddess. In the City, they talk about you like you are.”

  Delilah turns on her back to stare at the comforting sand color of the smooth cave ceiling. For her, daylight signifies a time of sleep. As they lie awake now she can hear birds singing and feel the sunlight relaxing at the cave entrance, generously lending them its warmth. But it is like a dream to her, a world she has not been a part of for so long. She feels so much more comfortable at night. It seems more real to her, more honest.

  “But death is death, no matter how you cut it,” she says.

  “Not necessarily,” says Moon. “There are ghosts who don’t fully die, and living people who aren’t really alive. You’ve been away from the City for so long, maybe you’ve forgotten.”

  But Delilah has not forgotten. She remembers her father, her sister, the faceless people she passed in the street—so many variations of living death, people who could not or would not inhabit their own lives. Living is hard. Most people, as far as she can tell, don’t fully manage it.

  “I dreamed of a unicorn,” she says.

  Moon waits. Then, instead of telling him about what she saw, she says, “When Mira was a little girl, she used to draw pictures of unicorns. She had this fascination with them. I mean, I guess that’s normal for a little girl, but we weren’t a normal family. We didn’t read fairy tales and fantasy stories like that. I think it must have been something my father taught her. Maybe unicorns were part of the mythology he remembered from his people. I don’t know, he wouldn’t have told me. But she kept drawing them, until our father died. They got to be really beautiful and elaborate. I didn’t think much about it, honestly. She was so crazy. So much of what she did made no sense to me.”

  Moon thinks for a little while. She’s afraid he’s going to tell her she didn’t respect her sister enough, didn’t love her the right way, didn’t understand her. But he says, “Unicorns have healing powers.”

  “Is that right?” She immediately regrets the sarcasm in her own voice, but Moon ignores it.

  “I don’t know, maybe. They’re supposed to be able to cure any ailment, purify water, bring healing of any kind to a person or even to a whole kingdom.”

  “Well. That’s useful,” says Delilah. She doesn’t want to tell Moon that she doesn’t believe in unicorns, although he ought to know as much. She believes in Moon, who is a god, and she believes in his magic, because she loves him. But what she saw that night—that miracle that rescued her from Dragon—couldn’t have been real. Maybe she’s going crazy like her sister, which wouldn’t be all that surprising, after so many years alone in the desert she can’t even be sure she’s counting them right.

  “I don’t know why it saved me,” she says, mostly to herself. “I don’t know what happened.”

  There is no way Moon could know what she’s talking about, but he says, “Sure you do.”

  Delilah lies silent, eyes open long after Moon falls asleep again. She is ashamed of how much she wishes she could believe. How she wishes that white horn would lean into her again with its healing light, and forgive her for giving up—so long ago she can’t even remember it—her innocence.

  “What are you doing?” says Kite, narrowing his eyes at his sister. You know Ma doesn’t want you doing that, he’s about to say, but stops himself. What does it matter? His mother worries about everything.

  Chelya brushes the girl’s hair away from her eyes and caresses her cheek, but the girl does not stir. The girl’s skin looks inhumanly soft. She is wearing a material that Kite has never seen before, that seems to swim over her body. When Chelya looks at him, he looks away, scuffs the dirt with his toe.

  “Shhh,” she says.

  “Whatever,” grumbles Kite. “You’re not being so quiet. I hear you in here talking to her, telling her little stories.”

  Chelya smiles at him—that smile that makes it impossible for him to be mad at her, that makes him ashamed of his own awkwardness. Why
should it bother him that she sits with the girl? What is his mother so afraid of, locking her up out here in the barn?

  “I don’t want to leave her all alone out here,” says Chelya. “I don’t want her to get lonely.”

  “She’s sleeping. You can’t get lonely when you’re sleeping.”

  His sister shrugs. The morning sun shifts into the doorway and stumbles over the scattered hay, lies down over the girl’s face as if it has finally found its home. “She has nightmares,” says Chelya. “I can tell.”

  The mother wakes on her bed of pine needles and hay, thinking first of her children. She already saw Chelya, her eldest, walking in from the fields—her hair still half webbed over her face, her blanket rolled clumsily under one arm. Malachite she has not seen yet. A flash of anxiety flips through her throat, but she swallows it out of habit. She doesn’t like that they sleep out in the fields all summer, but they insist upon it. What could happen to us? they ask her, laughing.

  Fawn is young to be the mother of two teenagers, but old enough to value peace above all else, breathing in the morning with deep lungs and unhurried vision. Maybe she has always been this old. Even as a child, her mother has told her, she never rushed, never took for granted a single moment of her day. She knit her life together piece by piece, and each thing she came upon she touched with solemn gentleness, as if immediately burdened with the weight of the world’s wonder from the time she was born.

  The pine needles crinkle under her as she rolls over and lays her hand on her husband’s, which is resting on the rise and fall of his chest. They don’t say anything as they watch the morning light creep over the eastern garden, kiss the fragile heads of the seedlings, and spark with cold freshness on the tall grasses that the deer and their children are nibbling with selfless grace. From their bed on the rooftop, the couple can see their whole world awakening: Fawn’s mother’s tent on the northern hillside, the horses grazing around it, the gardens to the east and the west, and the goats fenced in between the house and the eastern garden, already chasing each other and pushing each other off of boulders. The river runs through everything, through the gardens and the goat pen and even the front room of the house. The song of that moving water seems right for all times, all seasons: a lullaby when they are sleeping or sad, a hymn when they awaken or celebrate—even though in reality, it barely changes.