Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  In his mouth she dives down into a dark forest, and they walk for days through silent pines, where ravens croak an ancient language above their heads and moss sinks juicy and cold beneath their feet. She feels his hand grip her hip, slide up, and stroke with one finger the underside of one breast. She feels his holding back and also his certainty, his hand—with its intention, its clear ability, its rough heat—a hundred times more certain upon her body than she has ever felt of herself.

  Then he pulls away, leaving her desire to course down her legs, leaving the memory of his hand in every place on her body where it did not go. He stands up fast and wipes his hands on his shorts, dirt dribbling down to where they’re cut above his knees. Then he runs them hard across his head, dirt in his hair, not caring. “This never happened, Lonely,” he says. “This never happened.” And then he’s walking away fast.

  Lonely pauses for only a moment and then keeps weeding. She has to. The movement of it, and the feel of life and earth in her hands, are the only things she can hold onto. She listens to her own fast breath. She feels the pathway his hand traveled, more vivid than anything else real, so lit by the friction of that touch it is like a different color, a different temperature, a different material, even, from the rest of her body. The fire in her devours the memory of his tongue, turning her body so ravenous it frightens her. The earth in her awakens and is comforted by the firm reality of his hand, the desire of this other that makes her real. The air in her already draws her mind away into the dream of love, the person who belongs to her, who will one day caress her all over, only her—only for the love of her. The water in her rolls in stormy waves all through her, pained by the impossibility of Rye’s love, furious at her own loneliness.

  The fire and the air pull her skyward toward hope. The water draws her downward, and backward toward her past. The earth cradles her, rocking her with her own motion, until she finally feels safe to stand up, and walk back to the house as if nothing has happened.

  “Where were you on the full moon?”

  The oldest goddess sits down on the stone balcony, level with the highest branches of the great tree where birds no longer alight. Only the cloud of Yora hangs there darkly, pretending to sleep. Yora cannot hear the question the goddess asks her companion, because pain cannot hear.

  The younger goddess who sits before her is different from the others. She is the one who has always wanted to go down and enter the City, to work her magic among people—not stay cloistered up here in the garden forever. A few nights ago, she returned from somewhere. Her eyes in human form are suffused with clear light. She hangs those eyes boldly on the leader’s gaze, like treasures she’s taken from some grand, distant land.

  “I found Dragon,” she admits without hesitation.

  The older goddess’s attention flows toward her. She is not angry, only attending.

  “I needed to feel what it meant to be human,” the younger goddess continues. “Ever since Dragon left, I could not stop thinking of his desire, the boldness of his body.” She breathes in deeply. Her tongue still burns from human kisses. The thrill of her adventure sends her gliding forward into what she will say. She has no fear. “I wanted to know what it would feel like to be touched by such intensity. We take human form and we speak of humans and we try to help humanity, but it is all a lie if we do not experience these fundamental passions, these desires and urges and needs that make human beings what they are. That is what I believe.”

  The leader stares back at her with equal boldness. “So?”

  “I wanted him to touch me. I wanted him to show me what it felt like to be a woman. I wanted to know this pleasure that could be so great, so great that he would beg and plead for it, that he would shame himself for it, that he could not bear to be without it.” She pauses, as if expecting protest, but she receives none.

  “I found Dragon in the desert. I spoke to those who had witnessed his passing: Coyote, the vultures, a scorpion, cacti. Even the river knows him by now. They are wary of him but had nothing ill to say of him. They had not seen him for some time. So I went to the caves where we know the dragons lived long ago. But they were changed.”

  She stops again to catch her breath. What will it be like now, to continue on in the Garden? Will the passion she has known infuse her prayers, making them more powerful? Or will it tear her apart, drawing her ever backward toward humanness, impossible to resist? But she is not human. It was only an experiment, the briefest meeting with what could have been, in some other, mortal life.

  “The caves were seething, writhing with water like the hot inside of a woman’s desire. I could not resist them. As I stepped toward the water, the steam enveloped me, opening the pores in my skin, opening all the openings of my body, undressing me and peeling me apart. I lost control over my form. For the first time I felt the luxury of my own breasts, the pressure of my own sex, the crying mouth between my thighs. The water roared from below, like the mouth of a dragon. I kept moving deeper into its heat. I do not know when my body became wet, or if the wetness came from inside of me or out. The water came like hands around me, swirling against my most sensitive places. I could not stand. The movement of the water was driving me mad, my body overflowing, falling apart—”

  She stops and takes a short, deep breath through her mouth. The older goddess watches her and smiles softly at her beauty.

  “When I landed, deep down in that place, I was helpless. I was afraid but I could not move, my body convulsing and soft as clay. I was all body, I was nothing but body. I did not know flesh could be so mutable, like water, changing from solid to liquid, and then, when Dragon touched me, into a vapor of pure joy.”

  “Dragon was there?” the old goddess interrupts.

  “Dragon was everywhere. His hands were the caress of the water, his breath was the steam, his body was the roar of the dragons and the answer to all the desire that had built in me as I traveled downward through the water. The days I’d traveled in the desert, whole fields of desire opened inside me that I did not know were there. The form of his body was everywhere to me—in the stones and the upright cacti and the dunes and the hot animals running. I remembered his hard smooth skin, the desire in his eyes, his broad chest, his strong penis—these things so wonderful, like nothing we have here, nothing I’d ever known. I could think of nothing else. My body became wholly a body, itching with these memories, itching with the absence he had left behind.

  “So when he began to touch me— I cannot describe it. I will never be able to describe it. Like a castle built of pleasure. But more than that, he taught me about beauty. He traced my form and made me, and I saw the light that I am and that I have to give. I felt this in the touch of his hands, and how they loved me, how they gloried in my womanhood.

  “I am not the only woman—or goddess—who has come to him. There are others who come to him. He has a human friend, a woman, who came to him on the new moon. There were others, too. It is a gift he gives them, this loving.”

  The older goddess is silent. The still air of the mountaintop is grey and cool today, heavy in the room of the heart below them. “The body’s form reflects the spirit, but it is not the same thing,” she says slowly. “If we become too focused on the body, we lose touch with the spirit.”

  “But sometimes we must begin there,” argues the young woman. “Sometimes we must begin with the body. I’ve returned here to tell you: I think Yora must be reborn in human form. I think it is Dragon’s purpose to heal her—to remind her of herself, to remind her of her own beauty and power. To make her feel the way he made me feel. That is how she will return to being a goddess, and then the river will awaken.”

  The elder raises her eyes again to those of the younger, and is silent in thought. She herself is only half-formed into a human state at this moment, the lower half of her body fading into mist. She remembers Dragon’s presence before her the day they said goodbye, the way it made her retreat ins
ide herself like a child in the face of thunder. The truth is, this young goddess has entered a realm she could never enter, would never want to. This young one’s spirit is made of flame, easy to excite, its passion sinking or soaring with circumstances, naturally adjusting to change. By contrast, the elder’s sense of peace in this life—the quiet cradle of imperturbable understanding with which she unifies the Garden and the spirits who occupy it—is a delicately strung structure like spider silk, whose perfect balance could survive very little of the rough passions beyond this small world.

  “Dragon needs Yora, too,” adds the younger goddess. “He needs water, the cool water of the river. It will soothe him, for even now, I know, he suffers.”

  The two goddesses look toward Yora, a cloud hanging like a deep bruise in the now brittle tree. Yora doesn’t mean to, but she brings death. She will continue to bring death, until she releases her own death, and agrees to be reborn.

  The air is still and sultry, the day of Lonely’s second full moon in the mountains. In the twenty days or so since the last big rain, everything has dried up. Layers of soil sift into the wind, as if giving up their attachment to the earth. Dead grasses turn brittle and creak in the sun, waiting for relief. The idea of rain sits tense in the air but so far the sky is clear.

  Heat clutches Lonely’s body as she escapes through the back door into the darkened main room. Fawn has covered the skylight to cool the room, but it still feels stuffy to Lonely. She longs for the cold touch of the river but is still uneasy about entering the forest alone, afraid to lose herself again in that in-between world where she is neither human nor god. She thinks of Eva’s cool underground chamber beneath the hill, but knows better than to bother her in the middle of the day. Fawn and Chelya are still out in the gardens planting seeds for the fall crop, but Lonely, her body formed in the high-pitched delicacy of cold ocean air, cannot stand up to such heat the way their sturdy earth bodies can. Seeing her swaying under the weight of it, they sent her home.

  Rye is gone. He went alone to Jay’s farm, and said that maybe he’d return tonight, or maybe tomorrow morning. No one went with him. While Lonely was still in bed, she could hear him arguing with Fawn above her. She could not understand what they were saying, because both of their voices were so soft and controlled. But she knew he was going, and she had not spoken to him since what happened happened. All morning she watched him, watched his bare muscles in the sun—hard in their motion but obedient to the tasks his mind gave them—his body innocent of her watching, his face shaded by his hat. All morning she remembered the words he had spoken to her in the fields, and understood the hunger between them, and all morning her body belonged to him, but he never once looked up.

  Now she stands inside the main room, out of breath, feeling the resting stillness of the family’s absence. She hears the echo of Chelya’s laughter in the rafters, sees Rye’s other boots sitting in a pool of dried mud by the door to the greenhouse, feels the slow prayerful motions of Fawn’s hands weaving the whole space together even in her absence—caressing the space over the wooden table, and nestling among the jars and herbs. Fawn says that the house itself has a soul.

  Then she remembers that the house, too, has an underground room, like Eva’s under the hill. At the southeastern corner of the room, a spiral stairway connects all three levels of the house: the rooftop garden, the main room, and the basement. Though in her earliest memories, height was a cold, windy place, she has learned that here in the house, deep in the lands of earth, heat rises, and cooler places are hidden below. So she opens the hatch in the floor, and descends.

  It smells like Eva’s chamber, at once dusty and clean—free from the live, animal scents of ordinary life in the family. The same coolness meets her feet on the black earthen stairs. Spiders move at the faint stir of her passing. And as in Eva’s chamber, a light meets her arrival.

  No sunlight can enter here to reveal the arrangement of crates and jars of stored food, only the palest light streaming behind her from the room above. Little is stored here in the summer, and the family find their way by candles when they have to search for something—all except Fawn, who knows the placement of things so well she can find what she’s looking for in almost pitch blackness. But across the long cavernous room, past shelves of preserves and lines of dried meat and fruit, Malachite jumps at the sound of her step and looks up from a circle of candlelight.

  “Oh!” cries Lonely. “I didn’t mean to—” She stops. What didn’t she mean to do, exactly? She knows only that Malachite’s nervousness makes her afraid of herself, whenever she’s around him.

  “It’s okay,” he mumbles, closing something and standing back. He looks at the ground and stands there, as if waiting for her next move. Everything outside the ring of candlelight is grey, but in the shadow she can see the finely contoured fists at the ends of his lanky arms, the sharp bulge of his throat as he swallows. He is thinner than the rest of his family but with the same rich hue to his skin, like the desert when it turned to silk mud in the rain. He reminds her of the stag gods with their cool, handsome faces.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, seeing his hand drop from the table.

  “Oh I was—” Kite looks up at her, then quickly away again, as if remembering a taboo. “I was reading.”

  “What is reading?”

  “Oh,” He looks up at her again, and this time he doesn’t look away. She sees him stand a little straighter. “Something that Grandmother knows how to do. She taught me. In the City, the people use symbols on paper to talk to each other. They say the same things on paper that they do with their mouths, only it’s—different.” He falters as Lonely crosses the room toward him, and runs one hand through his hair just like Rye did after he kissed her. He turns his body away from her, toward the thing he was looking into before, but she can feel his heat rising, as from a stone in the sun. He opens the thing and she sees it is not a container at all, but a beautiful bound packet of crisp square sheets as thin as birch bark.

  “This is a book,” says Malachite. “Each of these is a word.”

  “Each of what?” says Lonely.

  “This,” he says, framing tiny black marks between the tip of his thumb and forefinger, but she still doesn’t understand. When she leans closer, he backs away as if stung—his hand suddenly clumsy, wobbling the candle so that it almost falls over.

  “I never knew about this,” Lonely says.

  “I’m the only one in the family besides Grandmother who knows how to read,” Kite mumbles beside her, and even though she’s not looking at him, she can feel his eyes on her breasts, coming back to them again and again. “My mother never wanted to learn. She doesn’t understand the point. No one else in my family understands why writing is important.”

  “Why is it important?” She looks up at him, more interested in his passion for the thing than in the thing itself.

  “Because,” he says quickly, his voice tense as if he expects her not to understand either, “it’s different from speaking. When people say things or make promises, they change their minds later, and then they don’t remember what they said. But books keep information forever. Someone wrote it down, and it’s still here, so you know it’s real.”

  What if it wasn’t real in the first place? Lonely wonders. Then she asks, because she knows Kite wants her to, “What does it say?”

  “A lot of things. About the City, and the way they operate there. The way they make machines do things, the way they make light. My mother doesn’t believe in all that, but she doesn’t know how to read either. The City is a magic that is made possible by writing. Writing can explain things that we can’t.”

  Lonely looks at him, and he avoids her gaze, but she’s got him trapped in the space between her and the wall. Remembering something, she asks, “Why didn’t you go with your father today? To Jay’s.”

  Kite shrugs. “We just saw them. I want to go somewhere new. I wa
nt to meet new people.”

  “Like who?” Lonely teases him, remembering Chelya’s jest. “Girls?”

  Kite’s mouth twists. He’s holding himself as far from her as possible. He is exactly her height. “No,” he says sternly. Then suddenly he looks right up at her, and his words come out fast. “Someday I’m going to go to the City. I don’t care what they say. I know there’s evil there, but there’s also great wisdom. They don’t understand that, but I do, because I’ve read these books.”

  Finally, certain images from Eva’s underground room fall together in Lonely’s mind, so clearly that she can’t help but smile a little. That’s what all those colored blocks were, piled to the ceilings around her walls! What stories, what truths could be inside them! No wonder Eva knows so much. “Where do they come from—all these books?”

  “My grandmother brought them all, from the City. It took her years. After she and my mother came to the mountains, she kept making trips back to get them. She missed them.” His voice is quiet with awe.

  “And you want to go there, even though they don’t respect farmers?”

  Kite shrugs again. “I’m going to bring back their wisdom, and it will change our lives. It will make everything easier. My mother thinks any change you make to nature is evil. But it’s not that way. We make changes whatever we do, even when we build our homes. There are other animals who make changes, too, like beavers and ants. If you do it respectfully, without harming anything, I think there’s a way.”

  Lonely stares at him because she doesn’t know what to say. Her destiny and her past are tied intimately together with this mythical place of evil and power that she knows nothing about. When she looks into his eyes, she knows suddenly, with a sharp, emotionless knowing like a blue light flashing in space, that one day she will go there too. To the City.