by Mindi Meltz
Delilah laughs. She peels pomegranate seeds into her mouth with her front teeth, feeling them drop like gel jewels onto her tongue and then burst.
Yet still. Still the silence aches lately, in a way it has never done before. And today—the night stretches so long before her.
I’m going to find the Unicorn, she hears herself saying to Dragon. So certain, as if she would go right now, as if she had no fear. But where will she go? She doesn’t even know what she herself means by it.
“What do you feel now?” asks Yora.
“Angry,” says Delilah, though she didn’t know it before she spoke the word.
“At whom?”
Delilah closes her eyes. She can’t see Yora at all now, only the river. Maybe she’s imagining this conversation inside her mind. But it doesn’t feel that way. She can feel the river listening, and that listening makes her mind clear and softens the sharp edges of her feelings.
“At Mira,” she says.
The water sounds like thousands of people all talking at once, like people flooding from a subway station or conversing in a giant room before the leader calls the crowd to order.
“For leaving me,” she adds.
“When they took her away.”
“No. When she left me. When she stopped answering me. When she stopped looking at me. Wouldn’t eat the food I brought her, wouldn’t even know me any more.”
The wind slips through the trees like a casual passer-by and is gone.
“When we got sent away, to school—” It always seems such a funny word to use out here. School. Meaningless to the desert, meaningless to the river. “When we got sent away, she was all I had, you know? I wasn’t ashamed of her, I didn’t care if she was crazy, I stood up for her no matter what. But I wanted her to love me, to talk to me, like—you know, like a sister.”
“There was something wrong.”
“Of course there was something wrong! But that’s what I mean. Why couldn’t she tell me?”
Delilah holds the remains of the fruit loosely in her hands, suddenly uninterested in it. It drips over the river like a bleeding heart.
“Why are you still here, Delilah?” asks Yora. “When you ran away to the desert you were only a child, and you were not thinking about the future. You only wanted to escape. Are you still the same girl you were then? Are you still so helpless, so alone?”
Delilah holds her face in her hands, tugs at the roots of her hair, sighs. “There’s something holding me here,” she says, and her words feel cottony and useless in her mouth. “My father asked me to burn down the pine forest. But I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t let it go. Because it’s kept me alive for so long, and even though I know now it’s a dream, maybe I still believe in it, because I have to. I can’t bear to destroy it. I can’t bear to be that person, Yora.”
But Yora is silent, and the silence is gentle and sweet.
“I don’t know,” Delilah says. “I don’t know why. I just can’t. My father died there. It’s his place. I can’t be the person—” She stops. She takes a tear out of her eye and looks at it, surprised. “I can’t be the person who destroys it.”
Yora waits, like an eddy between stones. Then she says, “You want to be someone who rescues, for once. Not someone who destroys.”
Delilah nods, not trusting her voice.
“Why do you not want to believe, then,” Yora whispers, “that she still exists somewhere—that you can find her?”
“What do you mean?” cries Delilah. “Don’t you think I tried to find her? Don’t you think I tried? How could I not wish—?” But she stops. Maybe it’s true. She doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want that obligation any more. Why not? Because I’m selfish, after all.
“That is not why,” says Yora.
“Fine. I suppose you know how to find her?” Delilah hisses.
She waits, but the sound of the water is her answer. The water knows everything. It is always flowing home. And Delilah sees her sister everywhere. She saw her in the deer’s eyes. She saw her like a light over the white girl’s shoulder, as they ate across from each other at the dream fire—like she was there all the time, but Delilah was afraid to look. She sees her when she closes her own eyes; she sees her inside herself. She sees her in dreams, where once she saw wings and fur.
“I know where her body is, not her spirit,” says Yora.
Delilah hangs her head again. “That’s not enough. Trust me. I know.”
“But the body is the only place you can begin. It is the only place she can ever come back to, whether she knows it or not.”
Delilah stretches her legs, immerses her feet in the river. Her shoulders ache. Her toes turn white in the cold water, like small eroding stones. She places a pomegranate seed on her tongue.
She knows that Yora, the river, won’t always talk to her like this. She knows it is a gift, for her to use while she can before she’s left alone again.
Secrets lie under last year’s dead leaves, whispering. The leaves beneath them are only skeletons of leaves, making a network, a cage of fibrous darkness, and the leaves beneath those are earth, black and luscious and ready to start again. Yesterday’s rain damps it all together, so that my feet make hardly any sound. But I know what is happening under the leaves. I know the way the silence unfolds. I know so much, so much that I used to think was forever closed to me, once my father died.
But me. What do I mean by that? I am a Unicorn now. Of course I know everything. But also—it makes me afraid, all this knowing.
I travel. I run now, nearly flying.
I run over burned hills like the moon. I run through deep brown grasses, the white of my back breaking through their surface, scared. I run over bright green moss shining with the cold. I run over mountaintops covered with tumbled boulders like shattered castles. I run through sunlight, so real and tangible in the autumn, like a live being. I skirt around the desert, where that desperate Dragon still hunts for the soul of Woman, as if to devour Her. I run far from the City. I am not ready yet. I run up into the sky, and run down, and walk wearily up again, too afraid to be still.
When I was a horse, without meaning to, I came to know the land again. What I had loved once—the grass, the wind—came to know me again. My body, my animal’s body—at least in that form—was my own again. It was safe to speak with spiders again. It was safe to listen to bees, and even without him there, I understood them. And Lonely! What a miracle, to know that I could love that way, and survive.
But this horn, still here between my eyes! I am still Unicorn, like a nightmare I keep waking up to. I keep giving it away. I gave it to Lonely, so that she could learn and heal from it. I give it to the river, so it can breathe again. I give it to the moon, because she’s never had anything of her own. I give it to the earth in a forest that’s been torn down, so that the new seeds will grow strong. Again and again I give away that light, but it keeps coming back, stronger than ever.
I want it to be gone. I stand under the waterfall and cry, silver tears that fall like fish into the river, and I wish it could wash the horn away. The fish come alive and wriggle their bodies downstream, finding their way to slower currents where they can hunt water striders in the shadows. No one will ever know those fish were once tears.
The idea of the horn terrifies me. I don’t want anyone to see. The horn—its very power—makes me vulnerable. It is not free, such power. Someone will hurt me for it: that is what always happens. The horror of it fixes me in this shadow behind the waterfall, hidden from the sun, hidden by the water’s deafening roar.
True, the water loves me again; the earth loves me. I do want to help Lonely, because when I was with her I remembered my holiness—where I come from, and where I must return to. And I understand something about her. The girl is carrying someone else’s pain, and the girl wants to fix tha
t pain, even though it is not her own. She feels it as if it were her own. She can no longer separate herself from it.
It makes me feel bitter; it makes me angry. It isn’t right! This desperation she feels. This suffering. I want to find the person who makes the girl suffer. I want to stop him. The fury of it tastes like blood in my mouth. But I’m afraid.
The water keeps falling before me, forever. I dip my horn into it and let it burn there, like a wound. I can’t feel it. It doesn’t feel like anything. It’s like a naked bone, with no nerves to feel, no muscles to move it, no flesh to hide it, sticking straight out into space.
Listen. I am the only character in this story who knows for certain where I come from, and what is going to happen to me. The identity of the Unicorn is very simple. Unicorn is for One, for Only, for I. I am. I am born in the Heart of the World, and I go back there to die, and be reborn again.
But sometimes I forget that.
Because in this life things became complicated. I was not born this time in the usual way. Something happened to stop the ceremony, and it was never completed. Instead I emerged somewhere else, through someone else, in a painful way. I became someone’s soul, when that soul got chased out of its body by violence. And he was always chasing me, that man who thought he loved me. Still I run from him. And the only salvation is to return home and be reborn again, start over—but how can I return to that paved-over place, where the Heart of the World once was?
It is not safe in this world for a Unicorn. It is not safe for anything sacred, not now. I will hide, as I have always hidden. I will hide inside this story, and the confusion of its people, who do not yet remember themselves.
Fawn flings open the door, her face white. Her hair loops in tangles about her cheeks. Lonely has never seen her so messy, as if her seams have been cut open. She’s holding several shawls tight over a soft brown dress, and the tight protrusion of her shoulders, thinner now, makes her look fragile like someone very young or very old. Her eyes skim Lonely’s face without understanding, and then, in the split second that they do, they slam shut—the light inside them blinking out as certainly as if her eyelids had actually closed. She leaves the door flung open and turns away.
Lonely is still standing in the doorway in shock as she hears Fawn’s unshod footsteps hissing against the rungs of the wooden ladder, ascending to the loft where Lonely last saw her, long ago, in Rye’s arms. Then Eva appears before her.
She doesn’t know what to say so when Eva holds out her hand, she just takes it, and lets the old woman lead her into the house with the same calm, tired shuffle, as if she knew all along that Lonely was coming. Of course she did. She knows everything. Why couldn’t she have told Lonely before, what would happen?
They sit down on the cushions close to the wood stove. Beneath the cushions, the floor is covered with wool and animal skins, scattered and layered like the cloths around Eva’s shoulders. The dim, windless silence of indoors is comforting. The deep nest of heat that fogs around them from the wood stove feels like love.
Eva sits down across from her, slowly, cringing a little. “So you’re back,” she says.
At the sound of Eva’s voice, Lonely begins to cry. She doesn’t stop crying for a long, long time. Eva sits there, watching her.
“What’s going on?” Lonely asks finally, trying to find her way back. “Why did Fawn—?”
But she stops in the face of Eva’s silence, and then slowly she takes in the mood of the house—this house she so remembers, whose wooden body sheltered her and gave her family for the first time, whose soul she came to recognize in the fire that burned at its center and the water that sang through it and the mingled breath of its people and the shapes and spaces they left behind. There is something wrong. She feels the presences of the people in the house, but there is a dark space hanging open somewhere, like a gaping wound. She turns back to Eva’s face and sees, for a heartbeat in the tricky light, a scar of fear running across it, as if Eva is still struggling to survive in a cold stormy forest from years ago, fearing at every moment that she might not be able to keep her daughter alive another day.
But then the shadowed planes of Eva’s face come together again into their familiar picture of webbed, level peace—almost. The light of the living, present moment moves in her eyes.
“Kite is gone,” she says.
Lonely stares.
“He left seven days ago. He left a note.”
Lonely imagines Fawn finding the note, perhaps left on the table, or on Kite’s bed, and handing it with trembling fingers to Eva, the only one who could read it. She imagines Eva looking up at her daughter with heartbreak in her eyes, not able to find words to speak it aloud.
“To the City,” Lonely whispers.
“Yes.”
Lonely feels something falling inside her, the downward spill of that same sadness—all the men turning away, going off somewhere with other worlds in their eyes and sad silence in their hearts, searching for something they can’t define, cold at the touch of women’s fingers, unreachable.
“Rye’s gone to look for him,” Eva sighs. “He left days ago. When Fawn heard the knock, she thought maybe….”
Lonely nods, though obviously Rye would not knock, nor would Kite.
“Why are you here?” asks Eva. Lonely feels her heart constrict. She cannot determine the emotion behind the question. Maybe there is no room for her here now. Maybe this family is like a wounded animal, wary and defensive, with no energy for anyone or anything but its own survival. And what then? Where will she go? The desperation of it brings bitterness to her voice—more than she intended.
“I failed,” she says.
“In what?”
“In love.”
“You weren’t able to love?”
“No. I wasn’t able to …keep it.”
“Hm,” says Eva, and nods. Then she keeps still, her eyes still holding Lonely with neither judgment nor compassion, as if waiting. Lonely remembers that she is starving. That she hasn’t eaten since last night, in a dream. But she doesn’t want to ask for anything. Maybe she shouldn’t even be here. But the thought of carrying her hunger with her back out into the cold, and being alone without the Unicorn, without a future, makes her cry again.
When she is able to stop crying for a second time, Eva is sitting closer to her, offering a small plate in her hands, and on the plate there is bread. Lonely pushes it into her mouth, barely chewing, and it rolls like fists into her stomach. Then Eva hands her a glass of milk, and she drinks it fast. She’s still so hungry, it’s hard to focus her eyes on Eva; it’s hard to keep her hands still.
“We don’t have much,” says Eva more gently. “It’s winter now. But as far as I’m concerned you can stay a little while. Maybe there is something you still have to learn here, that you didn’t learn last time.” She stands up, and Lonely feels ashamed of her helplessness, always asking of others.
“I’m going to bed now,” says Eva, “because this time of year, my bones hurt, and if I stay up with you longer I will be irritable and say things I don’t mean. My dreams await me. I sleep here by the fire, and tonight you can sleep here too. We’ll talk tomorrow about where you will sleep, if it’s okay for you to stay. It is crowded in here in the winter. Everyone sleeps in the loft, except for me.”
Lonely nods. She watches Eva as she ever so slowly, as if bending the limbs of an old, old tree, rises, walks the few paces to her mat, and lowers herself length by thin length back down to the floor. She tosses Lonely a blanket, and then curls up under her own.
It’s like a different house. A completely different house than the one Lonely remembered. Everything has changed.
“Thank you,” Lonely remembers to say to Eva’s small back. But she’s too hungry, and too frightened by the look she remembers in Fawn’s eyes, to go to sleep. The full moon is keeping her awake too, though she doesn’t know it, for
she did not notice it rising, and the passion of such a thing seems alien to her now. She watches the firelight flickering from behind the grate, one hand under her cloak and clasped around the Unicorn’s horn.
As she watches the fire, she climbs up into the distant attic of her own mind, to get away from the endless, redundant pain of her heart’s turning and the anxious rumble in her belly. Her mind, airy, spiders around the changing shape of the flames, considering, looking for thoughts to hold onto. She tries to decide what color the fire actually is. It seems orange, or maybe yellow, but then when she really looks at it, it’s not. Maybe white, but not exactly. The more she looks, the more there is no color—and the more there is every color. Then she remembers Moon, for the first time in what feels like a hundred years. She remembers the rainbow, and his soft kiss at its center.
The path of colors? Girl, you will do it again. Again and again and again, until you can hardly bear it. That’s what life is. Try to remember it’s a circle, and you’re immortal, and you can always come here, to the center, to rest.
Lonely closes her eyes. But she doesn’t sleep. Lonely, she thinks. Lonely. Her mind is a language, like Kite’s black marks on the page. If she could only follow it to the center. If she could just get through that depth of indigo, and back to that center, where that single kiss stilled her—no more than that one kiss, and no less.
But she’s not immortal any more. She’s here at the place where she first became mortal, where she first tasted food, where she first began to survive. At the center of her mortal body is her heart, and it hurts.
Lonely, she thinks. Because somewhere in that word is comfort. Something familiar, like the only home she has. That’s what the Unicorn meant, she thinks, falling into sleep. I have to get back to the center of the rainbow, and then I’ll know what to do….
But when she wakes, someone is yelling, and she does not remember her dreams.
8th MOON
Coyote keeps calling him a coward.
Or that’s the way it seems to Dragon, when Coyote follows him snickering, leering when Dragon turns around, and then bolts before Dragon can make a move. Coyote is laughing: Dragon is sure of it. Coward. Not enough man to hold onto a goddess….