Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The first light ahead does not welcome them. It’s all noise and motion—motion so fast it rips holes in reality. But he recognizes that light, though it makes him even sicker inside. He recognizes the cars shining smoother than water and speeding fast to nowhere, and the tight locked spaces, and the doors separating worlds, and the concrete walkways where feet leave no tracks, and the violent bodies, and the homeless hearts. It all comes fast on him at once: the nightmare he has always avoided, all his life until now.

  But it means he was right, and there is hope in the center of all this.

  They emerge into that garish light, and he tells himself not to look back. He never wants to know how the mountain appears from this side. Perhaps it’s a monstrous hill of eroding dust, or perhaps it’s a heap of trash.

  But of course, he looks back anyway. There is nothing there. He cannot see from whence they came—only the City all around them.

  For in the City, people cannot even see the mountain. They do not even know that the dream is there.

  The truth is that on the other side of the mountain, everything is opposite. So if here in this Other World, the City covers all the lands that were still wilderness in the world Sky has come from, then what was City in that world will be wilderness in this one.

  Therefore in the heart of this world, his people’s home will still be wild.

  9th MOON

  Lil,

  If I had words to give you. If I could say, somehow, that I love you.

  The best I could give you was always enough for you. A fleeting visit you could never expect. Showing up empty, and only when I wanted to—not when you most needed it, not when you were most alone. A protected love—that’s what I gave you. A conditional love, only when I felt safe.

  You deserve better. But because my love was the best love you ever got, you figured you’d take it.

  Lil, I couldn’t love you all the way because I wasn’t all the way myself. I guess you knew that. Now I’m going to try to be myself, but it means I can’t be with you that way ever again. It doesn’t make any sense.

  Lil. I tried to find you so your fire could dissolve me up into the sky. But you weren’t there for me when I needed you, like I have never been there for you when you most needed me. It was my own anger that dissolved me, instead.

  You know what that anger feels like. You feel it all the time. It always frightened me, so that I turned away from you when you felt it. But down in the desert I fought your lover, and he caused me pain, and it was the first pain that I ever got to feel, and it was the anger that made me feel it. That burning. You know.

  My own fire. If I’m rain, and I have fire inside me, then you, little fire goddess, must have water inside you too. I wish I could tell you that. Maybe it would help you.

  Do you know what tears feel like when you can’t find a way to cry them, what anger feels like when you think you have no right? It seemed so easy for you. I envied you, Lil.

  But I can’t be with you any more. I can’t talk to you ever again, in that form.

  Lil, the days we chased each other, hot legs pounding, stomachs clenched, in the meadow. The nights we spread our arms and turned in the desert, feeling the wind spiral into us. The noise of our heartbeats in the still forest when we hunted, the ache of my breath leaving my lungs as I played my flute, fur against my palm, skin against my bare chest, the breath of your whisper around the labyrinth of my ear. The touch of your child’s hands, as if I were human, as if I were yours and you, mine.

  Lil, I took my body for granted. I let other people use it. I thought pleasure was meaningless. I knew taking human form was only an excuse to avoid what I’m here for. I knew it was an escape. And I felt guilty about it. I tried to punish myself; I tried to make that body hurt. But I couldn’t feel anything because I wanted so desperately not even to exist.

  But now that I’ve lost my body, I long for the tears to cry for it. I long for a heart to ache for its loss. I miss it so much. It wasn’t a hungry body, but now I see that it could still experience joy. And your memory was stored inside the habits of its motions, its synapses, its pains, its impulses. Because through that body, I got to love, and I didn’t realize that that was part of the story, too. That was part of why I’m here. I wasn’t wasting all that time while the world went thirsty and the heart of the City dried up and forgot the rain. I was learning how to love.

  I’m up here now in the sky, Lil, where you can never, ever be, and I know how Yora felt. I know how the easiest thing is to hang up here forever. It’s so easy to be nothing. Forgetting calls to me and pulls at me and tempts me, the way sleep tempts a human being when he is lost on a cold winter night that will kill him. You’d think it would be easy to rain. To let go. But I must have turned human all those years with you, because I’m afraid. I wish you could be here with me.

  Yora had to face up to returning in human form. But me, I have to face up to never being human again. To being, instead, what I was meant to be.

  Lil, if I had words to speak. But I don’t. Because I have no mouth, no tongue, no throat, and no lungs. Not any more. I am rain, only rain. Or I am an idea of rain, something I hardly remember now.

  What is the purpose of a god? I can’t remember. The water exists and flows. It needs no god to oversee it. Being a god is not about controlling anything—I’ve known that for a long time. What, then? Why am I here?

  I feel like you would know. I feel like you’ve been trying to tell me, but I haven’t been listening.

  —Moon

  Ever since she talked with the tree in her dream, Lonely feels something she could almost call faith. If she thinks about it too much, she feels afraid again, but when she’s not thinking she moves with grace, as if she knows what she’s doing. In the mornings she does everything she can to help the family. She tries to rise before they wake. She lights the fire and heats the water. She asks Eva what medicines she needs for the pain in her bones, and gathers them for her the best she can. She helps Chelya and Rye make breakfast when Fawn can’t get herself out of bed. She learns to chop wood.

  In some quiet moment when the others are busy outside, she, too, leaves the house, and then she enters the forest. She doesn’t want to ask too much of the family, so she takes no food with her—only water. She explores each tree, and the shapes between it and each other tree, with her eyes and her fingers and her sense of smell, until she can recognize a certain path for herself to find her way out there and back again.

  Every day she comes to the fire circle, and greets the fallen tree, and sits on the feet-stamped ground where in the summer the fairies danced. She tries to be patient. She sits all day with the birch, the chestnut, the dead log, the mushroom, the empty hole of the weasel or a bird she hears cheeping, unseen, in the snow-shrouded bush. Sky could be anywhere.

  What do you know about him? she asks each one.

  She asks again and again. She lies back on the snow, which feels warm through the layers of her clothing, and opens herself up, opens the question up to the world.

  he is afraid of you, say a cluster of branches that become the limbs of a deer, and then, when she starts up and looks after them, are gone—but he needs you.

  he doesn’t even know if he is real, says the snake who hibernates now beneath the frozen mud, who takes all afternoon to form the words that Lonely dreams, but your love makes him real.

  maybe he looks for you, chatters the squirrel, heedless of winter’s somber silence, but he’s looking backwards. He leaps and laughs, circles the tree, up and up.

  Their voices comfort her, even while they worry her, and even when she doesn’t understand. She is not so alone any more. In her heart, she feels that truly it is the elders of his people who speak to her now; and this does not seem incredible to her, for though Sky saw them as only those white birds, she feels they have always been everywhere.

  We are always with him, the
y seem to say. But he does not know. Nor does he admit to himself that he has lost us forever. That we are gone. That we died long ago. That he is living in a land of ghosts.

  “Did I break him apart from you,” asks Lonely, with pain, “when I made love to him, and caused him to sleep?”

  You did not cause him to sleep, they say, speaking through eddies of snow and the invisible moon. You woke him. You woke him from that dream of the past, in which he did not yet have to feel.

  “But how can I find him now?” Lonely is crying as she lies open in the snow, her heart breaking with compassion for the idea of him wandering alone, awake to all his own sorrow—sorrow so painful that he created an entire dream of a life up on that mountain so that he wouldn’t have to feel it. She watches the colors of the sky twist and turn, watches it swallow and spit back the light, watches it pulse silently with the sun and foam up the clouds. “How can I help him?”

  only love, say a flock of starlings rising, the last dead leaves falling. only love and love and love. you are no bigger than this.

  And all she really wants to know is, How can I be with him again? And all she really knows is the memory of his helpless animal breath in her hair, when she touched his body as he spoke of dreams. All she has is the memory of his light voice and his unconscious arms as they held her that last night, and the thousand memories of those eyes and that kiss in that snow and that ice—and that smile, that childishly brave smile like a lasso of hope tossed out to her over a frozen past. All she has is the sequence of each moment they spent together, which she replays in her mind every day, as if it will tell her the end of the story.

  At the end of the day, she prays to him. Though all she can hear in response is a wordless, heartless wind, she whispers his name. Sky. I know you are here. I am your roots. Come down. She prays, though she does not understand her own prayer. She prays to make herself believe. She remembers how she stood on the cliff overlooking that nothingness into which he had flown, and how—without thinking, because there was no other choice—she jumped. How he caught her then, because he had to—he had to admit that he loved her.

  For she would leap again now. I’ll do anything, she tells him. Tell me what to do. Tell me how to find you. Tell me how to save you.

  Still, only the wind replies. But sometimes, like the day she stood on that cliff and shouted his name, she thinks she can feel his silent, fragile listening somewhere in the ethers like a wild animal unsure if it can trust her—holding his breath, listening for the guidance of her voice. As if he had flown to pieces and his spirit, his heart, his eyes and his ears, all rest in frozen waiting in the trees and stars around her, waiting for her to find him and wake him and put him back together again. Waiting for her to breathe into him and say, You are human. Be human again.

  In the evening, light and dreamy from hunger, she whispers against each tree trunk to find her way home, and walks up the moonlit field to the house, with its warm lonely eyes of firelight and its blue shadow in the snow. In the winter, darkness closes in on either side of day like two cradling hands, stretching its arms around from the black body of the night’s center—the abyss of midnight—when she will wake starkly in the silent room, the fire gone out, the stars hissing at her from all the way in the sky in a language too far away to hear.

  At dinner, she sits by Chelya, puts her arm around her if she seems sad, strokes her hair. Sometimes Rye will talk to Lonely in the evening, while Fawn is silently working or tucked away in the womb of her own fear, and Lonely will help him lay out his sorrows in the blanket of her listening—for they do not weigh much—and understand for the first time that loneliness does not belong to her alone.

  For Rye tells Lonely things he has never spoken of before. He tells her how beneath his own anxiety for Kite’s absence, there has also risen up this intense longing which he has not felt since before he fell in love with Fawn—which he has not allowed himself to feel. How he lies awake at night, imagining Kite’s journey, and then imagining his own, as if it were he who could walk away without thought for his family, and go wherever he chose, and live by adventure and chance, and be utterly free. How maybe what Kite seeks is something that’s missing in this family—something Rye has felt for a long time and denied to himself. They honor the seasons and the giving earth and the food they eat, Eva and Fawn did an initiation ceremony for Chelya when she came of age, and Rye tried to do one for Kite too, but still something is missing: that which is dangerous and brings unforeseen change, that which is masculine, that which blazes out into the world, whatever the world is—that which must prove its own life, and prove it by being brave.

  Rye talks, and Lonely listens and tries to understand through him the fight that rose up in Sky, what he longed for, and why he could not stay inside her arms and be at peace. For sometimes she thinks that maybe Rye’s words are—at least for now—the only answer to her prayer.

  She feels a sense of certainty sometimes, and in that certainty a surprising nostalgia, as if this time is almost over and soon she will know what to do. When that time comes, she will be gone from here, for a long time or perhaps forever. But the time has not come yet, so she lies awake after the others fall asleep, and battles with the fears that come creeping back in.

  What did you learn today? they mock, in the voice of the wind. Nothing.

  The moons continue, and you’ll be back on the island trapped in the old woman’s stare. As far as you know, he only drifts further away—and you here, locked against the earth, locked in your own human ignorance.

  She clutches the Unicorn’s horn always at her side, wrapped in her cloaks against her heart. But never again does she feel its singing sting, as she did on the night Sky reached out to her so briefly through the skin between worlds, and held her once more.

  “You can call me Kite,” Malachite reminds him.

  Dragon says nothing. He feels awkward, somehow, dropping the formality of the boy’s full name. He feels that there is honor in calling each other by their whole names, like men.

  “My mother still insists on calling me Malachite. It bothers me. Like she doesn’t get that I’m choosing who I am—that I want to fly, that I’m freer than she is, tied so hard to the earth and so afraid. She keeps saying, ‘That’s the name I gave to you. That’s your name.’ It drives me crazy. She doesn’t own me, just because she’s my mother.”

  Dragon is thinking that Malachite is lucky, to have a mother who loves him. But he tries to focus on what the boy is saying, as they climb together—Malachite’s feet in sandals and Dragon’s feet bare—over red rock formations, the clouds above so thick and white they look solid as they skid fast into the horizon. He loves the way being with Malachite makes him use his mind—makes him have to figure things out that he never tried to figure out before. It pulls him away, a little, from the obsessions of his body and the sickness in his heart.

  “What is owning?” he asks, though he thinks he knows. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s like, you think you control something. When people create things, they think they own them. My mother created me, so she thinks she owns me. People in the City create things, so they think they own them. But they don’t own them. That’s why things get out of their control, my grandmother says. Because they don’t give them proper respect.”

  Something about what he’s saying is tugging at Dragon. “So no one owns anything?”

  Malachite thinks. “No. I guess not. It’s a made-up word, I think. A word the City made, but everyone uses it now. It doesn’t make sense, when you think about it.”

  “But what about when you love someone? And you want to—to give yourself to her.” Because it doesn’t seem wrong, suddenly, despite what Delilah said. It’s true, he must own himself. But there is more to it than that. Something Delilah didn’t understand. Something she feared.

  Malachite twists his forehead a little. “I don’t feel that way about anyone.”
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  “Haven’t you ever known a woman? A woman who owned you from the first moment you saw her, because she was so beautiful?”

  Yes. Dragon sees the boy’s face soften, sees him turn away. But Malachite avoids the question. “It’s like fire,” he says instead.

  “What?”

  “You don’t own the fire, right? You make it, but it’s not yours. No.” He stops to think. “Maybe that’s not the same thing….”

  They see a jack rabbit freeze in the near distance, and they both freeze, too. Malachite pulls out his slingshot, and waits a moment, letting their stillness make a quiet space around all three of them. Then he whirls it, his wrist turning faster than Dragon can see, but not too fast for the rabbit, who becomes a blur before the rock has left the cloth, shooting like a star across the sand and gone.

  Dragon feels sorry. He knows the boy, who hasn’t eaten yet today, must be hungry. This is the second animal he’s missed.

  “I wish I had that kind of magic,” he says. “So I could help you.”

  Malachite shrugs. “I don’t believe in magic.”

  Dragon stares at him, as they keep walking.

  “I mean,” adds Malachite quickly, as if afraid to hurt Dragon’s feelings, “I know you can do things. I know you can go without food and make fire and—I don’t know yet how you do it. But you can’t make things happen like that. You can’t make an animal come to you or die for you. That’s what I mean about owning.”

  Dragon thinks he understands now. But he doesn’t want to. “I think I want to own something,” he says.

  “Why?” Malachite stops.

  “Because if I can’t control anything, then nothing responds to me, nothing answers me, nothing—there’s just nothing! I’m alone.” He thinks of Yora’s nothingness. Of her absence everywhere, all the time, how it haunted him. How it still haunts him, despite all that Coyote taught him. Yet at the same time, he’s surprised by the calm with which he can think of these things now.