Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “But you don’t need to own something for it to respond to you,” says Malachite. “If everything responded just how I wanted it to—if everything fell down and died right when I wanted it for my food—then things would be boring. You know?”

  “Are you happy?” Dragon asks.

  Malachite looks up at the sky and keeps walking. “I think so. Yeah. I like finding out new things. Things were too predictable back at home. I’m excited to see the City.”

  Dragon knows the general direction of “the City,” but it is Malachite—Kite, that is—who leads the way, who has planned their route exactly once he found the river again on the map. Dragon is amazed by the map: a tiny symbol of how everything in life is connected, like a window into the mind that dreamed this world, whatever it is. His dragons’ lair did not exist on the map, but Kite, with a god-like ease that unsettled Dragon, made a mark that showed him where it is. The river extends past his lair, past Delilah’s abandoned cave, and then stops. But east of his lair, back toward the mountains, the river forks off toward the City, and this fork continues almost to the ridgeline. Following this branch, they pass the development in the distance that Dragon once came close to, from the other side, on his journey down from the Garden. But Kite keeps walking. The people he’s seeking are at the heart of the City, where knowledge is kept.

  “I thought it was some god who created the City,” says Dragon now.

  Kite shrugs again. “I don’t know. I think that’s all stories. I mean I know my grandmother believes all that, and she knows a lot, but my dad says we’re all just people, you know? We have to be responsible for ourselves, not blame things on….” He trails off. “There’s Coyote,” he says suddenly. “Let’s follow him.”

  Shocked by this suggestion, Dragon turns in time to see Coyote running away into the brush, and Kite is already ahead of Dragon, starting after him. Dragon says nothing, but follows. It’s easy for him to make his footsteps as silent as Kite’s. He crouches when Kite crouches, steps when Kite steps, and then finds his own quiet route through the shadows. Never before has he tried like this to stay hidden, and it makes him feel strange and humble and lonely, but then after that a silent laughter starts jumbling in his belly, because he feels that they are playing some trick on Coyote, though he doesn’t know what it is. Without Kite, he never could have imagined such magic. The silence between him and the boy as they creep along—the silent understanding between them—feels good, like nothing he’s ever felt before. There is a sense of companionship with someone who is like him, in some way that doesn’t require words, doesn’t require anything of him. It isn’t the loving, devouring embrace he both needs and fears from woman, but it is a closeness just the same, a kind of gut-level agreement: to be men together, to be bold, to travel onward and onward, no matter what, into an unknown but deliberate adventure.

  Now he sees that Coyote is trailing a running bird. Kite has already seen this. Kite is circling around. Dragon stops and crouches. He watches Kite’s lean, focused arm unwind. He feels such a tenderness for his friend—for the instinctual confidence in his body, for the glorious manhood in him held out like an offering to life in the hands of the still-innocent boy. This is the first love Dragon has ever felt that doesn’t involve desire.

  The rock whirls. Coyote spins in mid-stride, then sits back and looks casual as Kite walks to the bird’s body to claim it. But his ears are pinned back, the romantic grace of his hunt deflated by his awkward snarl, his slinking backward. Kite is smiling.

  “Sorry, friend,” he says, looking kindly at Coyote but without regret. “You’d have done the same to me, if you could.”

  He and Dragon begin walking again, Kite swinging the bird by its feet. They are walking toward a hillside to get out of the wind, so that Dragon can make a fire for him to cook with. They both know this without saying anything. Dragon feels Coyote watching them go, and he makes himself look back so he won’t feel like a coward. Coyote is only sitting and watching, but Dragon thinks he sees him smile.

  “Sometimes,” says Kite, “it’s good to play a trick on the Trickster. Keeps things in balance, you know?”

  They sit in the lee of the hill, and Dragon sits cross-legged and focuses. He’s already made a fire on purpose for Kite once, but he’s still nervous. He’s so unused to trying. What if he can’t do it this time? But when he closes his eyes and breathes, it’s all still in there, closer than he realized, as if the act of leaving this place behind has brought it right to the surface: all the longing, the fury, the unspoken love. He cries out. When he opens his eyes to the flames, he can barely remember at first who Kite is.

  Afterward, he feels for the first time how his fire is a blessing, a gift he has, something special he can awaken at will. And at the same time he feels, for the first time, how it doesn’t belong to him at all.

  The colors on the signs are too bright—a uniform kind of brightness that leaves no room for wonder. You know how it is: those shapes are so hard, they knock a hole in your stomach, and that hole remains, aching and aching and nothing can fill it but more of the same, so that eventually you can’t see anything but those colors, those shapes. You keep needing more of them to fill you.

  For the Unicorn, Sky knows, beauty is food. Yet for him she steps resolutely, head hanging, over gutters, through the blasts of machines turning over and over the earth, between the alien rectangles and the swells of the land cut to patternless pieces by random metal, concrete, and plastic lines. The people—what are they fed on? Not food, not the lives of real animals or plants, but some artificial mockery of these, so that their bodies no longer take the shapes of real life—their limbs malformed, not shaped for movement, their graceless bodies bulging in the wrong places, their clothing rectangular. Lost hips, sagging bellies, concave chests, weeping breasts, flapping arms. The angular lines of their shirts and shorts cut them into pieces.

  In their dreams Sky had seen the most beautiful part of them. He had seen the truest part of them that remained. He cannot see it any longer.

  But the Unicorn carries him onward, though Sky is sure she will die of such ugliness. She has already taken him under the mountain. She could leave him now, and return to the world they came from, where most of the earth is still beautiful. But though she has not spoken of it, he knows that she, too, comes from where he is going. He could lift into the air on his own wings, and soar above this place, searching from a more distant height for the center he seeks. Yet—whether for her own sake or his, he does not know—he cannot leave her.

  She walks on, day and night, never stopping or changing her pace. In her stride Sky feels at once the ease of rivers and the broken, rhythmic seesaw of the land-bound mammal’s humble step: back and forth, right and left, an endless prayer knocking against the earth, whether with hopelessness or ceaseless faith Sky cannot tell.

  At night she says to him, “It doesn’t matter. I have nowhere else to go but where you are going.”

  He sees the people who sleep in the streets and the lonely people in their beds behind the windows. He sees the people who stay awake all night, seeking and fighting, pause to watch her pass—even if they don’t actually see her—and lift up their chests without realizing it, something like hope beginning there. Something they haven’t felt since they were born.

  “Who’s there?” cries one man, unfolding himself from rags and standing on shaky legs. Sky can see the lost ghost of who he could have been standing in front of him, the hero’s destiny his heart once planned for him but long ago gave up on. “Who’s there?” he cries out again, tears making acid paths across his cheeks.

  The Unicorn bows her head to him, and though still he cannot seem to see her, he lifts his hands to her horn, and seems to feel the light that lies in his palms. He smiles. As she turns away he clenches his fists as if determined, and his muscles seem to glow. He walks away down the street, standing tall, his stride purposeful.

  “B
ut if you heal them,” Sky whispers, “the ones on the other side—the world we come from—will only suffer more. Because everything is opposite there. Don’t you see?”

  The Unicorn keeps walking. “No,” she answers calmly. “I do not believe that everything is opposite, Dream God. That is not why I exist.”

  “But here you see it,” cries Sky, unable to stop himself, though he knows—he thought he knew—the meaning of the Unicorn. “There is City and there is Wild, and they are not the same! They cannot understand each other.”

  “Of course they can,” says the Unicorn. “They are the same. Aren’t they dreams of each other? Is the mind opposite the body? Don’t they only need to know each other, and love? Doesn’t the City always yearn to be wilder, and the things of the wild always yearn to grow stronger, live longer, do all the things that the City has done?”

  Sky enfolds his own face in his black wings. He doesn’t want to hear about love, or to care any more about the world. He is so tired. “When we get there,” he says to her, “you can stay there with me. You’ll be safe there, forever.”

  But he knows he only speaks his own longing, and he knows she doesn’t believe him.

  “Remember your promise,” is all she says.

  The closest Fawn ever comes to yelling now are swift hisses in private, always out of Lonely’s sight. Now she and Rye are arguing outside, and Lonely can hear them from where she picks greens in the greenhouse. Outside, twilight is already pinching closed the day, but Jay’s horse has just carried him off running back to their farm, and in a moment Fawn will have to follow him. Willow is giving birth.

  “Chelya is never here!” cries Fawn now. “She’s always with him. When is she going to learn that no one is more important than her family—no one!”

  “Fawn, you’re not making sense,” Rye sighs, not bothering to raise his voice. “Chelya didn’t know this would happen today. You know she would want nothing more than to go with you.”

  “But I never know where she goes. She’s always gone. She thinks she’s in love—but it’s nothing, it’s nothing, when it’s all we can do to keep our family together.” Lonely hears the familiar tightening in her voice that is tears fought back. “And it’s so late. She knows better than to stay out so late on a winter night! How can she—? It’s so dangerous—and now Willow—”

  Then there is silence, and Lonely wonders if Rye is holding her, comforting her, or if they are only standing several hands apart from each other, staring awkwardly, each full of emotion they have no place to unload. She wants to shake Fawn, to break her open and unloose that tension that clutches her own heart just as tightly when she’s forced to listen like this.

  “Mother can’t go,” she’s murmuring. “She’s in too much pain to travel by horseback in the cold.”

  “You don’t need anyone’s help,” Rye says gently. “You can do it without her.”

  “I don’t want to travel alone,” hisses Fawn. “How can you ask me to—?”

  “Take Lonely,” Rye interrupts, impatient again. “I’ll go find Chelya. I’m sure she’s fine. I’ll go and find her. You go with Lonely. That’s what we’ll do.”

  Lonely hears a whimper that sounds like “no.” She straightens up, her heart panicking against the inside of her chest, and stares at the door. Then without waiting to hear more of Fawn’s response, she goes into the main room for her cloak and boots. She wraps her head in a shawl. She slips the Unicorn’s horn into the inner folds. She is shaking from the fear of Fawn’s quiet anger, from wanting to do what is asked of her and fearing she’ll mess it up—and now Fawn is waiting at the door, her eyes raw, her face soft. Lonely doesn’t know why Fawn should be so angry with her, but the way she ignores her, and has ignored her for so long, makes it seem that she must be.

  They stare at each other for a long moment. Fawn knows that Lonely was listening. “We’ll take Rye’s horse,” she says finally, and that’s all she says to Lonely until they arrive at Jay and Willow’s house deep in the night a long time later.

  Rye’s horse, being a work horse, is slower, but strong enough to carry them both. Lonely feels awkward in her tallness, towering slightly over Fawn’s head from behind. She doesn’t want to put her arms around Fawn’s waist, she doesn’t want to intrude on the space of someone who has kept her at a distance for so long, but once the horse starts moving, she has to. Fawn gives no indication of noticing.

  Fawn’s silence is all Lonely hears, all she feels, all she knows, for a long, long time. She doesn’t think of where they are or where they are going; she doesn’t even think of Sky. She is so afraid of that silence, and it surrounds her, bigger than winter.

  She tries to focus on her own body, and on fighting the onslaught of the cold.

  But finally, eventually, she becomes aware of the peace inside Fawn. That peace, settling into the rhythm of their riding, settling into the night, sits at the very core of Fawn through everything that happens. Still, at the heart of her, Fawn is gentle. Lonely feels the warmth of Fawn’s deep body as if it, not the horse, is carrying her, and she remembers the first food she ever tasted, and waking up for the first time to humanness inside Chelya’s smile. She closes her eyes.

  Then subtly, inside the warmth of Fawn, she feels Fawn feeling her. She feels Fawn’s nervous, surrendering awareness of her own flesh, and in turn she remembers her own body, and also how once it danced with Fawn’s. Once their bodies called up each other’s joy. Once their hands lingered at each others’ secret doors. Almost, she feels Fawn shiver. She feels the tears wash quietly over her own cheeks, and she does not know what they are for and does not want to know. Now she is grateful for that silence. Together with Fawn, she wraps her own soul in it, to keep her soul warm. She looks up and watches the stars she can glimpse through the treetops—that were long ago her first vision of the world—and no matter how far into the night she and Fawn travel, and how long, those lights never seem to move. She loses herself in that stillness above them, under which the horse’s movement seems void, under which she and Fawn seem to pace in place forever, trying to get somewhere but always right here. Only the ache in her neck finally rouses her from her meditation, so that she has to bring her face down again, and smell Fawn’s river-scented hair, and see the shapes of the trees shifting soft before her in the darkness as if they were made of flesh.

  Something like a path seems to carry them, but not one that Lonely could ever have found on her own, even with the waxing moon to guide her. When they’ve traveled so long that Lonely is no longer aware if she’s awake or asleep, or which side of midnight they are on, an owl calls out to her left—first a single hoot like a bottomless hole in the blackness, and then a windy trumpet of open notes like some eerie announcement of either beginning or end.

  “We’re close,” murmurs Fawn, and says nothing more, leaving Lonely to imagine what relationship must exist between this owl and Willow’s family: perhaps he has always lived here on the outskirts of their home, and always calls when Fawn passes, perhaps he is the voice of some ancestor of that family, or perhaps he is a harbinger of births. But most of all Lonely wonders at Fawn’s brief words, which could only be for her benefit, and whether or not the effort of Fawn’s speech signifies some forgiveness for whatever she has done wrong.

  This is where Rye grew up, thinks Lonely as they enter the open field. This is where Fawn played with her friends, never imagining the love that would come to her, living in day-to-day harmony and companionship and touch, needing nothing, not even knowing her own beauty. And Lonely’s idea of this friendship, this laughter in the grass, this sharing of play with animals and this whispering together in earthy beds, is so real to her it is like her own memory, for which she feels the most vivid nostalgia.

  The hills are deeper here, and Lonely still can’t tell where she is as Fawn ties the horse and, without rushing, unties her bag from the horse’s body with perfectly efficient motions. She
turns without looking at Lonely, and Lonely slides down and follows, remembering again suddenly that they are here for a reason, with no time to waste on dreams. What will Fawn ask of her? They pass between two cold white hills, and what must be sheep bleat nervously from somewhere near. A shed or two hide between trees. They are beginning to enter the forest again when Lonely sees—or perhaps she feels it first, like a quiet deity—the house, which is built into the side of a hill, with trees emerging out of it. She can see one lit window, and then they are through the door, into deep warmth and the scent of blood and a cascade of soft, watery moans.

  Jay explodes upon them almost before Lonely can take in the room. “Did Eva send you with medicines?” he asks, hugging Fawn. Fawn nods, hushing him, stroking his head for a moment like a child’s, and only then does Lonely see his trembling. “Something to stop the blood?” he whispers. “I don’t know why it’s so hard—it wasn’t like this with Blue or Morgan.”

  Lonely can hear Willow crying out now—tired, hollow screams with no finish—from behind a curtain where the edge of a bathtub peeks out. Someone bent and feminine, maybe Willow’s mother, is crouched down there, speaking softly. Lonely watches as Jay and Fawn move toward that place. She is given no instructions. She walks slowly toward the curtain, but it seems that her feet will never get her there, she’s suddenly so afraid—as if that is not Willow behind it but some other creature, some demon of pain, some lost soul in the darkness like the voices that chased her in the desert long ago. Will Fawn want her help, or will she only be in the way? Why is she here? She tries to remember that she is taking the place of Chelya. She tries to think what Chelya, in her eager love, would do. But Lonely is frozen, without knowing why. She can’t feel anything. The word mother repeats over and over in her mind, like panic, and she doesn’t know what it means.

  Then, as she stands helpless on the wrong side of the curtain, she sees Blue and Morgan standing in a corner of the kitchen, their heads barely reaching the counter where dirty dishes are piled in a dirty clay sink. They look more frightened than she is, and this helps. She walks to them, and swoops down to them, grateful for their need.