Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “Do you remember me? My name is Lonely. I’m—a friend of your aunt’s. Remember?” Morgan nods, his lower lip stuffed out and cushioning the upper one.

  “Are you afraid?” This time they both nod. Now she doesn’t know what to say. How can she comfort them? “Do you remember when Morgan was born?” she asks Blue.

  He looks at the stone floor. “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember?” she teases Morgan, trying to smile. He shakes his head.

  “I think it must be very hard work,” she says to them, “giving birth. That’s why your mother is making so much noise—because she has to work so hard. She has to make a person! Think how hard it must be.” Lonely, herself, thinks about this. Her father did not make her. No, not her father….

  “We were in there with her,” says Blue anxiously. “We saw the hole where the baby will come out, and mama was sweaty and red and crying, and daddy was talking to her, and grandma, and then—then there was blood. She’s crying so much. Morgan got scared.” He glances anxiously at Morgan, to cover his own fear.

  Lonely wants to take them somewhere else, somewhere where she can think clearly, away from those screams.

  “Are there other rooms in the house? Where do you sleep?”

  Morgan points.

  Now Jay comes out from behind the curtain, his face limp with emotion, and he kneels down beside them. “Boys, your mother and I want you to go and say a prayer for her and the baby, to help them. Can you do that?”

  He turns to Lonely. “Will you go with them? See if they can sleep?”

  Lonely nods wildly, as speechless as the boys. She stands up and offers her hands, and faster than she expected each one is clasped tight by a tiny warm one, soft and fleshy as the udders of Chelya’s goats when she milks them. Even Blue has taken her hand with urgent immediacy, despite the caution and reticence in his face, and in this she understands even more deeply their fear, their smallness. She has given Blue too much credit for his emotional distance—seen him as older than he was, because his gentle silence reminded her of Sky.

  Now she feels ashamed of her own shyness, and wishes she had taken their hands sooner.

  “Show me your room,” she whispers, “and we’ll make a quiet place to pray.” As they lead her, she tries to gather together quickly some idea of what prayer is. She thinks of Rye on the other side of the curtain as she lay in the bath. She thinks of the wind, whose voice she can never imagine when it’s not speaking to her. She thinks of how far away the sky is.

  The children lead her into a low clay hallway, pale white in the dark, which twists and winds deeper into the earth, then emerges into a round room with a big window facing upward toward the moon. There is one big bed on the floor which they apparently share, miniature animals of wood and cloth who stand together in conference, a big stick twined around with feathers and beads, a bow and arrows, a flute, and small clothing strewn about the floor. Nothing seems placed with any sense of order. So this is childhood, thinks Lonely.

  They need only the moonlight to see by, the walls are so light.

  “Okay,” says Lonely, and then on impulse turns to the children for help. “How do we make a prayer?”

  The boys both glance around obediently, and she sees their relief in their own knowledge. “The talking stick,” says Morgan.

  “No Morgan,” says Blue impatiently, “the talking stick is for Council.”

  Morgan holds onto it stubbornly. “I want to use it anyway.” Blue glares back and then turns away muttering, “stupid.” Quietly he gathers a bowl, a candle, a stone, and a feather.

  “Go get some water,” he commands Morgan. Morgan looks sullen but turns and runs out of the room with the bowl.

  “You should be nice to your brother,” says Lonely. Blue glares at her.

  “It’s not enough to know what you’re doing,” she says. “Isn’t a prayer supposed to be a loving thing? If you’re going to make a loving thing, you should do every part of it with love. Including how you interact with the people who are doing it with you. They’re part of it. Morgan and I are part of the prayer.” She doesn’t know where that comes from, but she needs people to be kind to each other. It’s too much for her, this unnecessary meanness, after her long night of cruel silence with the woman who used to be her best friend. “You were only snapping at him because you’re feeling scared,” she adds, trying to make her voice more gentle. “But we have to act out of love, not out of fear.”

  “I’m not scared,” says Blue, but his eyes are downcast and he places the things he has gathered very carefully on a blue cloth on the floor, in a circle. And then Lonely realizes it’s Sky she’s talking to, again.

  “Well then, be nice to Morgan,” she says. “Because he’s scared. And so am I.”

  Morgan comes back into the room and crouches to place his bowl of water in the circle. Blue lights the candle, and they sit. The boys close their eyes and Lonely copies them. Is this how you pray? She has never made a place for prayer. She has only prayed to Sky wherever she was, and argued with the wind, and called out to nothing, when she felt like it, without stopping first to be silent. Eva’s face appears briefly in her mind, calm and knowing, nodding. Then her father’s. And then she knows why she doesn’t know how to pray.

  Because I don’t know where you are. Because I don’t know what happened to your body after you died, or if you even had a real body, or if you—though you were my father—were only a dream. Because the only place I ever knew you no longer exists. If I cannot find you, how can I find God? How can I find myself?

  “Ancestors,” comes Blue’s small, clear voice, “we invite you to pray with us. Helping animal spirits, helping plant spirits, we invite you. Earth, we invite you; sky, we invite you. Wind, we invite you. Rivers, we invite you.”

  He’s quiet then and they all open their eyes, as if by signal. “We are praying for our mother and for her new baby,” he says. “To make them be okay. To make the baby be born okay now, and for mama to be well.”

  Morgan takes the bowl of water in his hands and looks up at Lonely. “We have to ask each of the elements to help,” he says, but there’s a question in his eyes.

  “Okay,” says Lonely. “Water, we ask—we ask for your grace, for easy flow, for Willow’s baby to easily flow out of her.”

  “There’s water inside a womb,” adds Blue.

  “How do you know that?”

  Blue shrugs. “Everybody knows that.”

  Morgan puts the bowl down and picks up the feather, looks at Blue and Lonely again.

  “Air,” says Blue, “we honor your breath. Breath for the new baby.” He takes a deep breath in and out, fast, his eyes closed again. “Breath is life.” And Lonely remembers that first breath on the shore in Yora’s arms, how she was born into this world, and how that element carried her, in the arms of the wind, all along her journey.

  So serious now, Blue continues to the stone, taking it in his hands. Lonely sees Sky again, deep in concentration, deep in the seriousness of his spiritual task, from which nothing could distract him. She sees Sky, only a child after all, pretending to be older than the sky itself, holding onto the idea of his necessary role as Dreamer because it was all he had. When she closes her eyes she sees Coyote’s awful, yet knowing grin—What are you going to do about the nightmares, Sky?

  “Earth,” says Blue, but he can’t seem to find words.

  “Cradle us,” says Lonely without thinking. “Keep us safe.” Because it’s all of them, isn’t it, whose foundation becomes unstable, when the mother suffers? Lonely knows because she has no mother, and all her life this hopeless abyss has lurked beneath every hope and journey, beneath every love and joy, and behind every connection—this fear of falling, this fear of earthlessness beneath her feet.

  “Keep us anchored,” she says, thinking of Fawn. “Keep us strong.” Give us something, in our pain, t
o hold onto.

  Morgan picks up the candle. “Fire is my favorite,” he says.

  “You can’t have a favorite,” says Blue, and then, at a look from Lonely, adds, “Sorry.”

  “Go ahead,” says Lonely.

  “Fire,” he says, “give Mama energy. And—?”

  “The fire that makes the pain,” says Lonely, “also will make new life.” Although she’s not sure about that one.

  “Now we make an image in our heads,” says Morgan.

  “Like what?”

  “Something good.”

  “Okay,” says Lonely. “Like your mama happy and holding your new baby brother or sister in her arms?”

  “Yeah,” they say together.

  “And all of you together and happy?”

  “Yeah.”

  So they close their eyes together, and imagine that. When Lonely opens her eyes again, she is crying, but she’s not surprised this time.

  Afterwards they thank all the spirits they invited and then put the sacred things back where they were—for they are the only things in the room that seem to have special places.

  “Let’s get in bed,” says Lonely, and she sits on the edge of their mattress while they crawl under the covers, their eyes still wide. They can all hear another of Willow’s wails through the walls, and though it is terrifying it also tells them that she’s still alive, still trying.

  “Can you tell us a story?” says Blue doubtfully.

  “A story?”

  “Mama tells us stories,” explains Morgan.

  “Oh,” says Lonely. “What kind of stories?” She only knows one story. She has only ever been told one story in her life, and she doesn’t like that one.

  “Like about animals,” says Morgan. “Or about us. Or about a warrior, or a magician.”

  “It doesn’t have to be real,” says Blue, and Lonely sees the grown-up man in his eyes again, and it moves her somehow, to know that he knows this—that stories are not always real. Whether it makes him seem older or younger than her, she cannot tell.

  “Okay,” she says and closes her eyes. “I have to close my eyes to tell it.”

  “That’s okay,” says Blue. “Mama does that too.”

  Lonely, surprised and grateful for this tiny, unintentional connection between herself and Willow, begins.

  It is the story she knows, and yet it is not that story—it’s a story she has never heard before in her life. She doesn’t know where it comes from. She only knows that the children need a story to survive this night, and she will have to tell one.

  So she begins with Morgan’s suggestion: magician. “Once there was a great magician.” She hears Morgan turn toward her under the blankets, snuggling into anticipation. Why are stories comforting, even if they’re sad? she wonders, grateful to Eva for the first time. Just because they have a beginning, a middle, and an end?

  “Once there was a great magician,” she says again, “who was lonely. When he was a little boy, everything in his world was destroyed, and he didn’t know why. He lost everyone and everything. He was an orphan.”

  “Why?” asks Morgan.

  Lonely thinks. “He didn’t know why. Maybe another people, or someone bad, destroyed his people. Or maybe his own people had a bad relationship with the earth—they took more than they gave, and in the end they used everything up.”

  “Like the City,” says Morgan.

  “Yes. Like the City. So this magician’s land was all destroyed, and there was nothing left for him, so he traveled to the other side of the world, where everything was still green and beautiful, and the rivers were still clean, and the rains were still fresh and happy. And he said, I am a magician, and I will make a better world than the one I came from—one where people live forever, and no one is ever unhappy, and everything is always beautiful.

  “But he was lonely, because he didn’t know anyone in this new world. There were lots of different peoples: people who lived in the desert, people who lived in forests, people who lived on the seashore, and people who lived in the swamps. There were people who lived on mountaintops and people who lived in valleys, people who lived on red soils and people who lived on light soils. Everywhere he went, the people looked at him with suspicion, and he always felt like a stranger. He never felt like he belonged with any of these peoples, and they didn’t understand his magic or his language. And though he wanted to make a new world, still he was also so sad, because of all he’d lost, that it was hard to start over.

  “But in the world he’d left behind, he had always been told that there was a special place, at the center of everything, where life was still thriving and sacred. There was a secret swamp near the edge of the sea that the City in his world had never touched. But he had never seen it. Now he was very curious to know if the same center existed on this side of the world and what power lay in that place. He was fascinated by the mystery of it and felt that perhaps the secret of all the world’s magic lay there. So he asked every people about it until, eventually, he found it: a misty, quiet, watery place where the most magical people of all were living—just like the place on the side of the world he had come from, which he had never seen.”

  Lonely takes a deep breath. If she opens her eyes she will remember where she is, and she will not know the next words to the story. If she thinks at all, she will realize that this is not her story, not a story she knows, but a story that is coming through her from someone else. It’s familiar, but it is also different. If she were to open her eyes, that which she does not understand would frighten her. So she keeps her eyes closed, and doesn’t let herself wonder where the words come from, any more than she wonders where the world comes from, or where the screams out there in the darkness come from.

  “In this secret marshland, where everything was damp and silent and vivid green all year round, people lived for a long time. Time moved very, very slowly. Love always lasted forever. A couple might only make love once a year, but when it happened the entire village shone and shivered with bliss, and everyone’s existence was elevated to a new threshold of understanding and connection. Every day, people meditated on each aspect of their simple existence. They spent long hours gazing into each other’s eyes. They prayed to the fish that they caught with their silver rods and marveled over their taste as they ate them. They touched each other, and touched the hanging moss and the giant, deep pink flowers, with reverence and with wonder. And once every so many years, about as often as a person died, a new child was born.

  “The strangest thing the magician discovered about these people was that they lived their entire lives up in the air. There was something ethereal about them, and perhaps that is why they lived so long, and why they were so fascinated by the simple earthly pleasures of mortal existence. They lived in thatch huts built on giant stilts high above the water, or sat in woven swings—modeled after birds’ nests—which they hung from the trees around the edge of the swamp. Swinging footbridges connected their houses, and the most athletic among them learned to be great acrobats, swinging and flipping from strong vines. But they had to be very brave to do that. Because the reason the people lived all their lives up high was that there was something terrible under the water that would devour them if they fell.”

  Now she stops. She has to. She is not aware of being afraid—she’s so deep in some other place that she feels nothing, only the story—and yet she finds she cannot go on yet.

  “What?” comes a small anxious whisper by her side. It’s Blue, in his soft voice like Sky’s—that heavy-wondering, that dark-light call. “What was under the water?”

  “Wait,” she says. And she, herself, waits. She feels that it will come to her. “The Dark Goddess,” she says finally.

  “What’s that?”

  “Something like a dragon, with a long giant mouth and teeth as long as tusks. And a creeping body like an insect, and shimmering scales, and
a whip-like tail. She has eyes on the top of her head that peek above the water, blending in like little nubs of moss so that no one ever sees them, and that’s how she watches you.”

  She feels Morgan snuggling closer to her, feels the innocent softness of his flesh, feels all the vulnerability of a human being—no outer shell, no scales, not even any fur.

  “She was the most ancient of creatures, the Dark Goddess. She was the goddess of destruction, of chaos, of death, of darkness, of every fear and sorrow and loss. And they could never come near the water, because they saw what happened sometimes to the long-legged white birds and the marsh rabbits and the few other animals who had no choice but to walk among the reeds in search of food: like an explosion she rose up, and then she pulled them down forever.

  “The magician learned all this by watching, in secret, from a magical, invisible, floating glass ball in which he hovered for a long time over that place. He could not explain his fascination with this people, except that they seemed perhaps to be closer than any other people to achieving what he longed for—eternal life and happiness, without loss or pain or regret. He thought that perhaps the one thing holding them back from immortality was this darkness that lurked beneath them, haunting them, keeping them forever in fear. He could not understand why they worshipped it.

  “For they did worship it. He saw them singing the most beautiful, eerie songs to it in the middle of the night, and once when a baby was born, he saw them throwing all of the fish that any of them had caught back into the waters, to be gobbled up by this monster—like an offering. And then the most horrible thing happened.

  “There was among them a beautiful girl, more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen or imagined in all of his journeys around both sides of the world, and among all the peoples with all their different bodies and colors of skin that he had ever known. This girl—who was nearly a woman, but still very young—had long black hair, but it was so black that sometimes it turned as blue as dusk, and sometimes every color of the rainbow could be seen in it. It was straight, so straight and smooth that it shone, but sometimes it seemed to ripple like fire. Her skin was dark and changing, sometimes golden and sometimes tinted like the metallic flame of desert sands. The tilted swoop of her shoulders from the base of her graceful neck made him feel like he was flying, and the slow river glide of her body’s curves around and around and downward made him shudder with longing. When she walked, her hands seemed to finger the air, and her spine seemed to tremble. Her eyes were huge and sad and wise, and seemed to hold the whole of both worlds inside them, and once when she stopped in the middle of a bridge and looked out across the water and then up into the sky in contemplation, she seemed to see him though he knew he was invisible. In her eyes, he thought he saw the deepest understanding he had ever known—the compassion he had always longed for, and the love he had always needed but never found.