Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I have something for you,” says Lonely, and she takes the Unicorn’s horn from out of her cloak.

  Eva looks up at her sharply. Eva’s eyes are more like Sky’s than anyone’s, Lonely thinks, not for the first time.

  “Do you know what it is?” Lonely asks, uncomfortable in Eva’s questioning gaze.

  “Yes, child. I know what it is. Why are you giving this to me?” She still has not taken it.

  Lonely plays her fingers over its smooth, spiraled slopes, runs them along the grooves. If white had a texture, it would be this. “Because I don’t know what to do with it. Because once it gave me a window into another world where I thought I could feel my lover’s touch, but it was not real—only a dream. I don’t want to feel that ever again. It’s too painful. I only want to feel it for real, if I ever feel it. But mostly,” she adds, looking up again and meeting Eva’s eyes, “I want to give you something. I want to give all of you something, but this seems like it was meant for you. Maybe it will help you with your Dreaming, because you would know better than me what to do with visions like that. I don’t know. But maybe the reason it was given to me was so that I could give it to someone else. Maybe the gift was teaching me how to give.”

  Eva takes the horn in her palms. “Thank you,” she says. And in that thank you, Lonely knows, is the acknowledgement of all the love that Lonely has given and tried to give, all the strength she has tried to grow, all the dreams she has tried to live up to, and all that she fought to do that—the pain of her past, the confusion of it, the loss of it. Eva knows all of this, of course. It was Eva who told her her own story. And the understanding and forgiveness in that thank you brings to Lonely’s eyes the tears that moments before she could neither find nor feel.

  “I don’t need help with Dreaming,” says Eva. “But Unicorn horns can purify any body, any water, anything. Like fire, they heal by transforming, turning the heavy build-up of the past into ashes and smoke. Dissolving suffering with light.” Then she smiles at Lonely’s expression. She laughs to herself and looks down at the spire of beauty she holds in her hands. “So maybe I can heal these old aching bones after all. That will help everyone, because they won’t have to hear me complain any more.” She laughs again, and Lonely knows Eva means more than what she is saying, but she doesn’t understand exactly what. She just knows that giving Eva the horn was the right thing to do.

  “Eva…” she begins now.

  “Ah, yes. Here come the questions. I knew she wouldn’t leave without questions.” But the old woman is still smiling—a good, real smile. If only Lonely could take that smile with her, and carry it with her to that dark island of pain—where there is no love, no love at all. Only barren rocks, and merciless wind, and an angry face that waits and waits forever, expecting nothing but failure.

  “Go ahead,” says Eva. “I’m only teasing you.”

  “My beloved—”

  “Yes.”

  “My beloved is a shapeshifter.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, in order to find him, I need to learn how to shapeshift too.”

  “I see.”

  Silence. What was she expecting? That Eva would give her a list of simple instructions? That Eva would even know? Lonely comes now to the truth within herself. She knows that she is leaving. She has known ever since the night she told her father’s story to the two boys, then left it behind to sweeten and transform into the lost, innocent dreams of children. She has known it is time to go on again in pursuit of her destiny. But she does not know, even now, where she is going. Or if, where she is going, it will be day or night, winter or summer, or who she will be—or if she will survive.

  “I’m scared,” she whispers.

  “Well, that’s the first thing,” says Eva, and her voice is firmer now. “You’ve got to let go of that fear.”

  “What do I do?”

  Eva shakes her head, tightens her hands around the Unicorn’s horn. “Girl, I couldn’t begin to tell you. Shapeshifting is the most complicated, ancient art. It is absolute surrender and absolute control.”

  “What do you mean, control?”

  “I mean, where everything you feel, every part of who you are, becomes a magical substance that you can mold at will.”

  “Dreaming is like shapeshifting, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so. Perhaps that is how your lover does it. But I do not enter dreams. I only see them.”

  “But you must know something, Eva. You always do. I’ll do anything. There is no other choice for me.”

  Eva sighs, leans forward and takes Lonely’s face in her hand. Lonely lets her gaze into her eyes; she does not turn away, even when it hurts. “Yes, there is a dream I had,” Eva says finally, “that I didn’t fully understand until now. You must go to the river.”

  “But I was going to go to the—”

  “Go to the river,” says Eva more sharply, sitting up, her eyes turned suddenly inward. “I don’t know why, but go now.”

  “But I haven’t said goodbye to Fawn.”

  “Just go.”

  Startled, Lonely stands up and hurries to the ladder.

  “Don’t be afraid, granddaughter. You are goddess as well as human,” calls Eva after her. Then Lonely hears her mutter, as if to herself, her last words to Lonely:

  “Don’t keep forgetting.”

  On the night of the full moon, Delilah’s body feels clear and strong for the first time in many days. Restless, she climbs to the top of that tumble of stones under which the river disappears, and watches the moon rise. She can see the men dragging their slow machines across the cold sand in the distance.

  There is no way to cross the desert without water. She will have to ask for their help.

  This obvious realization has been creeping up on her ever since she came to the end of the river, only she didn’t admit to it until today. And she didn’t really think about it until tonight, on this night of pregnant moon, when her mind is so intent on going onward toward Mira—so intent on figuring out a way—that it seems to vibrate inside her skull. There is no other choice. What else can she do? Turn back like a coward and retreat to her cave forever? It seems she has never, until this moment, truly thought about that “forever”—never actually imagined if she would spend her whole life there, or if she would have to. She was only living each day, one day at a time, because she thought she had made that choice, and would continue to make that choice each day that she wished it: to stay. Now she sees that once she made that first choice, she was always trapped. There was never a way back out.

  No way, that is, except to surrender control to the very people she hates, the very men who are destroying all that she loves. She will have to go to them. She will have to ask them for a ride. Is this her punishment, then, for depending on them for so long to meet that darker need?

  Earlier today, she wandered experimentally out toward them. She wanted a closer look. Or maybe she wanted to gaze out at their mechanical, stubborn bodies and hurl her hatred out at them for what she was being forced to do. She had manipulated men for what she wanted in the past. But she had never believed that she needed them for anything she couldn’t survive without. She had never believed she couldn’t make it on her own. Never.

  When she got close enough, careless in her own self-righteous resentment, she forgot that they could see her, too, and several men stopped what they were doing and turned toward her. She wasn’t yet quite within shouting distance, but she thought she could see their grins. She thought she could see the leer of their bodies, and the way one of them laid a hand on his machine and leaned back in relaxed anticipation, looking at her. Their surprise, their muscles rippling in their hands, their tongues moving in their mouths.

  Then one of them whistled, and then two of them started to walk her way.

  She didn’t want them. Not at all. She felt a strange protectiveness in her belly,
and crossed her arms over her chest. Careful not to run (for any predator knows that a running animal is prey), she turned around and walked fast, and she made sure to zigzag and duck where she needed to, so they would not see where she had come from or where she was returning to.

  Now as she sits up awake, watching their tiny silhouettes in the distance, she has to admit that what keeps her up watching is not only the fury or the plans she is forced to make, but also the barest hint of fear. She will get what she wants from them, if she has to. But for the first time, she doesn’t want to give what they will want in return. She suspects now that all those years she thought she was making that choice, she wasn’t. All that time she thought she was manipulating and seducing to get what she wanted, contemptuous of these men who could give her whatever she needed, she wasn’t in control at all. Because she was the one giving, and whether she wanted to give it or not, they would have taken it anyway.

  Water is love. They will not give her a ride for free, and they will not give her that water she needs to live for free. Just like love has never been free.

  Basically, she thinks, now that I don’t want to stay in the desert, I will be forced to die here. Now that I don’t want anything to do with these idiots, I will be raped by them.

  “Fuck,” she says, standing. ”Fuck!” She hurls her empty water jug across the sand. It’s the chill of the word “rape,” which she doesn’t remember ever thinking before, that makes her angry. Later, she will wonder why she thought it—why she assumed that it had to happen. But right now she can do nothing but stomp out across that same expanse, kicking sand with every step until she reaches the jug, and then she swoops it up, and then she stomps back again to the unhelpful river.

  “Fine. I’ll go.” She kneels by the raging water, and dips the jug in. “I’ll go, I’ll go, I’ll go. What does it matter? What do I matter, right? It’s Mira that matters. It’s for Mira.” But the plastic jug hangs there in her hand, battered against the stones by the rushing water, and she is sobbing, holding her belly with her other arm—and it’s like that day she walked into the desert with Moon, only that time her tears were like being born, and this time they are like dying.

  Come, says Yora. Or was it only her mind?

  Come in.

  Delilah lifts her head, lays the jug on the ground in the moonlight.

  Come in with me.

  “What?”

  Come in with me, Lil, says Yora. Tonight, for one night, become a goddess and enter the river with me. So that you can learn better how to be a human being. And so that I can finally let your pain go.

  The river crosses all through the forest in that direction, so that it would be impossible for Lonely not to arrive at it eventually, but where she arrives it is only a little stream. The water slips by as silent as owl wings, and all she can see of it is the moonlight twitching on the arched contours of each ripple, fogged by the ice above it, so that the water does not seem to be flowing either way but only shivering in place.

  She kneels and touches her fingertips to a place where the cold water gushes through, hoping to feel something, hoping that something will suddenly make sense. But she can barely feel the water. Her mind tries to fit around the sensation, and cannot. Her body sits alone in the dark, as empty as air.

  There were times when Sky seemed to be everywhere, alive in each living being, and everything beautiful would remind her of him—and she knew that he was everywhere, and could be anything. But tonight all she can feel is his absence.

  In the night there is the flicker of a question—the question of fear—as she remembers that story which is always in her consciousness now, and tries to imagine, again, what that Dark Goddess looked like, and what her hunger looked like, and in what way she would emerge from dark water, and in what way a person might die.

  Lonely tries to imagine Sky as a young boy, fighting her father as if he would give up his own life. For of course that was Sky—Sky with the blue raging eyes, who had another name then, a name she never knew.

  What was it he fought for? The woman? The ceremony? Some sacred promise? His people? The Dark Goddess Herself? The water curling smoothly under Lonely’s fingers is like a heart, beating and surging and falling, overwhelming her with tenderness for the mystery of that man she loves. How child-like, how frightened, how delicate that heart he held inside him, shielded by his eternal wakefulness, his hard declarations of duty. She remembers how each time she begged him to come closer, each time she spoke harshly to him for abandoning her, he wrapped that secret heart in one more layer of protection, until she could barely come near it at all. Until that final night when she forced him, perhaps, to surrender too quickly all that had made him feel safe for so many years. She wishes she could start over now, coaxing that heart out slowly, not so overcome by her own need, her own fear. What had he lost that day in the marsh? How had his spirit been broken by his failure, and by her father’s triumph? How ashamed he must have felt. And how she must have shamed him again, to tell him over and over that his love was not good enough.

  But who was that woman? She almost forgot, but now she remembers. I am part of you, Sky! I am descended from a woman of your people. Don’t you realize? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you deny me my past, my mother?

  Lonely looks up, clenching her fists around the water as the water runs right through, and is forever running through, and forever lost. Mother, she thinks suddenly. Why did everyone deny you?

  Then a movement before her catches all her senses by surprise, and there is Fawn. Fawn walking toward her.

  When Lonely sees her, she can tell that Fawn has been approaching her long before now and is not at all surprised to see Lonely. Her gaze is serious and hidden in the shadows, taking Lonely in without emotion, as she steps carefully on the river stones and doesn’t stop.

  “Do you want to come with me?” she says softly as she passes.

  Lonely stands so fast she almost falls over, freezes, and then begins to follow.

  “You have to be careful,” says Fawn.

  It’s true. Some of the stones are damp, and some are icy. Some of them tremble, and even begin to fall under the weight of their feet. This water that runs so sweetly, so much like a beating heart through the living forest, could kill them with its cold if they were to dip their bodies in it. After slipping once, Lonely decides to follow Fawn’s path exactly, stepping on the same stones, which Fawn has obviously chosen with more knowing than Lonely.

  Gradually, the river runs wider and a little deeper, and it takes all of Lonely’s being—all the concentration of her mind and body—to place her feet exactly on each tiny island, to balance her weight, and to keep Fawn’s moving shape in her vision at the same time as the stones. All thoughts are crowded out of her mind; all feelings go unconscious. She has no time to wonder at Fawn’s courage, or where they are going, or why. She is the muscles in her legs, careful and tensed. She is the rhythm of her steps. She is the tilt of each stone beneath the soles of her boots. She is the loudening shhhh of the water, an eternity of sound surrounding her.

  Around a large rock where the river pools deeply, the trees open to the moon above them; Fawn kneels. There is no space for Lonely there, so she stands where their path left her, balanced. Fawn removes her mittens and dips her hands deep into the black water, where white light threads between them.

  “This is the river Yora,” she says. “When I was a child, I knew something about this river. Something….” She trails off.

  Lonely steps carefully to a place on the shore where there is room for her to crouch down. She faces Fawn and puts her hands in the river too. She is so lonely. My name is Lonely, she thinks. It is my only name. I accept it. It is my name. Longing stirs between her and Fawn, turning slowly in the moonlight, moving in the water. Lonely watches it, not knowing who it belongs to or what it is for.

  Fawn looks up at her, and the surprise of it almost kn
ocks Lonely off balance, like seeing a ghost.

  “You’re a goddess, aren’t you?” Fawn whispers.

  Lonely says nothing. It doesn’t seem like a question that looks for an answer.

  “I was jealous sometimes,” Fawn says, still whispering, still staring at her, her body eerily frozen. “I was jealous of you and Rye. It seemed that you were so alike. It seemed that you understood each other—”

  Lonely shakes her head. “He became a friend to me. That’s all.”

  “I know.”

  Lonely hangs her head and trails her hands in the water. They are both silent for a long time, and Lonely feels sorry. Once, long ago, she had thought nothing of stealing Rye from the woman who truly loved him.

  Now it seems to her that sadness is all she is, and each moment can be translated into one more drop of sadness, until there is so much she could lie down in the deep sea of it and go to sleep forever.

  The forest is absolutely silent. So silent that the moon, who Sky once told her was the Earth’s sister—the lost earth, the shadow earth—very quietly seems to creep a little closer.

  Then Lonely looks up and sees Fawn lifting her hands from the water, one at a time. She lifts one hand and the water spills off of it, a slow waterfall back into that pool of moonlight, and as she dips it back down into the water, she lifts the other one. Back and forth, back and forth—and both she and Lonely gaze at the water as it curves over the flesh of her palms and falls, its sound a caress.

  “Thank you, Lonely,” says Fawn. “Thank you for all that you’ve made me feel. Even the pain. Everything.”

  But Lonely says nothing because as she watches, the water seems to change, so that it becomes smoother and slower and thicker, and now churns with faint rainbows, like saliva from the mouth of some dragon. Blue and violet it stretches between Fawn’s hands and the pool, and they both watch fascinated, until finally Fawn lifts both hands so that what seemed like water now swirls around her fingers in the air—some magical substance Lonely has never seen but which is at once familiar and terrifying and heartbreakingly beautiful.