Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  The inside of the building is warm though there is no fire, and so big he cannot see the other end of it. There are piles of vegetables which don’t exist in the winter—more than all of these people together could eat all winter—and he doesn’t understand where they could possibly come from, or how they are being kept cold in this warm room.

  “Where does all this come from?” he asks a woman standing near him. She is strangely misshapen, her hair an unnatural color, her face pasty and cracked as if part of it might flake off, her body fat in some places and wasted away in others. She is picking carefully through a pile of apples as if they do not all look perfect—so perfect they look unreal. She seems unfazed by the abundance around her.

  She looks him up and down. “What do you mean?” she snaps.

  “Who grew this food?”

  The woman shrugs irritably. “How should I know?” she says and moves away. Maybe it’s because her body is so unwell that she is unhappy. But Kite cannot imagine how she could be unwell, with so much variety of good food around her.

  Something feels wrong to him—all these foods at the wrong time of the year, and so much of them, and not a single blemished one. But there is so much, whoever grew them could not possibly need them all, and he’s so hungry. Though he would never steal, he sees so many other people taking the fruits and vegetables that he thinks perhaps there is enough for everyone.

  He eats an apple as he wanders around the building, fascinated. The apple looks like a real apple, but it tastes terrible, like an apple with the soul of it sucked out. He can’t imagine what happened to it. It isn’t rotten, and yet it doesn’t taste fresh.

  He is so dazed by the lights and colors and all the people that he doesn’t realize for a long time that inside some of the unidentifiable shapes on the tall shelves are actually more foods. A loaf of bread. Meat. Kite begins to read the words on the things, and discovers that they are actually almost all food. In fact, according to the words on the labels, they are foods with magical qualities, foods better than food.

  “Where’s the regular food?” he grumbles to himself, but he takes what he can carry.

  A man comes around the corner as he slips a box into his pack, and starts yelling.

  “Hey! I saw that! Put that back!”

  Kite stands still. He doesn’t run. He didn’t mean to steal, and if he wasn’t supposed to take this, he’s prepared to give it back.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the man shouts, though he’s standing right in front of Kite now with his hands on his hips. Kite stares at his face, trying to figure out what’s wrong with it, what feels untrue about it.

  “I—” begins Kite. “I thought— Can I take this? Whose is it?”

  The man’s expression changes. Kite barely has time to try to read it, before suddenly Dragon has appeared beside him, from nowhere.

  “You leave him alone,” Dragon growls, and out of his mouth comes fire.

  Then before Kite knows what’s happening, he and Dragon are both running, and the man is running too, as if they are chasing him. But they are not. They are looking for the door.

  Outside Dragon puts his arm around Kite and laughs easily, as they walk fast into the lost streets again, as if they were still out in the desert and everything made sense.

  “Hey, friend!” he cries. “It’s good to see you again. I’ve been looking for you ever since I got here. I knew you’d need me. I realized I’m not a god so you can worship me or admire me; I’m a god so I can use my powers for good! To protect the people I care about. Right? That’s the purpose of a god.” His voice is hearty, weighted with some deep joy that Kite cannot right now imagine. These have been the hardest two days of his life.

  But feeling Dragon’s presence beside him again makes him weak with gratitude. He doesn’t care about gods or not gods—he is only grateful to have a friend.

  “We should stop so you can eat,” Dragon says, and Kite can tell his kind concern is bolstered by his pride in being the reason why Kite can, in fact, eat at all.

  “It’s okay,” murmurs Kite. “Not yet.” He wants to keep moving until maybe they find another space of green. He can barely speak. He has no room for hunger any more. He thinks of the place where he got this food, and he doesn’t understand anything about it. He doesn’t recognize the feeling inside his belly, something he’s never felt before: a cold, reasonless numbness, like terror.

  Inside the swamp, the man who forgot himself in being a god and the woman who forgot herself in being a Unicorn dream the same dream.

  Each of them remembers what they wished never to remember.

  For Mira, falling into those great jaws is not like being devoured, but rather like falling into the pain of some great, wet, pulsing wound. That wound has been lurking, not only beneath her but inside her, ever since she sent her soul away in the form of a Unicorn, and for as long as she can remember. Nothing will ever heal it. Nothing will ever close it. Nothing will ever protect it. It horrifies her, that this is life. That this is simply the way things are.

  Here inside this vulnerable place, the earth is made of water.

  The Dark Goddess sucks her in, and now she is inside that place, inside that fear. She can hear the Goddess’s enormous breath, expanding and contracting the great belly that contains her. She can hear the shuddering pain of it, a pain so big it nearly crushes her.

  “Shhh,” whispers Mira desperately. “Someone will hear!”

  The Goddess roars—a crazy dragon roar that makes Mira’s body collapse against Her soft inner walls. “IT’S ABOUT TIME THAT SOMEBODY HEARD.”

  Then the Goddess laughs, and Mira recognizes that laugh, that voice, and she stands up inside the body of the Goddess, not realizing yet that her form has changed, that she is no longer the Unicorn. “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you remember me?” the old Witch says, her voice creaking through her veins.

  Mira begins to cry. “It hurt so much.”

  “Ah, Mirr,” says the Goddess, using the name that Mira gave herself and that only she knows. “Don’t cry. You were the first person I loved after so many, many years. Do you understand now, what I asked of you?”

  “Sacrifice.”

  “But not the kind your father asked of you. That’s stealing. They took everything from us, Mirr. Our bodies, our souls, our beauty, our youth, our tenderness, our lusciousness, our will, our knowing, our intuition, our ability to choose. I did not ask you to sacrifice yourself for me or for anyone. I asked you to sacrifice the pain you’d gotten so used to, you’d learned how not to feel it. I asked you to sacrifice your hiding place, your numbness, your belief that you were dead—that nothing would ever wake you again. I asked you to sacrifice what your father left you with, in exchange for your own self back again.”

  Mira remembers now. How the old Witch came to her in that room with walls of stone darkness and a ceiling of glass. How she asked if Mira would be willing to leave behind her fear and pain in order to serve another—another woman, who needed her. The river will carry you to the shore. You will be safe. How the old hag embraced her, and in that instant Mira felt her whole lifetime of pain at once—the fear in the meadow, the fear in the house, her father’s touch, her father entering her, her father’s death, the loss of her sister, the brutality of the world enclosing her—all at once, and she wanted to cry no, that she could not, but then in an instant everything had changed, and she was the Unicorn after all. She was riding the seas in the arms of the beautiful Yora to a lonely beach where a fragile, vulnerable girl she did not know stood waiting.

  “You are braver than me, Mirr,” says the Witch, who seems also to be the Dark Goddess—or is she? “I resisted my own sacrifice. And it only brought me a lifetime of pain. Was it truly a sacrifice after all, that you accepted? Did you not learn anything, in that long journey, about love?”

  “Yes,” says Mira. “I learn
ed to feel—something. But I’m still afraid.”

  “Where are we, Mirr?”

  And Mira knows. She shakes her head and curls up into herself, her head still shaking back and forth: “No no no no no no no…”

  “Where are we?”

  That great wound, never closed, with no protection. Where the Unicorn comes from. Mira cannot hide it—no, not even in the meadow, not even in the deepest shadows of the grasses, not even if she keeps it perfectly, perfectly frozen and still.

  “He’s coming,” she sobs.

  “No,” says the Goddess softly. “He isn’t. This is the place of women. Only women enter here. Only women know these secrets.”

  “But he is here! He is everywhere.”

  “Look,” says the Goddess, and she spits Mira out into the darkness. Mira puts her hand on the strong, scaled spine of the Goddess, and grips it tight. “Look at him.”

  Then Mira sees Sky, flailing tiny in the distance, spinning in the underwater abyss. So alone, so afraid. Like she is.

  “Man isn’t all-powerful. See?”

  But Mira—Mia, Mia—feels the old tugging, the guilt, the pain in her father’s eyes drawing her irresistibly toward him, the ugly relief when he laid himself over her. “But what can we do? How can we help him?” Her voice choked.

  “Nothing,” says the old one. “It’s not your problem.”

  “But what will happen to him?”

  “What will happen to you?”

  Mira is silent. She cannot get her mind around that question.

  “Do you want to see where the swamp ends? He could only ever enter so far. He never went all the way inside you, Mirr, where your deepest womanhood is kept. Do you want to know the secret?”

  Mira can’t see herself; she doesn’t feel solid, and she doesn’t know what this word “woman” means. She still feels like she is nine years old, which is how old she was when her father died and she gave up her body forever. She holds on tight to the Dark Goddess’s rough shoulder, because she has nothing else to hold onto. If such strength, such sure feminine power, had been offered to her when she was a little girl—if some old wise woman like this had come to her and had offered, in the middle of her father’s turmoil, to tell her the secret that he could never, ever claim, and keep her safe forever—how desperately, with what claws and superhuman grip, she would have clung to that person and asked to be taken away. But now she cannot even manage an answer.

  “Come back to the Island with me, Mirr.”

  “But why?”

  “Because you left part of you behind there.”

  My body, she remembers, confused. What is it? What is it for?

  But now the Dark Goddess is that old woman she remembers, who takes her hand and leads her through the murky marsh, still underwater, into the silkier, hidden inlets, and out into the great salt sea. Then they swim together, under the waves, where brilliant green forests sway and dance, and colored creatures fly among their fronds, and everything is fluid and free, and the world is like the world was long ago, before Man made it over into what he wanted it to be.

  Mira wavers, upright under the sea, like a little seahorse holding to a particle in the current before being swept away.

  “This, Mirr,” says the Dark Goddess, “is what He doesn’t know.”

  The swamp is the vagina of the world.

  This is the first thing Sky understands, once he is finally inside it. The marsh is that opening, and the sea is the womb. For in the body of the earth, the vagina and the heart are the same place: the same entrance.

  Why did he never understand that before, when he lived above it all his life, and thought he had learned all the secrets, thought he understood what the elders meant, thought he understood the reason for the sacrifice?

  For now the blackness under the water shows him as clear as light what he never wanted to see: that he was always alone up on that mountaintop. That the people he dedicated eternity to were only ghosts, only memories. Because when Hanum’s army came, his people had already forgiven. They had already spoken to the Dark Goddess and made peace. They had already understood love. They did not fight. Sky remembers now: after the maiden was taken from them, they took her place. All of them. They went down to the Dark Goddess in her place: every man, woman, and child. By the time the army came, they were already gone. But not Sky. He had stayed behind to fight the fight he hadn’t been allowed to fight before—the fight she had stopped him from fighting. He’d thought he had something to prove. Maybe he’d thought, somehow, that he could win her after all. Maybe he’d thought, like Hanum, that she belonged to him.

  But really, he had only been afraid to go down into that darkness. Really, he was the only one who hung on.

  It all looks very simple, once he’s inside. All this time he’s remained human because he was still afraid of surrender.

  He remembers a dream he dreamed the night he and Lonely made love, as he lay on the shore of the lake in her arms. He didn’t remember until now that he had it.

  In the dream, he sat in Council with all the animals, all the trees, all the plants, even the stones and the mushrooms, and the smallest, most original life in the depths of the sea.

  “We are here to discuss the fate of the world,” he said, in a great booming voice that even to him sounded clumsy and foolish.

  Then a delicate white bird came forward, a bird that looked like himself in the form he’d taken to rescue Lonely from the tower long ago. All the other creatures were looking at him, and he could tell that the bird spoke for them all.

  “No, Sky,” the bird said gently. “We are here to discuss the fate of your own heart.”

  Then Sky broke down before the whole world and wept. He said, “I don’t want to keep this place any longer. I want to be down there with her. I want to run through those fields with her and lie down under the trees with her in the ferns.” He said it sobbing, full of shame, without being able to stop himself.

  And the bird said just as gently, without any judgment, “Then go.”

  The river forgives Lonely everything.

  Her past, her longing, her mistakes, her ignorance, her doubt, her fear and her sorrow, her anger and her selfishness, even her own name. Shapeshifting wasn’t so much about becoming something else, after all, as much as letting go of what she thought she was.

  Perhaps she is a snake: a pure motion of eyes and spine, threading into the current. Or perhaps she is a only a ripple, a ribbon of shade, a thin passage. She can no longer tell if she is moving or being moved. Everything is released. She is no longer human. She is no longer female. Then she is no longer moving.

  Perhaps she is only an invisible atom, invisible to an eyeless universe, blinking in space before the world ever was.

  This seems to go on forever.

  Then there is Something in the Nothing.

  It isn’t wanting, exactly. Or is it? There is no reaching, no hunger, nor any satisfaction. But she is pulled toward another. Or rather, she and another meet, for no reason, and yet they do not meet randomly. In fact, they come together so hard that they fuse; they merge; they devour one another; then they explode into flame. The very heat of their union pushes them apart again—exploding back out into space, in which there are no opposites, and there are no sides.

  A billion years go by. The two atoms come together again. Pretend they are the same two atoms. They believe they are. They press tight, and their center burns hot, but they hold. They hold so strong that they become one being, so strong that they develop their own gravity—and that gravity, like hunger, pulls other masses toward it, and those merge, too, and get hungrier and keep pulling.

  Maybe they will always be nothing more than those first two atoms, but they will be reborn over and over again, just trying to remember that first time, and why. Lonely…Sky….

  Now Sky is stone, recently cooled. Black, the
color of dead fire. The world is fluid and broken, constantly restless, a newborn screaming into space. He pops and crackles. He feels his own heat rising within him. Lonely is lava and flame, fountaining up from his own depths, at once destroying him and freeing him, and the sound of the explosion which no one is around to hear is the sound of his own name.

  Now she cools over him. There are so many elements now. Elements that do not yet have names. Elements that can change form by the second, elements that transcend realms, elements that follow no rules. Now he is the rain, and she receives him. He rains for thousands of years, without stopping. She forgets the sun. She forgets her own restless fury, and her heat drums softly within. She rolls over, relaxes, receives him in bowls of earth that are wider than the moon. She sighs under him, deepens, yawns him in. He splashes and subsides. Through thunder and wind, the earth and the water keep pressing their bodies together. They are the only life. Fear does not yet exist.

  But in his next life, Sky is only the moon, watching the lovemaking of earth and rain from a distance. Like the earth, he is nothing but a rubble of stone. Like the earth, he is mountained and pockmarked by the smaller stones that flew at him when the world was young. But unlike the earth, he will stay naked forever. No wind will touch him. No water will feed him. No warmth will grace his flanks. Nothing will ever grow. Nothing will ever change. He will remain like this forever, spinning grey and cold around her: a stillborn planet, a lifeless memory of the beginning of time. And she, in the lush and painful miracle of her transformation, will forget him.

  How could they have been water, but also stone; sky, but also fire? There was a time when things were not so delineated. When male was also female, and female was also male. Then the elements came together—the lightning and the clay, the salt-sea and the nameless spirit inside the stone, the heat of volcanoes and the mixing of the winds—and made life.