Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  Forgetting him, forgetting everything, she flies finally upward on her wings of fire, into the light of her own new eyes.

  Yora is a river, and Yora is also of the sea: for all rivers circle around and meet in the sea, meet in the sky, rain down, and meet again in the sea.

  The moon, growing, pulls her in. She groans—too big, and heavy with too much pain, to remember the names of the women she once humanly loved: Delilah, Mira, Lonely, Fawn. She is full to bursting with that old pain, and she can no longer resist the insatiable demand, the agonized desperation, of that man who is all men—that man who first called her back to earth with her own name. On the shore, she can still feel Dragon’s longing, pulling at her, pulling her in with the impossible strength of a child’s arms. She can feel the suffering that calls to her, the thirst and the hunger of the tiny creatures that crawl among the rocks of the shore. She loves them, and she will give them everything, over and over again, without regret.

  But when the moon wanes, she will feel the deep comfort of the bodies of whales, who sing her home again to herself, her center. She will retreat. Back inside that center, she will feel the deep darkness that refreshes her—opposite of the moon—and she will close in upon herself, water within water. She will feel the whole history of the world—how it rose up from her—and the black hole from which it rose, rich with forgotten silence.

  Back and forth she will swing forever—with no decision, only rhythm—between the call of the earth, her children crying out for her, and the call of her own self, within. With that swing she will bring life and death, at the same time. Never one without the other.

  Mirr. Mirr. Mirr.

  She misses the sound of it: the way it sounded in the dark, in the safe silence, and the way the Mad Ones sounded humming it in their dreams. She misses their dreaming, which kept her anchored as it wove around her. True, they were broken. True, their dreams were pockmarked, bruised, emaciated with longing or sluggish with the fat of self-loathing; those dreams dragged under the island with ugly sounds, and never woke up. But they were familiar. Most of all, those people accepted each other, and were safe in that sad, comfortable fellowship of suffering. Where are they now?

  For now Mira is carried in an older embrace, an embrace she loved and longed for but which before was never sturdy, never certain, and which, in fact, was connected, in its very blood, to everything that she feared.

  “Miri,” Lilah whispers, through the sea, on the soft backs of whales, emerging with her through wet sand into the sun. “Miri.”

  But Mira is still afraid to speak, because if she tries to speak, she might begin to scream again, like in the old days, and Lilah doesn’t realize that the screaming terrified Mira more than it terrified anyone else. She doesn’t want to see that fear emerge from behind Lilah’s face. That face is a good, old face, as if each face of her sister’s life—woman, teenager, girl, and every phase in between—is layered under the other. If Mira looks deep enough, she can see the child Lilah, the one who ran with Moon—the one who, like Mira, mistakenly thought that the meadow was eternal. And beneath that face, she can see the face of the old woman Lilah, the wise one that Lilah doesn’t know she is becoming.

  “Miri, Miri,” she is saying. “Come back to me this time. I’ll keep you safe this time. Come with me.”

  Why is she calling, calling? Mira is sitting in a ball, knees against the soft protrusions of her unfamiliar breasts, at the edge of the sea. She can only look at the sea. If she looks anywhere else—at the beach, at the dead trees, at her sister’s face, at the world beyond—the screams begin to rise up in her throat. But as long as she looks at the sea, Yora can hold everything. The Dark Goddess….

  “Miri,” But poor Lilah, who is lonely, needs her.

  Now Lilah touches her, hesitantly. Sand on her fingers, in Mira’s hair. The water so heavy still, on the blanket Lilah wrapped around her strange, naked body, and the sunlight so light.

  “My beautiful sister,” says Lilah, but Mira can hear the fear in her voice, and knows that it is she—Mira, Miri, Mirr—whom Lilah fears. “It’s just us now, see? We’re free.”

  Mira closes her eyes. The sand sparkles underneath her body and says her name, and she remembers what she knows now: that she is also the Unicorn, and that the Dark Goddess told her no one can steal that from her. Her father didn’t take it away after all. In fact, it was the Unicorn who kept her safe. Knowing this makes her feel a little calmer inside. Something walks white and fluid inside her, its hooves kissing the earth. It feels so good to fold inward into that light that she has to use all of her energy to stay present to her sister, to stay here in her human body. This body is wounded in ways that will never heal, and she doesn’t think she will be able to stay inside it much longer.

  “Miri, I’m sorry,” Lilah is crying, and Mira turns to her and touches the tears with her fingers, wondering if her own tears feel like this. The touch seems to make Lilah cry harder. “I thought I was so alone, I thought you had left me, I thought he loved you more than me and that you shared something I could never have. I was nothing to him, and you were everything.”

  “No,” says Mira, but she can see by Lilah’s continual tears that she didn’t say it aloud. You were the stronger one, she wants to say. That’s why he left you alone. He knew your power. How I wished I could be powerful like you! But instead she says something else. She doesn’t know what it is until Lilah repeats it back to her:

  “Fire?”

  “Fire,” croaks Mira, unable to remember the girl she once was, who formed all those words, as if they made sense. “Fire fire fire.”

  “Where? What…?”

  “Everywhere. Fire.” And it’s true. She can’t feel it, but she knows that inside herself—inside the Unicorn, inside the center of the earth itself—she is so angry that the whole world is on fire. That fire killed her father, and it almost killed her. In her head she can see the whole City on fire, and she knows it is true; she knows that right now half the City is burning to the ground, and the people are crawling in smoke. And she is sorry but there is nothing she can do about it. There never was. The fire does not belong to her, any more than her body belonged to her when her father took it.

  “Yes, I think that’s why,” Lilah says pensively. “Because of the fire in me, he couldn’t love me.”

  “No,” chokes Mira. “I fire. I am fire…Mia. Mia.” And she closes her fists over her face, because she is afraid she will scream.

  “It’s okay,” says Lilah. “I know. You can scream. No one can hear us here. We’re safe. Scream if you have to.”

  With that, all the scream comes pouring out of Mira, but it doesn’t come out as a scream—because, once Lilah says that, she is all of the sudden okay. She doesn’t have to scream after all. Instead there is a long easy silence, a breath that falls out of her, a tree falling inside her and coming to rest finally on the earth that has given it life. She reaches out her hands and Lilah takes them, and then Lilah comes close and wraps her up to keep her warm.

  “Oh Miri,” she whispers. “What happened?”

  But Mira knows she doesn’t want to know. Anyway, she cannot imagine the words for it. The words to tell it are lost under so many other words—words that were not shameful to say but that were also lost.

  But she loves her sister (she remembers now), and so she says to Lilah, “You are going to have a baby.”

  This time she knows she spoke out loud, because she feels Lilah stiffen.

  “There’s a baby,” she says again, to make sure Lilah understands, “in your body.” She touches Lilah’s belly and Lilah doesn’t move. “There,” she says. She’s pretty sure she is saying it right this time. That the words are coming out in order.

  “No,” whispers Lilah.

  “I know why you’re scared,” says Mira. “Because it’s a girl.”

  “How do you know?”

  “T
he same way you know.” Mira looks into her sister’s eyes, tries to see in there, wondering if she is mistaken. “Don’t you?”

  Lilah nods slowly, her eyes flashing white. She knows. Mira watches her look down at her belly, at her own body, like it belongs to someone else. Mira knows that feeling. She watches Lilah touch her fingertips—just the tips of three fingers—to the swell of her belly, as if afraid to break a fragile glass ball.

  “I didn’t think—” Lilah says. They are facing each other now. Mira places her fingertips in the edges of the waves; she is wet, and most of all she is cold. It is the first clear physical feeling she can remember feeling in years. The cold opens the doors of her body from all sides, accentuating the solid separateness, the freedom, the untouchable aliveness of her flesh. Something like a scream sears through her, almost like joy. Cold! she thinks. I feel cold!

  “I didn’t think,” Lilah says again, “that I was that sort of woman.” And Mira has a sudden memory of holding a magic pebble in her hand—she’d found it in the dry streambed at the edge of the meadow, black with white rings—and as her father came toward her, accidentally she dropped it behind the bed, and she reached frantically with her hand as he came closer, feeling that if only she could keep it with her she would be safe, but she was so frightened that she could not find it, and even later after he left her, she could never find it again, and she always thought that pebble was magic; she always thought if only.

  That’s what Lilah’s voice sounds like right now, so small and lost. Like that pebble.

  “What—sort of woman?” asks Mira, feeling the word “woman” grow big and achy in her mouth, like something that swells when it gets wet.

  Lilah waits a long time, while Mira sees the answer already in the determined glow of her skin, the new center in her weight, as she sits there surrounding her own belly.

  “A mother,” Lilah says finally.

  Mira presses closer. She wants to. She wants to feel that beginning of a body in there, brand new, newer than she can remember herself ever being. She presses her own belly—empty, inhumanly empty—against that brilliant swell, and wraps her legs around her sister, and her sister wraps her legs around her back. Then they lean into each other, without saying a word, and make circles on each others’ backs, very small, with their hands. And she knows that Lilah wants to ask a hundred questions, and say a hundred things. She knows that Lilah wants to tell her how sorry she is for leaving her to be with those boys, and how for Lilah, being with those boys was beautiful—not at all like what happened to Mira herself. She knows Lilah wants to ask her what has happened to both of them between then and now, and wants to tell her she loves her, and wants to say how good it feels to make circles like this with their hands, and how those circles protect each other. Or maybe it is Mira who wants to say those things to Lilah. But either way, neither of them say anything—Lilah because, though she doesn’t even know it, she is still angry, still hoarding her own words out of hurt and bitterness, and Mira because it still costs her too much to speak, because she only has a little bit of this life left in her and she wants to use it right.

  But between them the fetus murmurs an old song, not knowing yet what it will mean to be a girl or a woman—only recognizing the taut, tentative stretch of their love.

  They stay together like this for many days, on the beach where in the past, things were only lost and never found. Mira cannot bear to leave the sea, the only place that ever kept her safe. So they stay, not knowing what to do or where to go. The sea comes and goes and is always there, and Yora cares for them.

  It begins with lightning, like the beginning of the world. It begins with the falling of live wires in a dry wind. It begins with the mixing of chemicals together in factories whose walls melted and fell, and which became houses of destruction instead of creation.

  Now fire embraces the houses, fast and easy as instinct. Like a lustful spirit, it climbs the highest, loneliest towers and licks the cloudy fields of heaven.

  Through flame-framed doorways, you must run now from a hunger too powerful to bear. Fire leans forward in an eager cursive slant, in waves and jagged moving tiers. Collapsing beams fall through it, as through the arms of ghosts.

  If only you could see how beautiful the City is, as it goes down! How beautiful the buildings with their beating wings of flame! How the Things laugh as they come undone! But you cannot look now. For you are all of you running for your lives, howling as if the fire were already inside of you.

  As for the mad people in the island, they sleep with the Princess, and they will wake with her, as the darkness wakes with the light. Then they will want to go home. They will want to be where you are. They will want to look into the eyes of the living, and they will claw at the cloth of your forgetting, twisting their faces in its dewy depths. They will call out your names.

  The sea pulses, nauseous with their suffering, and pumps larger and longer waves onto the shore.

  They want you. They want to come home.

  Over the mountaintops there is the faintest mist of red: not the red dying of fall, but the red beginnings of maples in spring. Yet it is not quite spring yet. The buds are too small to be noticed down on the ground. They can only be seen en masse, by certain birds, from the air.

  Chelya comes out the back door, tying her skirt up around her knees, muddy pajama bottoms flapping beneath it and over her boots. Rye stops chopping and straightens up, watching the falling snowflakes perch in the red, buoyant hills of her hair. Not all women wear skirts. In fact most that he’s met do not. Willow wears pants when she works. But there seems to be some unspoken rule in his family that women must always have that undulating roundness moving over their legs, hiding them. It’s a secret he doesn’t know. “Helps me flow better,” Chelya told him once. “Brings the earth up into us,” Eva said.

  Now Chelya, smiling a little to herself, picks up the other axe, drags out a log, and swings. She’s as strong and certain as Kite was, and the two pieces tip neatly apart, their white insides shining smooth. But for some reason this was something Rye almost always did with Kite, not with Chelya.

  And though doing it alone, up until this moment, he was okay, now that Chelya has come and lifted that other axe herself, he has to turn away and pretend to be checking the woodpile for mold. He can’t remember the last time he cried. Maybe when his mother died. His eyes blur and it dizzies him, as if they are dissolving into rivers and falling away, and he will never be able to see again. He holds onto the wood and tries to steady himself. He feels Chelya’s small hand on his back. She doesn’t rub it or say anything; she just stands perfectly still behind him, her hand firm and calm, like truth.

  Gently, he shrugs her off and begins stacking the cut wood. Chelya begins chopping again, and neither of them speak of it.

  “Dad,” Chelya says, “why do the women always do certain things and the men always do others?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you and Kite used to chop wood most of the time. And Ma and I usually cook, and prepare the meat, but you are the one who kills it.”

  He stops. “I don’t know. That’s how it’s always been. But I don’t mind, if you want to come set the traps with me.” He looks at her.

  “No—I just wondered. Eva says in the City it’s different. It’s important to the women now for them to do the same things men do. They want to, and also, if they don’t, the men won’t respect them.”

  Rye thinks about this. “That doesn’t make sense,” he says finally. “Why would I respect someone more for doing the same things I do? I mean, I respect women because of their differentness. Because of their mystery.” He thinks a little more. Is that it?

  “In the City,” Chelya says, pausing in her work and thinking, too, “I guess when the women spend their time raising children and making food—they call it home-making—they aren’t respected.”

  Rye is still staring
at her. “But why not?” he asks, bewildered. “What’s more important than that? What’s more important than making a home?”

  Chelya shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ve never been there. They don’t have real homes there or real food. Maybe that’s why.”

  Rye shakes his head and goes back to his work. “Well,” he says, relieved by this intellectual discussion, relieved to sound once again like the confident father who knows. “Like I always say, it’s not all bad in the City. There’s a lot of creativity there, a lot of new ideas. It’s good, maybe, to change roles sometimes. Human beings can do almost anything, if they try.”

  “You sound like Kite.” Chelya laughs, and Rye doesn’t know what to say to that. He is always surprised by how easily she can say his name.

  They start chopping again, their faces intent, their voices silent, and the memories of trees release themselves with quick, explosive cracks. Chelya is sweating but she doesn’t look tired. They’re about half through, already, what he wanted to get done today, and the snow is still falling tenderly and respectfully, the air absolutely still. It’s the kind of snowfall Kite would like. He’d be out all day in it, and no one would know where.

  “We don’t see you around much lately, Chel,” he says quietly, when they both stop to rest.

  She lowers her head. “I know,” she says, and nothing more. But Rye hasn’t been Fawn’s husband all this time not to learn how to interpret what’s going on beneath the surface. It must be all the tension in the house that’s keeping her away. It’s the fights between him and Fawn. Lately, he and Fawn are doing better, but maybe Chelya hasn’t been around enough to know that. Or maybe it’s more than that? Maybe it’s the strain of being the only child now. That feeling that all her mother’s worry and fear is focused on her.

  He says, “How are things? I mean, with your tree god.”