by Mindi Meltz
He sees Her in the crotch of the wave, Her horn lowered, the wave radiating out and above her like a great roaring shell that encloses her. The wave will destroy the City—will destroy all those people who have saved him from loneliness. He feels only rage, and that rage is lust, and that lust is fear, and that fear is need. He is only fire, taller and taller now, and this time fire will win. He is taller than the wave, taller than the sea, as tall as his own erect and endless need, leaning over her and spearing her with the whole weight of his soul.
Then he is a dragon, his teeth at the throat of the Unicorn, his breath turning her white skin black.
Then she roars, and he realizes it is She who is the dragon—She whose dark longings bruised him and weakened him and kept him from that sweet virgin, that first Yora, whom he loved more than anyone. Yes he—it was he all along!—he is the Unicorn, with his pure thrusting sword, when the fire of his lust finally rises up through his body and erupts through his skull into his great father the sky! Yes, She is the dragon, as if the Dark Goddess herself was a dragon all along, who tortured him and fed on his lust, who taught him to love, who—in the form of Delilah—was fire and loved the fire in him right back.
And then, his hands still clutching at the warm flesh of something—Unicorn, dragon, or woman he does not know—still needing it, still holding it tight to keep it from destroying him, he actually sees Delilah rushing toward him, and she is calling out to him, just before the wave falls over him.
She is crying, “Don’t! Don’t hurt her.”
Blue. Grey. Black. Flashes of red in silver space. Dragon falls to his knees, and the sea draws out; the wave draws back, sucking him down in its retreat. But he is a god, and he rises again. He rises and stumbles toward her, as obedient as any god to a human being. He is cradling something in his arms, and whatever happens, he feels that he has to keep it safe.
He meets Delilah on a sandy shore. She is kneeling, doubled over in pain, her belly swollen and dropping between her legs into the earth. He kneels before her and holds out this sacred thing for her, and only then does he see what it is. It is the Unicorn, which is not really a Unicorn after all.
It’s a little girl.
Then he meets Delilah’s eyes, and remembers again that she, too, is afraid, vulnerable, and alone.
And that he is all grown up now, and can no longer be rescued by anyone but himself.
“Let Her go,” she had said, and he had.
It was that easy.
When she saw him coming, she knew he was coming for her. She had known it from within her mind, which still lived in the depths of the sea, long before he even knew his own purpose, long before he saw or even imagined her. She felt his coming the way she’d felt her father’s coming in the whispering grasses that were always safe until suddenly they were not. She knew how his soul worked. She knew that whatever he loved, he needed to own, and whatever he owned he would destroy through that owning. She grew four legs in the formless sea. She struck out her horn and stood staunchly in the cave of a wave. Before it fell she would kill him. Whether she survived did not matter, only that she never again allow herself to be taken.
But when she saw him rise up in towers of flame, she shivered in her cold shell. For what was she, really? Never before had she truly tried to claim this body, in all its power. What power did it have? Fear drained her breath, her own horn like an icicle in her skull. Only when he touched her—only when his hands closed around her tense, breathless throat with their magnetic fury—did the rage come back to save her. A holocaust of flame, big enough to consume a city, thrust against her ribs from inside, and she knew again that she would kill him and that nothing would stop her. Too late, she realized that to take hold of her own power meant to give in to that mystery within her own soul that she had never wanted to face—that very mystery that her father had sought, the mystery he scented her out by with his magical mind when she hid from him, the mystery that kept her silent every year after he died. It wasn’t the pain, it wasn’t the anger, and it wasn’t the fear. It was knowing she was human, too. It was what she recognized in the dragon that came for her—the dragon within herself. It was her own desire.
So that now he became the Unicorn, and she became the monster, battered and torn into inhuman shapes, her face a bleeding vagina, her hands missing, her body gutted. Then all that pain and fire was her only power, so that her strange, fantastical body flashed its wonderful tail, and her wound was her fury, and her voice was flame, and she knew that the secret to the Unicorn’s magic—the secret her father, who banished Lilah from his love, never knew—is that within the Unicorn roars the passion of the dragon.
He did not hurt her—this boy-man who had come for her. She knew he wouldn’t, finally, when she felt Lilah coming, and felt Lilah cry out the way she’d never cried out all those years of their childhood—when she felt how at last she would be rescued the way she’d always longed to be rescued, those long lonely years, by someone who loved her. So she didn’t kill him, after all.
When she felt Lilah near her again, she was able to open her eyes, and then she felt no rage, but only tenderness, for that tortured, square-jawed face above her—that smooth human skin with the sharp animal hair bursting through, those wild, womanless eyes—because she knew that he would listen to her, and she knew that all he needed to be at peace were those three words that only she could give him.
“Let Her go.”
Now the sea, exhaling, has receded to its own center as easily as it advanced, arching downward and inward in liquid tiers of bounty and death. Yora, released from Dragon’s hold, lets the people go.
And a girl who calls herself Mirr sits on those bare wet rocks now, hidden from the sun, watching the sea go.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispers, though she knows she is supposed to be strong now, she knows her sister will stay with her, and she knows this man will not hurt her. Almost, she knows these things. Perhaps she is still afraid of the dragon man, after all. She waits to see what Lilah will do with him.
Mirr won’t tell the secret of the Unicorn. How the Unicorn carried upon her back once a girl of perfect innocence—a girl whose heart was fearlessly open, who believed in love and nothing else. How beautiful that girl was! As if from a dream, as if from another life, Mira remembers that girl—the lonely fields and desert water they shared—but she will not tell. It is not safe to tell. First, she must watch Lilah and the dragon man to see what will happen.
Back on the beach, Lilah and the man are moving near each other, not knowing what to say. At first they held each other for a long time, as the waters swept past them, and Mira watched the sturdiness of their holding, despite the entire ocean sweeping by them, and knew that this man was the baby’s father. But neither of them said that. In fact, neither of them said anything at all. Now Lilah sits alone with her big belly, and the dragon man walks around with a twisted face, jabbing restlessly in the sand with a long piece of driftwood. It is familiar to Mirr—this cold, awkward speechlessness, this denial of what is most real. No one in their family ever had words for real love. But the silence frightens her, because she knows it is from that kind of silence that hatred is born, and those dark urges that no one admits to will play out unseen.
“Don’t leave me,” she whispers again to the receding waves, lowering her head to her knees, not knowing what she is now.
You have a choice now, Mirr. You can be a girl, safe in the harmless innocence of girlness, sweet and loved, but vulnerable in that way that only a girl can be.
Or you can be a Unicorn, with all the power and magic of that untouchable creature, but living always with the fear of being hunted by those who envy your power, those who want it for their own.
You can be safe in being small, or safe in being big, and yet neither one is safe.
“But that was always my choice!” Mirr cries. “Nothing has changed.” She feels like the Dark Godde
ss is giving her a riddle. That what She says is not exactly what She means, but Mirr doesn’t know what the truth is.
What’s changed is that you cannot be nothing any longer. That is no longer one of your choices.
Mirr looks up and sees the sea finally, for now, at peace, rocking in the deep bowl of the underworld. She feels raw, exhausted, and alone, but at least she feels something. She also feels her sister’s love reaching for her like fast and hungry paws. But still Lilah does not know Mira’s deepest shame, and Mira does not want to be human, for fear that the shame will show.
Yet for Lilah, she will at least begin. For Lilah she will leave the sea and begin that painful journey outward again, onto the land. When she sees Lilah’s wary, hopeful eyes glinting at her from that childish, ancient face, she says inside herself, No, I will not choose. I want both.
Then inside the wound, for the first time, the Dark Goddess seems to smile.
For a long time, there had been no thought for Fawn. She had lost the ability or the need to think. When she fell into the blackness that was Malachite’s absence, when she found out that he was gone, it seemed as if she returned to that state of being that she existed in before he was born, when he was growing in his ancient, unconscious way inside her. When he had lived inside her womb, she had lived there with him, not thinking, not caring for complex questions, not even speaking when she did not need to. She had moved fluidly through dark, instinctual patterns, and known nothing but the sensations of her body. Pain, heat, weight, hunger. While pregnant there had been times when, though she remembered who Rye was, she could not remember exactly what he had to do with her, and she wouldn’t try.
After her son disappeared, she went back to that place, where words could not reach her. Again she was only a body, aching with emotions too big to have names, and now sometimes with terror gouging holes along her spine and leaving empty spaces in her skull. Though her womb was cold now, instead of warm, in a way she felt as close to her son in his absence as she had felt when he lived inside her. She felt that close to him simply because she could think of nothing but him all day long, and all through her sleep, and in everything she did. When people spoke to her about something else, she did not understand why.
Inside her womb, she saw the tracks his salamander body had made; she felt the shape of him in the curved shape of her own arms. She saw his hungry face at the table, saw the color of his eyes, saw the intensity of a little boy leaning close over the movements of insects in the grass. She saw him beside his father, quick with his hands, the two of them working and not looking at each other. She heard his questions, first in sounds and then in words. She saw the shape of his back over the fire he built in the morning. She heard his voice in the evening, “Watch me, Ma, I can hit that tree with my slingshot, eyes closed.” She was confused because all of these were real, all of these her body recorded, and yet everyone wanted her to believe this was not real any more. That Malachite could be gone from her life, now and maybe forever.
It was easier, in a way, to live in that dark terror without words, without thought—close to him in that darkness—than to endure the pain of hope. Grief and despair did not require thinking. Hope did. Hope made her realize all over again that he was gone.
But how long could she go on chewing the emptiness? Eventually she had to sigh, open her eyes, and hear Yora’s questions, feel Delilah’s and Lonely’s pain, and then, finally, Rye’s. That night after her dream, she and Rye had switched off telling stories about Malachite—Kite—both past and future, real and imaginary. Each story was a step she used to climb out of her own womb, until it was light enough to begin thinking again, and then she had to start asking questions and couldn’t stop.
How did this loss manage to toss her so easily, so effortlessly, from the rooted center of her life, as if she weighed nothing? How was it possible so suddenly to lose the quiet peace she and Rye had spent nineteen years lovingly, tenderly, trustingly building? What was that peace built on after all? Only the circumstance of good fortune? Only a beautiful piece of this earth that, as Willow’s experience showed, they could so easily lose at any time?
She went down into the basement of their home, the foundation on which this home was built. With her fingertips she traced her way between the rough mounds of old canvas bags, sacks of potatoes, turnips, onions and beets, the strung heads of garlic, the light, thin brittle of hanging herbs, the last sack of flour and the two last sacks of rice that Willow and Jay had given them at the end of last summer, before Thea was born and before Kite was gone, when they were all still laughing over watermelons and climbing to reach the first apples. She brushes the shiny globes of jars in the darkness: tomatoes, pickled green beans, apples, blueberry jam. She knew the placement of each one. A barrel of dry beans, and another of dry corn. Muskrat jerkey wrapped in leather. A wooden door beneath her feet, echoing from the little space below full of aging goat cheese. All of this abundance, so precious to her, so comforting, but which was not enough for her son—who must cast off the beginning of his name, and fly.
She came, still in darkness, her hands on her belly, to the dusted-over table where he used to do his secret work. She lit his candle. In all the time he had been gone, she had tried to forget this one place—asking Chelya or Rye or Lonely to go down and gather the food they needed for supper, so she would not have to come near it, or remember the absence he left there. She had climbed his secret tree and looked out to the distant City, and she had sat by his bed for hours until some duty called her urgently enough to drag her away, her fingers pressed to his cold pillow, staring dully into the form he left behind as if she could find him there. But she had avoided this one place, down here below the life they lived, where he used to plot and dream of running away.
She opened the books whose little spider footprints were meaningless to her. How could the secret contained in those tiny marks be so convincing? She rubbed at the page with her fingers, leaning closer, as if she could rub open the truth—as if she could find in those lines where Kite was, if he was safe, why he left, and if he would come home. What could it all mean? How could there be so many words? Kite, with his dreams, lived in the sky some of the time—a sky she did not know, beyond what she could see—but he also lived down here, trying to understand the roots of things. It was something he was born with, this questioning: needing to know why we believe the things we do, why we live how we do, and how life itself becomes. How does the sun burn? What makes the water run? What did the fish lose when we took it from the water, that made it stop moving? He had wanted to know these things from the time he was old enough to speak.
Was he trying to get closer to things, that way? Because now she asks the same kinds of questions, trying to get closer to him. Why did you leave? What were you seeking? Who are you that I, your own mother, did not understand?
That night in the basement, she knew that to understand him she would have to open to something she had never opened to before. She did not know exactly what that was, but standing there, her world illuminated only by the small, fragile light of that single candle, she felt panic skitter again down the back of her neck like a cold insect. Those meaningless marks, those imageless words, made her stomach turn, make her bend over and close her eyes. She caught the familiar desperation in her fists. I can’t bear to lose him. I can’t bear it. And yet, if only she could be still inside, if only she could calm her frantic heart for one moment, she might know something. She might know—the way she always knew, when he was out in the fields for the night, or coming home through the forest, or anywhere—if he was okay. Before he left home, she had always been able to sense that. She could always feel when he was on his way back. She could feel his mood even when he was out in the garden, and she was in the house. Of course she could! But since he left, she had felt nothing but her own fear.
If only she could be still inside, she thought, then she might know. Yet how could she bear to ask herself the q
uestion: Is he okay? Is he coming back? What if, inside, she did know? What if this darkness, this emptiness, this endless bleeding inside was her knowing—the answer she had always feared?
It was like when Willow’s family lost their land. Over and over, Fawn went to the river and told it of that loss, and the river—which was Yora, though she would not, for a long time, remember—said, Let go, Fawn. Surrender. Fawn knows she cannot control the rains, the pace of the seasons, the storms, or the marching of the City over the land. She has let go of whole crops that failed; she has let go of seeing Willow’s family and children more than a couple of times per year; she has let go of the longing she used to feel to have a real father. She has let go of so much that she knew she had to let go of. True, it was that very surrender that gave her a sense of peace in life—that let her feel that, despite everything hard, the river always carried her, like a pillow of soft motion beneath the mysterious journey of her life. But certain things she could not let go. No one knows how she has denied everything she has been given, how she has refused the song of the river, the songs of the birds, the hum of the insects and the wind in the leaves—everything, everything that made up the life she knew and loved, crying inside herself “No, I will not surrender this!” I will not surrender my son. I will not surrender the earth itself into the hands of evil men. There are some things one should never, ever have to give up. It is too much to ask. It is not part of the sacred flow, to lose such things. There is nothing left, in the absence of such things.
How is it possible, Yora, to surrender to such losses?
But on this night, all night curled up on the basement floor, her body rocking (“Don’t—please leave me,” she cried out to Rye when she saw the light coming from the open door above), she knew the answer. First, surrender to the emotion. Let the emotion carry you.