by Mindi Meltz
13th MOON
Mira will always remember the night of this full moon, on the equinox of spring. It is the night when time starts moving for her again.
Every night now for a little while, she has been taking human form. And though she is silent with everyone else, sometimes she lies with her sister in the evening and practices speaking. At first she thought that the Unicorn was her real self, the immortal self—and that this human body was one she could soon give up forever, too used up and broken to survive—but now she is beginning to wonder if she might have gotten that mixed up. Now it seems to her that the Unicorn body is the one that is old and tired, yearning toward its own death and the time when it will be reborn. Mira feels sad to notice how it fades from her, how it feels less and less natural, how it begins to lift from her again like a dream, while she remains here on the earth with the human body that will live on. But in the mountains where they walk these days, enclosed in the silent rooms of trees and the earth old, old under their feet, Mira feels safer than she did before. The trees talk to her and tell her stories that make her laugh and sigh inside, stories that make her own story seem like simply one more story—and not necessarily one she has to keep. Even if she feels afraid of this change that’s happening to her, when she stays near her sister she feels better, because her sister knows exactly how painful it is to be human.
But on this night, Lilah and Dragon are having sex. Mira, left alone, watches them from the high branch of a tree. This tree called her up here. Come on, it smiled, knowingly, gently, come on up. But you have to be a girl to come up here—no Unicorn can climb, you know. Mira is fascinated as she watches Lilah climb on top of Dragon, watches her ride him gently even as she holds her pregnant belly with one protective hand, her lips hanging over his. Mira watches Dragon lie helpless like that, allowing Lilah to overtake him, even though Mira knows he could grab her if he wanted to, and push her back under. Mira doesn’t know what she herself feels as she watches, and the numbness that sits like a rock inside that not-knowing is so painful that she tries to think of something else to distract herself. Something that will take some thought to figure out, to pass the time until they’re done.
I am eighteen years old, is the thought that comes to mind first. That’s what Lilah told her today, or maybe it was yesterday. She tries to understand what that means. It seems like such a random number: so much older than the lifespan of a grasshopper, for example, but nothing compared to the lifespan of a mountain. It’s older than she was when her father died, older than she was when they went away to school—and yet if she feels older now, she is not aware of it. How can people measure age like that? What does it mean, that she is eighteen? Is there something she should be capable of now, something she should be responsible for, something she should feel? These questions make her anxious. Like something is happening to her that other people can see but that she does not know about. It has always been this way for Mira.
She wonders how old Kite is. She knows he is younger than all of them, because of something Lilah said once. She called him a child. But he does not seem like a child to her. The way he looks at her, he doesn’t look like a child. Yet he doesn’t look at her the way men look at women either. It’s somewhere in between.
She has not gone to Kite since the night she and Lilah burned the land of their father. But somewhere inside herself she knows that she is human every night also for this: that she will go to him again. And when she goes to him, she wants to be in this form. She wants him to see her. For the first time she can remember, she wants to be seen, and she doesn’t know why. It’s something about his seeing, and something about the way he lays his body down—almost mentally, like a blanket he’s unfolding, like a thing he knows well and has under control but does not relate to anyone else—that feels safe to her.
I’ll go and ask him, she thinks suddenly, how old he is. It seems like an easy question, something she should be able to put into words. It shouldn’t put her in any danger to ask that. It should be simple, and the answer will be simple, even if it doesn’t mean anything to her. At least she will have said something. It will be a beginning.
She hurries down the tree, but she stops every few feet to catch her breath—not from moving but from fear—and to press her chest to the tree, pressing into it like a camouflaged moth, telling herself it’s okay. It’s okay if I change my mind. I don’t have to ask him. I’ll go and sit beside him like before and see if the words come.
She gets to the bottom of the tree and realizes that what she really fears is not speaking but finding out that she can’t speak, finding out that silence is no longer a decision after all, but something she trapped herself inside so long ago that she can no longer get out of it.
Mirr, Mirr, Mirr.
It’s darker under the trees and she has to crawl very slowly in order to find him. In some places that almost never get sun, in the damp corners of tree roots and behind the cold faces of stone, a little snow remains, crusted and glowing. But elsewhere the earth sinks a little beneath her knees, and she can feel the first green leaves at once bitter and tender against her palms.
He is still sleeping but something else is awake tonight that hasn’t been awake the other nights. It’s that part of him. Mira can see the little tower of it beneath the blanket, can see his hands twitch a little in his sleep as if something is alive in him that makes that tower rise and possesses his consciousness and moves him without his knowing. Without realizing it, she grips the earth with her hands and her mouth goes dry, and she is prepared to bolt like an animal. She recognizes that terrible possession. She remembers how there is nothing a man can do to control it. She hears Delilah cry out in distant ecstasy in the dark behind her, and she feels like she did a hundred times in her childhood: so eerily, abysmally alone. She wants to run, but it’s like a dream, and all she can do is fall, her own body a bottomless shadow thing that drops her spirit through a trap-door into chaos without a thought.
It was Lilah’s presence that protected her those other nights, she realizes. It was Lilah, somehow, who kept Kite safe for her. But Lilah, back there with Dragon, is lost to her now—and Mira, Mia, wants to run, run, run….
But then he opens his eyes. The strangest thing happens. As soon as he opens his eyes, she is okay. Or almost okay. She looks into those blue windows, peaceful as a snowflake or smoke on a winter evening, and remembers he is not her father, not some demon possessing him, but just this boy—this mystery of a boy. She sees the longing there, brilliant as an oncoming rain, and yet it does not frighten her, because there is no intention in it. It’s simply there. It is so sincere, so helplessly huge, that it makes her eyes tear.
“What?” he whispers, and she knows this night is different, because he has never spoken to her before. “What do you want? What can I give you?”
Mira looks down. She doesn’t understand the question. But then she finds herself looking at the tower again, still alive and tall under the blanket. It’s dark but a shadow outlines it faintly. She knows it is there. Suddenly Lilah’s cries seem so loud she thinks they will engulf her; they are like a roaring in her ears, something so loud, so horribly loud that her whole body shakes with the sound of them. They crescendo and then keep rising inside her head, until she thinks her eardrums will break. She does not know what’s happening in her body, or even that her body is still there, but when the cries break off—leaving a sudden, wild silence behind in which she wonders if maybe she imagined them—she finds that the blanket has been torn away. And she knows by the placement of her hand that it was she who did it.
She gasps. Slowly, all the while staring into her eyes as if she herself is willing this to happen, Kite is now undoing the cloth that surrounds the tower, and the thing is being set free. Naked now, it glows in the dark, and she worries about it, bobbing alone there in the cold. He starts to reach for it but then pulls his own hands away. He keeps staring at her face—she can feel his gaze—
but she keeps staring at the thing and cannot look away. She can hear his controlled but urgent breathing, his in-breaths tight and his out-breaths weak and fast, as if he is climbing a mountainside with the last of his strength. She starts to back away, then glances back quickly at his face.
“It’s okay,” he whispers. “I won’t touch you.” And so she can look back at the thing again, which is what she wants to do—feeling his gentleness, knowing he won’t hurt her. She needs to look at it. She needs to watch it for a long, long time. She needs to keep an eye on it. She needs to know what it is, what it will do, what it wants, why it longs for her.
Or maybe she doesn’t need to know any of that. Maybe she just needs to sit here and be okay. She tries to concentrate on her breath, which sounds too loud—loud like he’s going to find her, he’s going to capture her—but no, she remembers, he is right here, she has found him, and he is not doing anything to her. The night isn’t that cold. A breeze she knows and trusts encircles her face, and then the rest of her body—a white warm breeze that has always protected her. It asks gently,
What’s happening in there?
In where? wonders Mira.
In your body.
I wouldn’t know, thinks Mira quickly, but then she realizes that she needs to know, because if she doesn’t find out, what if someone else does? She needs to know exactly what she is, exactly what she owns still, so that no one can ever steal it from her again. Eyes still enraptured by the rearing thing, the naked tower, and by his hands clenched near it, she tries to get inside some part of her body. She starts with where her knees feel warm, where his body lies close to them. She travels her attention up her knees, up her thighs—but then she gets lost, and looks quickly back to his face, afraid.
Oh no, she thinks helplessly, oh no. But she doesn’t know why she thinks that. Such kindness in his eyes! Surprised, she watches one of his hands unfold from where it lies, watches him open it above his prone body, open it up. He is asking her for something, or he is giving her something; she can’t tell which. She tries to remember. It’s a language she knew once, long long ago. She closes her eyes tight, trying to think. Everything, she feels, depends on her remembering this. If she can’t remember, she will be alone forever. She will never be able to be a sister to her sister, never be able to express love, never be able to touch anyone without pain. She has to remember. Tears roll down her face with the effort.
“It’s okay,” he says again, more loudly now, and she opens her eyes to his again and sees such compassion there that suddenly she remembers easily, without even trying. He is offering her his hand. He is offering to hold her hand. That’s what the gesture means.
Smiling a little, relieved, she lays her hand inside of his. It hurts, but that’s okay. She still has the other hand free, in case she needs it. He isn’t holding her hand hard. She could still pull it away, if she needed to. It doesn’t hurt so much, actually, this touch. She couldn’t say what it feels like. Something other than pain, and every feeling other than pain is the same to her, because it has no name and is unfamiliar. If she thinks about it too much, it starts to feel like pain after all, because that is the only feeling she knows. But their two hands, entwined like that, float gracefully to the earth between them, and lie there, warm in each other.
She will always remember the embrace of that hand. If only she could tell him, what it means to her! At first it is only her hand that feels it, but then it’s as if her whole body fills out, bit by bit, around the flesh of that hand, so that he is cradling more and more of her, without ever moving, until she can feel up from her knees, feel down from her chest, feel down her arms and into her hips and her belly and down. Bit by bit she can feel, and all he is doing is looking into her eyes, and that tower that stands up for her—he is just leaving it there for her to see.
With her other hand, like it’s the most natural thing, she reaches down to feel for something between her legs. Something is going on down there. Something really important, that she’s been ignoring. When she touches it, she is surprised at the icy sting of her fingers. She can hear Kite’s breathing intensify, and she hopes she isn’t hurting him somehow by doing this, but now that she’s doing it she doesn’t want to stop.
Melted and jelly-like, soft as an eye.
She couldn’t say exactly what she feels down there but she feels her finger moving and she hears her own breath now along with Kite’s, so that she can hardly tell the difference. She’s looking into his eyes and something in her knows what he knows, and it is something she has never known before. When she looks back at the tower, she sees it for what it is—not good, not bad, but simply alive with its own particular song, like any other creature in the forest. And because she doesn’t know what it is that she’s touching, because she doesn’t know what she’s feeling or whether it’s good or bad—only that it makes her tremble, only that it makes her own lips taste sweet, only that she is breathing harder and she doesn’t know why, only that it is so, so important—she wants to express it to him somehow. So she brings her fingers out from inside of her, as if from out of the ocean, and then touches the tower, sliding the wetness from inside her along its delicate, newborn skin. She looks back at his eyes as he cries out, and then she sees the little fountain jumping out of it, and pulls away as he grabs it suddenly with his own hand and rubs the fountain out.
The fountain is familiar. Maybe she did something like this before, a long time ago. Maybe that time, long ago, was terrible. She isn’t sure. But what happens here doesn’t feel like anything to do with that. It feels like the first time for Mira. She isn’t afraid. She wraps her hands back inside her cloak and looks back at Kite. Always, she will remember the vulnerable, helpless explosion of that naked creature under her hand. Always, she will remember to feel compassion for that creature, and for the gasping in his breath. She feels that she understands something she didn’t understand before: something about power and the reasons behind what people do. Most of all, she understands something that lives inside her own body, that has nothing to do with her father or anything that happened to her before: something that simply lives there, that she never knew about before. And she wants to keep it alive. Someday, she wants to bring it out like that again. She had no idea that voice comes not only from the throat and the mouth but also from down there. No wonder she could not speak before. Because she has two mouths, and both of them have to be open.
“Sorry,” Kite is saying, covering himself.
But she leans down low so that her face is close to his, and she closes her eyes to feel his breathless wonder. And she says out loud, but gently, into the little spiral fetus of his ear, “Thank you.”
Love used to seem simple to Dragon. It was the thing he did not have.
He knew that love was something he needed, and so he used that word to describe whatever attracted him: woman, sex, Kite’s friendship, the acceptance of the City, even Coyote’s haunting attention. Love was the same as need. Whatever he loved, he needed, and whatever he needed, he loved. Love was absolute and unquestionable and holy and better than him. It felt the same in his loins as it did in his heart: desperate and beautiful and the only thing worth living for, and yet so painful it might kill him.
But now, as he walks into the mountains with Delilah at his side, now as the subtle, ever-changing trees curve their touch around him, now he feels for the first time how complicated love is. Or perhaps the feeling of love is still simple, but knowing what to do with it is not.
The spring earth sinks, delicate and damp, beneath his bare feet. Once, a year ago, he came plummeting down these mountainsides like a fallen bird, dragging his heart behind him, crying out to an empty universe. But that seems like a lifetime ago—another person, hollow and selfish and alone, that he pities now. Now he listens to the wordless words the newly arrived birds and their mates have to say to each other: in the forest their calls are occasional, important, and slow. He has more time in h
imself now to listen. Things are simple for them. They seem the way he once was: made of pure instinct. They only want to make love, and what comes after that they have not yet imagined and do not need to.
But for him, now, there are so many loves. And though he knows he should be grateful, finally, they make him anxious too.
Here is Delilah, walking beside him in silence—a silence they share comfortably now, that fills him with pride and warmth. He knows that he loves her. Yes, that is real love. He feels it every time he glances at the stiff lift of her chin, and at the swell of her belly, and every time she sighs and he knows she is getting tired even though she won’t admit to it, and he curls his arm around her back so gently she can’t resist. He remembers when they made love again, finally, and again—the last time only last night. How their fire twined together so easily now. Just like that last time in the desert, when she sat in his arms and melted into him, they spiral up together into the sky now, only now more slowly, more sweetly. Now when they make love, he gets to watch her face, and she lets him watch. Now he understands, finally, that the fire he was trying to raise up inside himself all those years—in the Garden, in the desert, so lonely—needed the fire of another to raise it. It needed to weave back and forth between them, sex to sex and belly to belly, heart to heart and throat to throat; it needed that rhythm of longing and retreat, reaching and releasing, to make it go.
He loves the baby inside of Delilah, the baby she says will be a girl, with a mysterious and protective fierceness that frightens him. That baby belongs to him. The thought of any other man raising that child but him makes the blood pound in his head.
Yet he doesn’t want to stay with Delilah. Not always. He wants to be with her sometimes; he wants to care for her; he wants to be her man—and yet at the same time he misses the friends he made in the City, who were surprising, creative, and abundant, who loved his art and made him feel like a god. There are so many women out there that he hasn’t even met yet, and he loves that look they will give to him, when he first catches their eyes.