Lonely in the Heart of the World

by Mindi Meltz

  “I know you’re there,” she whispers to it now, sitting apart again, as the children play. And a breeze snakes over the dust and shimmies against her leg.

  “I keep asking myself,” she murmurs to it vaguely, “I keep asking myself, what is next for me?” Then she pauses, smiling at a memory. “I saw Dragon the other day. He did not recognize me. He seems very happy here, and very loved.”

  Dragon, dressed in bright colors, was surrounded by children. He was making little flames for them—making them dance in his hands—and they were awed. He was talking about dragons, how they breathed fire like that, how they came in all different colors and were very powerful but would not hurt people if people respected them. In an outer, less cohesive circle around the children, adults stood listening, though some of them pretended they were not listening. The children were asking if Dragon could show them the dragons, if they promised to be very respectful. They were asking where the dragons had all gone.

  The wind, never impatient, ripples without direction through her hair. “But am I happy?” she asks it. “What do I want, I wonder?”

  That was my question to you once, says the wind, a long time ago.

  Then as it hurries off into its freedom, over heads, over walls, over anything, it leaves her attention upon a shaggy old dog running toward her.

  She holds out her hand.

  i know you! cries the dog, pressing his paws against her chest. i know you!

  She presses his shaggy ears back with her palms and looks into his face. “It is you,” she says. “How you comforted me so long ago, when I was terrified of this place and could not come in. You remember me!”

  He sits panting and closes his eyes, letting her hands rake over him. There is nothing more to be said. He is happy.

  “Oh,” she says now. “Do you belong to that woman?”

  The dog stands up excitedly. no, he pants, but i brought her here, for you.

  Then he trots off, as if hurrying on to his next ecstatic mission. Now the woman comes toward her silently, stepping over the near rock wall: a woman with dark hair like nightfall. So many of the City people are pale, and many of the darker ones have had to be encouraged, over time, out of hiding. But this woman is half dark, half light.

  “Can I help?” the unknown woman asks in a small voice.

  The woman who was speaking with the wind looks up and smiles at a memory she sees in the other’s face. “Of course.”

  “There will be a garden here?” the darker woman asks. She speaks as if she isn’t from this place—as if she does not even know what has happened.

  “We’re trying to plant food everywhere,” the first woman explains slowly, curiously, looking into her eyes. Then she says, “I’m Salt.”

  “I’m Mira,” says Mira.

  “You look a little like someone I once knew.”

  Mira kneels. Salt stares at her, feeling at once startled and foolish, as if she is missing something obvious. This girl is not just any girl. She feels so important. Or she reminds Salt of something important—a dream she had? The impression seems to come from more than her uncanny resemblance to Delilah. But then Salt worries that her stare is frightening the girl.

  “You can turn up that row there with your hands,” she says to Mira. “Loosen up the soil. I’m sorry I have no other tools to work with right now.”

  Mira begins obediently. But Salt keeps staring, in spite of her intention not to.

  “Something has happened to you,” she says suddenly, reaching out to touch Mira’s hand. She can’t help herself. Every motion of the girl’s pained, hesitant body is like a careful attempt to repair the wound of a soul. That wound, too, feels familiar to Salt.

  But Mira pulls back sharply, then sits still and lowers her head. Salt immediately regrets her gesture and her words. She begins to think through some apology, feeling an old loneliness rise up inside her that she thought she had conquered. Lost in thought, she unknowingly picks up a fallen leaf and tears it to pieces in her hands.

  “My father died,” Mira says finally, long after Salt has given up hope of an answer, “when I was young.”

  “Mine, too,” says Salt, and Mira looks up.

  “My mother,” she says, shaking her head, and stops.

  “She could not rescue you,” whispers Salt, and Mira nods.

  “Whhhooooooh!” roars the youngest boy with his breath, interrupting them. He is running toward the older boy and the older girl who are building a play house out of sticks. It may be the only house they have in this world right now. But the younger boy is pretending to be fire, and will tear it all down. Salt stands, anticipating more tears.

  “I came to you,” Mira is saying to her, oblivious to the commotion, “because I thought I recognized you, but now I’m not sure.”

  Salt glances back at her.

  “Anyway, something about you— I’m still so new, but you seem safe. Oh, I can’t explain anything. Are you old?”

  Salt laughs. “Old?” But the little girl comes running to her now, tearing at her skirts.

  “He tore down our house!”

  Salt sighs. What can she tell them? The truth is that the house was important, but the fire, too, was a true thing. It was something that happened. The boy is only re-enacting the drama of reality. How else can it be understood? But she doesn’t know what to tell them. She doesn’t know what to do with children, really.

  “Hush,” says Mira gently, and holds her fragile arms out to the girl. And the girl, not even knowing her, falls into them, and lets Mira caress her back. “I know,” murmurs Mira. “It’s so sad. So sad.”

  Smiling, Salt watches the girl’s shoulders relax, and then the girl pulls away and runs back to her friends—everything okay now, forgotten. Mira looks back up at Salt.

  “Once I was a different creature,” she says thoughtfully, “and that creature was the oldest creature in the world, and I knew so much more than I know now: I was wise. But I gave that form up. I gave it back to the world, to whom it belongs. It never belonged to me, Salt. And now I am only this—this woman, and I feel so young, so unknowing. I don’t know what to do, what to say, what to feel. And you seem old to me!”

  Salt sits down again, sifts soil between her fingers, dusts a thin layer over the shivering seeds, and thinks. It seems to her that she can speak the truth to this girl, and Mira will not think it strange. So she allows herself to look into her feelings a little more deeply than she would ordinarily do with a stranger present. “In a way I do feel old,” she says. “I’ve seen many worlds, and I’ve lived many lives, and I’ve lost what I love most over and over again. That makes me feel old. But at the same time I feel younger than I’ve ever been. I mean, in my lives before this one, there was always something I had to be, some plan laid out for me, some dream I was for someone else. I was chasing—I didn’t even know, Mira—I was chasing a ghost.” She pauses, staring into the air. “Now I get to start all over—with no one wanting me, expecting me, or challenging me, no one even truly knowing me. I can go anywhere in the world. I can do anything, meet anyone, and make any choice I want to at any moment.”

  She smiles at Mira now with the revelation of what she’s saying, feeling for the first time since Sky died that she is waking up—and it is a good waking, not like waking from a nightmare. Mira is staring back at her. Her eyes are indigo, her neck long and curved, her shoulders brown and narrow. Like a brand new creature.

  “It’s that way for me, too,” Mira says.

  “Have you ever been out in those fields?” Salt asks Mira in a rush. “Out beyond the City, toward the desert and the mountains—those fields that are like the sky, the way it feels to walk through them? Have you been there?”

  Mira nods. “I have been there.” For an instant she looks not young at all, but very old, much older than Salt. Salt feels the air lift her right up from inside; she feels lighter
than she can remember feeling for a long time. Suddenly, as if it were perfectly natural, she imagines traveling with Mira through those fields, laughing with her, discovering and speaking with all the creatures together, talking of their dreams and their longings and knowing that they both have felt all of the same things. She imagines it as if it has already happened. Or as if they have already traveled all those lands together but did not have the language with which to speak of it to each other, until now.

  She reaches across the seed beds again for Mira’s hand. This time, Mira’s fingers close around hers.

  “There are other people out there, Mira,” she whispers, “in the mountains and the desert and all the lands where I’ve never even been. And there are great wildernesses where you don’t see anyone at all.”

  Mira nods. “I know people who live in the mountains.”

  “So do I.” Salt smiles to remember, for it feels so long ago that she knew them, and yet they feel so close she could almost touch them. She looks down at her own hand clasped in Mira’s, and her heart is beating so alive.

  “Salt,” says Mira very quietly, “I wish I could see those fields again. I would walk tall in those fields now. I would run. If you—”

  She looks up, and Salt looks up too. “If you will come with me. As my friend.”

  They gaze at each other, as the children cry out and laugh and spill the soil around them, and they try to remember. Because it seems to each one as if she knows the other from somewhere. As if their story already began in some other lifetime, when they stood lost and separate by the sea, and the wind called out a single, restless word, whose gift no one yet knew.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my publisher, Steve Crimi, for putting all your heart into making this book happen, because you believe in it and for no other reason. Thank you to Krys Crimi, for doing the same, and for your calligraphy. Thank you to my husband, whose honest feedback on my earliest draft was the catalyst for my best revisions. Thank you to my editor, Judy Hogan, for bolstering my faith when I most needed it. Thank you to Susan Yost for cover design and layout, and to Chiwa for your artwork. Thank you to Brian Mashburn for permission to use your beautiful painting, and to Utah Green for permission to use your beautiful song. Thank you to the fox who appeared at the edge of the field, at a time in the very middle of the story when I wondered if it was worth going on, and stared at me long and hard, until I didn’t anymore.

  Mindi Meltz has worked in many landscapes as a writer, counselor and teacher, and holds an MA in Transpersonal Psychology. She grew up on the coast of Maine, and now lives with her husband in the mountains of Western North Carolina. This is her second novel.

  She can be reached at www.mindimeltz.com