The Mountain's Heart - Deborah L. Davitt

He'd known that something

waited there for him...

The miner carved a path to the mountain’s heart,

though everyone said he was mad to think that he’d hit a seam

in this rough, unpromising patch—

not a trace of color in any stone he dredged up from the depths.

But he’d felt something when he first looked at its face,

a tremor in his hands, a twist low in his gut,

and he’d known that something waited there for him.

Nine years he dug, propping and shoring;

spent each night wrapped in the dull ache

of work-sore muscles and delicious exhaustion;

found just enough glistening opals

to pay for the pumps he needed

when the boiling water escaped the rock—

a narrow escape for him, dropping pick

and running up the shaft on scalded feet.

Still, though the mountain seemed intent on his demise,

sometimes trapping him at his claim for months

with a snare of winter’s snow,

and never paid him enough wages to offer

more than a penitent’s diet of bread and beans,

he persevered.

He grew thinner by the year, slower to words

when he went to town; people there

called him a gray ghost, a vagrant,

a lost soul who came down to the valleys

covered in stone dust;

a hermit, but not, to their mind, a holy one;

he never told them of the silent songs

he heard the mountain sing,

of the chorus that water made against rock,

the ringing rhythm of his pick against stone.

He never told them that when the mountain sang to him,

he raised his voice and sang back,

and sometimes, the echoes that he heard,

returned distorted, in some other voice,

calling his name.

In the ninth year, he broke into an open cavern,

a bubble of space deep in the mountain’s bowels,

and as he waited for the foul air to escape,

he felt again that twist in his gut, the itch in his hands,

heard the mountain’s voice

pounding louder in his mind, and hoped that somehow,

through his years of diligence and privation,

to have been found worthy,

as he prepped his lantern for descent.

Deep inside, in a grotto formed of stalactites

and stalagmites, joined together like a grove

of flowing, flowering stone, he found her, growing

like a blossom from their bark, attached

along the long, lithe line of her spine.

Her tangled hair fell like dendrites,

like the swaying branches

of some seared, scarred nerve,

lifting up into the ceiling,

tangling through the branches

of the stone trees;

it gleamed like crystal, unyielding,

flayed his work-rough hand

when he reached to touch it;

When her eyes opened,

he felt neither fear nor surprise,

but met her opaline stare

with dazed wonder.

“Did you call me to free you?” he whispered,

hesitating over the words,

lest the sounds profane the sanctity of the air.

She didn’t reply, but the song rang louder

in his mind, and the sweetness of her sad smile,

was an answer of its own,

as a chill spread through him.

He looked down at his wounded hand,

to find the blood congealing into corundum.

He reached out once more, setting his fingers

against a cheek made of chalcedony,

and endured the poison as it wracked his body

till it reached his heart, as he’d reached the mountain’s,

transforming, transfiguring him,

into rutilated quartz, shot through

with gold, like stars falling from the heavens.

And then his carefully-shored tunnel

collapsed behind him, enwombing them in night.

Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Reno, Nevada, but received her MA in English from Penn State. She currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her poetry has received Rhysling and Pushcart nominations and appeared in over twenty journals; her short fiction has appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Compelling Science Fiction, Grievous Angel, andThe Fantasist.

For more about her work, please see www.edda-earth.com.

Cover by Amanda Bergloff