Ari has beautiful hair, her mother says, like copper and gold, like a lion’s mane, and sometimes she looks wistful and runs her pale hand over it. When Ari dreams, she is a lion, lazily coiled upon the warm ground as the sun sets in an apotheosis of saffron and carmine, and she rises and walks into the light as her shadows stretch into negative infinity.
Ari wants to know where she came from. When she looks at herself she sees a girl taller than any other she knows, and she sees strong shoulders, and the strange shape of her face and eyes. Her mother smiles and says she was born out of the desert wind, and does not understand that Ari just wants to know where her father is. She has gone through the attic and through the rooms, through the photo albums and the bookshelves. All she finds are yellowed pages all scribbled over, sweet words whose taste must have faded long ago, and she thinks she can smell the sun and feel grains of sand under her fingers.
Sometimes in her dreams it is not sunset but noon, the sun harsh and impartial glaring down from the clear blue sky. Even then when she walks there is black pooling under her paws, shifting with her every movement, and the birds overhead seem weighted down by their shadow, crisp and clear-cut on the ochre of the sand. On those days (on those nights, rather) she looks to the horizon, endless and flat, and starts walking. There is something calling to her, and she goes looking for it.
Sometimes Ari thinks she may well be a lion. What she knows is that she does not always feel like the other children. When they play after classes they invite her, and magnanimously she accepts, joins them and, invariably, wins. When she looks at them, when she sweeps the dark amber of her eyes over their faces, she sees the awe and the bright smiles, and she turns her back to them, because they are strangers and she fears they would shackle her down in their own little world.
Once also, she remembers, she was at the beach. There was the crinkle of the sand under her bare feet, and the murmurs of the breaking waves, which told her stories in a language she did not speak. And when she turned from the horizon and the setting sun, for a fleeting moment she thought there were pawprints inscribed in the sand, leading to her. Then she blinked and there was nothing but the breeze, the sand, and the insistent, thrumming loneliness of being only human.
Ari at times is too much like a lion. She roars and does not walk so much as stalks and hurts people before they can hurt her. Once she told her mother she hated her and meant it, and she ran away from home and raged against the sky and the wind, a little girl with wild hair and empty hands and nowhere to go. When she snuck back home she found her mother slumped in a chair, tears at the corner of her eyes and old letters between her fingers. Ari said sorry then, very softly, and kissed her mother’s brow gently so she would not wake her, and she meant that too.
But Ari is searching for something, or maybe someone, and she is tired of winning and not knowing anything. She thinks maybe she’s looking for herself, except she already knows all about that. She looks to the south, where it is warm, and she looks to the west, where the sun sets, and there is nothing and no one. Sometimes her mother joins her, and sets her hand on Ari’s shoulder, and they wait together, for something that may never come.
One day Ari decides to stop dreaming. There is life waiting for its turn, and she can see the lines creased in her mother’s face. From her Ari learns the price of waiting and the price of hope – it is high and it is heavy, but surely it must be worth it to her. It has to be, or there is something wrong with the world, that it would let people suffer so.
Yet Ari grows up, and Ari is not her mother, and Ari just – lets go.
On that night there is a lion before her, and his shadow flickers to join her own, and when he moves to face her she sees the glitter of dark eyes. His mane is a tapestry of tarnished bronze, spun of golden threads and embroidered with silver, and the desert wind lovingly runs its hands through it. He is strong and tall, and as the sun sets somewhere far, far way she realizes she loves him, and that she hates him also. Ari purrs, low in her throat, and comes to rest her head on his large shoulders, breathing in his scent – sunlight and sand, like memories and old paper, longing and despair all mixed together. Then she steps back and turns away, and leaves. She does not look back.
When she wakes she sees her mother’s frail smile, her tired arms and her clear eyes, and Ari finally, finally goes home.
