Short Story-- "True Nature" approx. 3,000 words.

There once was a girl, her name is not important because this is a fairy tale, and so this girl represents all girls, maybe all boys too, but to set us all at ease I will call her Arielle. She was a pretty girl, pale, with a great flurry of fiery red hair, and wide, child-like green eyes. She was not old, though she was old enough to be called a woman, but all women are girls inside and all men boys, for the most part.
There are many ways to tell this story, and indeed it has been told many times before, though it has been enacted countless other times in unimaginable ways that have never been put down on paper or uttered into a listening ear.
Arielle, the girl we were just speaking of, was walking down a path along a wooded creek. Whether the sycamores were bending out over the gentle stream just because or whether they were doing it to avoid the girl is questionable, for she carried a stick in her hand and poison in her heart. The stick was an extension of her hurt and rage, and it passed along these feelings to the plants, stones and trees that lay nearby. The poison in her heart did what poisons do. It hurt. It ached. It promised you it was never going to go away. What was wrong with her, you ask? Can’t you guess? Why, she was in love! She was in love and something went terribly wrong. Something happened and then Arielle was stuck with a feeling that no longer had a purpose, that no longer held the meaning it once had. Feelings in situations like this often become septic, and surely that was what happened to the poor girl. It was a young love, of the kind fraught with all the misunderstanding and callousness that youth can muster. She never thought she’d be able to feel this way, but when she went to visit her boyfriend at his house the evening before, and she saw his silhouette converge with another through his bedroom curtains, a vileness poured from fissures forming in her heart and began to fill her. The pain and rage were still filling her even after she smashed the windshield of the new car his parents had bought him; they were still pouring forth during the walk home, the shredding of his love notes to her, his photos; they were still flooding her being even as she finally cried herself to sleep. When she woke up in the morning these emotions had stopped their incessant dripping; Arielle was full.
As Arielle walked and raged and cried she headed away from the creek (much to the relief of the sycamores) and angrily tossed her stick away into the underbrush (much to the relief of everything present) and began to walk up and out towards the bluff, open, canyon walls. The exertion as she huffed and puffed up the trails, switching back and forth to the top of the canyon wall was good, and helped her let go of some of the energy and frustration she felt. Soon she found herself atop the canyon wall, and she scrabbled up a few remaining boulders and took a seat. She could see for miles from her vantage point; the small city that had been her home for all of her life sprawled out around the park, taking away from the illusion that the park was anything but a vast, wild expanse. She felt as if she could see the sky begin to curve around the Earth and she knew she was alone. She felt as alone in that place as it felt inside her heart, and somehow that was comforting to her. Arielle looked out over the landscape and solemnly wished that she had no heart at all.
Now at this point many of the stories say many different things. All would contend that a wise and mystical creature steals upon the girl and that they make a pact. The way I heard the tale, and the way I’ll tell it, was that a great mountain lion came upon the crying girl. The girl didn’t see or hear anything at all until the mountain lion was lying beside her, blinking at her in that sunny, cat-like way. Surprise and fear attacked instantly and were gone just as suddenly, though she was sure it was no doing of her own. The mountain lion was huge, easily the size of a large mastiff. Its thick tawny coat stretched tight over its muscular form. It was surely a prince among its kind, for it had the bearing of royalty, with proud head held high and piercing, golden eyes. The girl and the mountain lion locked eyes for a long, long moment, and in that moment they spoke mind to mind, or heart to heart, as it were.
“Why do you cry bitter tears little cub, little kitten?” the puma asked.
“Because my heart hurts. It’s too much pain for me to bear,” whispered the girl.
“Can your family not help you? Your friends?” asked the puma.
“No,” said the girl. “They can’t help me, nobody ever hurt this much. They tell me to stay busy, to have fun, to forget, but I can’t. I don’t even know how to deal with it. It won’t go away, and nothing I say or do is going to change that. I wish I could just give my heart away.”
“I see,” said the great cat. “You are in luck, little kitten, for no one is as alone as the mountain lion. Our tears have streaked our faces since the beginning, our song is the loneliest of sounds and pain is a part of our lives. I will hold your pain for you until you wish it back.”
“You can take my heart from me?”
“To take your heart, little kitten, would be to take your life, but I can take that from you which feels too deeply for comfort. You only have to ask.”
“Please do it,” said the girl.
“Then close your eyes,” said the puma, and as she did the mountain lion sat up and placed the point of one of his large claws to her forehead, between her eyes, and drew a drop of blood, and something only his eyes could see, to the surface. Then he leaned in close, so that the girl could feel his warm breath in her hair and he gently licked away the beaded drop on her forehead. The mountain lion stood and began to pick his way down the boulders. The girl sensed his departure and her eyes flew open and she looked upon a world that seemed to her free of pain. The desolate world she had seen was gone. In its place was its glorious ideal, lush and alive. The trees waved their verdant branches serenely in the wind, finches and sparrows flitted and dove in aerobatic merry-making, and as the light began to dim, an orchestra of crickets began tuning their instruments. She laughed aloud and yelled many enthusiastic words of gratitude to the departing puma.
The puma paused long enough to turn his head toward the girl, and it seemed to her somehow that he looked more regal, and yet more tragic than before, and as he turned and began walking again, his parting words came unbidden into her mind. “I’m sorry, little kitten.”
As it goes in stories such as these, time is fluid and the details many and mundane if I were to tell each and all. Suffice it to say that time passed, years even, and the girl flourished. She never loved again, but was content. She still felt emotions but the feelings were somehow dampened, like turning the sound down on a radio, and therefore made more manageable. She told a friend once in confidence that if her family and friends found a way to love and cherish her even more than they did, she would be no happier than she was at that moment, but also that if her friends and family were to suddenly abandon her, she would be able to survive and adapt, and grow content again as she built a new life. Her friends praised her stability and her sage advice; her co-workers marveled at her good attitude, her effectiveness and her amazing ability never to bring her personal woes with her to work. The interested boys who entered and left her life were often sad that she seemed slightly distant and never seemed to give back the love that they gave her, but all would agree that she was an amazing person, that they would do it over again if given a chance and that their relationships had been easy and comfortable, if not particularly intense or wonderful.
Her current boyfriend, Aidan, was a wonderful human being. He was strong, sensitive, able to commit, confide, and cuddle in ways that sent tremors through her spine, but none to her heart. She would watch him chop wood or wash the car from the kitchen window, sipping on her coffee; he would see her and wave, a smile breaking across his sweaty face, and she would feel the love emanating from his gaze.
This is the point in tales such as this one where the characters begin to wonder if the wishes they wished, the treasures they stole, the princesses they wooed were what they really wanted.
Arielle, for the first time in a long time, wondered what it would be like to love and to be loved. She could see herself being with Aidan for a long time, like a matching set of gloves, weathering the years and the storms of life together. She thought about happily ever after.
So is it any surprise that one summer evening, with the full moon smiling enigmatically down onto the landscape, she found herself striding purposefully up the trail to the same bluff where she’d first met the mysterious great cat?
Arielle sat on the edge of a boulder and let her feet dangle, beating a tattoo with her heels. She was excited, as we can surely understand, for soon she would be whole again and she would be able to give herself to Aidan, completely.
She did not have long to wait, for as she watched the sun sink behind the horizon, a deep, gravelly voice sounded within her skull.
“I have come,” the voice assured.
She smelled his musky scent before she heard him and she turned on her perch to greet the great cat. The sight of the mountain lion, not five feet away on another boulder still thrilled and awed her, though his flanks seemed leaner, and his toothy muzzle was beginning to gray. She managed to squeak a fluttery “hello again,” and added a nervous smile for good measure.
The mountain lion blinked at her, studying her for a long while. “Not so little anymore, are you, kitten? Seasons have come and gone and you’ve become quite the lioness; I see pride and accomplishment in your eyes. Life has been good to you these long years hasn’t it? Yet you come back for your heart, why?”
“It’s not that I’m not grateful for what you’ve done,” she began, “and life has been good, more than good, but I’ve…. I’ve met someone special, someone who loves me, and I want…. I need to be able to love him back.”
The great cat lay down, sphinx-like, and rumbled, knowingly perhaps, deep in his chest. “So you would take your heart from me to give it to another. This is good, kitten, very good. Men were meant to love and anguish and fear. They have held hands with Joy even as Sorrow tugs at the other. Such is what it means to be human, I think. You are ready for joy; are you ready for sorrow?”
Arielle thought for a moment before nodding, though with the way her life had been going, she hardly had any memory of either sorrow or anguish.
The mountain lion grunted. Was it a sneeze or was it a snort? Perhaps it’s just one of those things we’ll never know.
“Very well,” spoke the puma, rising and jumping with deceiving lightness and grace to the boulder where Arielle sat, strangely unafraid. The mountain lion sat so close to her that she had to look up into his eyes, a scant few inches from her own. She stared into those liquid amber orbs, into the dark wells of his pupils and she felt as if she were falling into them. A deep rumbling filled her ears, so deep she could almost feel it in her bones. He was purring. Floating in the inky waters of his eyes, surrounded by the rhythmic rumbling, she tumbled deeper and deeper into him, into herself. She swayed slightly back and forth, aware of nothing, for a time. She felt a warm breeze on her face then and she inhaled it, tasted it, let it fill her. She tasted meat and felt the thrill of the hunt; she tasted cool autumn winds, the decaying forest floor, granite warmed by the sun; she tasted time—ages of memories, generations; she tasted sadness so profound that tears leaked unbidden from her still-staring eyes, and she tasted love. She snapped back into her body, her eyes flying open, and she gasped. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she began laughing, giddily, hysterically, happily. She tried to fling her arms around the mountain lion, but he backed away quickly.
“You have remembered your true nature little one, but you must also remember mine,” the puma warned, “I am no housecat.”
“I understand,” she said, rising, as she watched the great cat begin picking its way among the boulders. “Will I ever see you again?” She yelled at his back, but the puma did not answer and so she turned towards home, towards Aidan, her mind and heart ablaze.
We can well imagine the bliss of the young couple’s life after that night on the cliff. Many a gentle nursemaid has stopped the story here, perhaps adding that bit about happily ever after, sharing dreamy sighs with their young charges. The story, as I heard it, didn’t end there however. It has always been a sad truth that life doesn’t end happily ever after, and this story is no different.
Time passed, a lot of time, though it seemed fleeting to the happy couple who seemed to live and breathe as one. They were like that, often entwined in body, always in soul, until one stormy winter evening, on the longest night of the year, Arielle received a phone call from the police. Apparently, the police told her, Aidan had taken an indirect route home from work, walking a short distance out of his way to a flower shop where he bought a bouquet of roses. He was accosted by one or more perpetrators who severely beat him and then robbed his unconscious body. He died of massive head trauma before anyone came upon him. The flowers and card were scattered nearby, his wallet was found in a garbage can down the street, along with an empty box of the type that might be used to hold a ring.
The days after that passed in agonizing slowness, when Arielle even noted the passage of time. Friends and family tried to comfort her; her work gave her some time off, but she never noticed. Her whole life, if you could call it that, was frozen in the one terrible moment following that phone call. Her love turned to agony in her chest, her happiness turned to dust drier than the soil she had sprinkled on Aidan’s coffin.
Her work began urging her to return, her unpaid bills began to pile up at her front door and her body was slowly wasting away from hunger and disuse. Arielle was at the point between life and death, and she knew she couldn’t live long like this.
One morning something snapped. She wrestled with her clothing, unused to so much exertion but once outside she found in herself the strength inherent in a decision made firm. The trip passed as if in a dream and though she had to scramble, almost crawl the last few feet, she eventually found herself standing, lost and sunken, at the edge of the cliff she’d visited twice before in her life.
She stood at the edge of the precipice, looking down at the fallen, broken boulders and waited. She knew he was there an instant before his voice, sounding tired or perhaps sad, filled her mind.
“Why have you come, little kitten?”
She looked long and hard at him, his frame almost mirroring hers, gaunt, not weak but seeming to hold together out of determination rather than physical health. “Take it back,” was her only reply.
“I cannot.”
“Take it back!” Arielle screamed, her fists clenched, and she began sobbing, still looking out over the valley. The city had grown, and the park was being slowly, inexorably swallowed by the petty needs of Man. There was now a row of gaudy, expensive houses on the ridge across the way, tearing at the natural horizon. The shrinking park, under the care of winter’s watchful eye, looked gray, thin and haggard, like the puma, like her, like her heart. Under her wracking sobs the mountain lion could hear her pleading—takeitback, takeitback, takeitback.
Then he was beside her, his flank lightly touching her hip, his gaze looking outward, looking nowhere, perhaps unwilling to look at what Man’s greed had done to his home, to him.
“Not will not, little kitten, but cannot. The Great Mystery does not allow for second chances. You only get one chance, just like I only get one life to live, just like Man gets only one Earth to rule. I took your nature and but held it for you until you could hold it on your own. You told me you were ready for it, that you were old enough and strong enough to embrace what it means to be human, to love and lose and love again—“
“And lose again?” she demanded.
“Even so, little kitten. All living things live and die, and all humans love and lose. You must be strong and bear it, this is a part of life; this is life. All living things must follow their true natures.”
“Then I must follow mine,” she said simply, and leapt off the edge.
* * *
Arielle’s body lay broken and lifeless amidst the dead boulders and dying grasses. The mountain lion sat at her side, looking at the girl’s untouched face, now and forever free from pain, a smile half-formed on her lips. Hot salty tears formed slowly and streaked down his face, dropping onto her fallen body.
The great cat roared then, and the sound was heard for many miles. It was heard over the trickle of the creek; it was heard over the roar of freeway traffic; it was heard over conversations in crowded restaurants; it was heard over stereos playing full blast; it was heard over the deep slumber and the chaos of the dreams of Man. Where it was heard husbands held their wives a little tighter, people paused in their work and their play and shivered at that loneliest of cries, the cry of a woman screaming in agony, a puma’s roar.
All living things must follow their true natures, little one, all of them, the lion said to the wind. And he began to feed.