We knew we shared kinship with the surface dwellers. For what else could explain our similarities, our ability to speak their language, our memory of the face so like Waj’s during our infancy, floating still in the water?
But the full truth is not as we imagined it.
We lurk near the surfaces, hoping to find more zoti aleyu. We listen to the talk and chatter of two-legs on their massive ships. There are surface dwellers in the bottoms of these ships whose language we understand, whose words are the same ones Waj had used.
They are suffering and scared. They have been robbed from their homes, stolen from their families. Their lives are no longer their own. They belong to the two-legs on the decks of the ships.
We are descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom, thrown overboard, deemed too much a drain of resources to stay on the journey to their destination.
We know this because we see it. One day we are swimming but a few feet down from the surface in pleasantly cool waters, when there’s a plop from above, a struggle causing the water to stir, and then a sinking.
The surface dweller is in our arms, heart still beating, but we are too far from any land for us to think of dragging it to an island. It is unconscious, and its belly is round with child. We bring it to the surface so it might breathe, but it never comes to. Underfed and malnourished, this is no surprise. We wonder how close it was to death already before whatever devil who captained that ship abandoned it to the seas.
The two-legs dies in our arms, but not moments later, its body starts moving, taken over by a spirit or some other thing of the next world.
Afraid, we let go. We don’t wish to intervene with the dead. We watch from a distance, feel its convulsions in the water against our skin.
Its eyes are closed. It is dead, isn’t it? Yet it moves as if something is inside of it, using its body as a vessel.
As we see the two-legs’s belly move and bend, something inside of it indenting the flesh, we understand its baby is trying to get born. The poor thing is trapped inside, and we want to help, but how? How can the body even push? We worry for the two-legs’s pup and wonder if we should claw open the two-legs’s belly. We can save the child in a way we couldn’t save the parent.
We bring our teeth toward the belly of the dead, but we cannot bring ourselves to desecrate the flesh in this way. The fat round belly gives under our touch as we lay our cheek against it. We can hear the two-legs baby inside.
“Come out,” we sing. “The world is ready for you, and you are ready for the world.”
It’s the birthing song we zoti aleyu sing for our little ones, and there’s a chance that something in our voice will reach a two-legs pup too.
“My body is preparing milk for you,” we sing. “You are hungry. Come to this world, so you might eat.”
We look for the place where the baby is to come out. The ashti. The tunnel.
There’s a round button on its belly that looks promising that we feel with our front fins, and we wonder if we have to nudge it to open. We press and press, but it does not yield. Then the surface dweller’s legs begin to splay apart, and we come under it. We see it: the head. Our eyes widen, struck. It is not a two-legs head.
There are fins at the center of its back, on its sides, and at its front. Hairless. And darker than any land creature. It is zoti aleyu. It is zoti aleyu!
What magic had intervened to transform the pup in the womb? Was it the ocean itself, the progenitor of all life? Did the zoti aleyu have a god after all?
“Come!” we sing. “Come. We have been preparing for you. We have feasted so you will be strong.”
The pup is coming. Head, shoulders. Then we grab hold and pull it out into our embrace. This close to the surface, we see its features so clear. Black eyes. Brown, nearly black skin. Beautiful dark scales.
We sing to it to rejoice, overtaken. We have never seen a zoti aleyu this new. This small. This fragile. How many who’d been just like this were swallowed whole? “Precious pup,” we say.
We cannot think about its origins. We cannot think of what sickness plagues surface-life affairs that they throw living creatures to the sea to die alone. We must not think of the surface dwellers and two-legs at all. Only zoti aleyu.
“I will call you Aj,” we say. It means small. This little thing in front of us is the tiniest of our kind in this moment. One day it will be full-grown. One day it will take over where we’ve left off.
Overtaken with happiness, forcing any trace of sadness that might ruin it away, we take the new pup to the bottom of the sea, along with its two-legs parent. We must bury the surface dweller. Our kin.
We are headed to the city at high speed. We are not slowed down by the weight of the pup or the two-legs. With determination, we plow through the water, diving through the icy depths. Blackness and cold welcome us. The city we’ve built together with the other zoti aleyu thrums. Our body shakes from it, and it is the most welcome vibration. It has been one year since we left in search of where we came from.
When we are near enough that many will begin to hear and feel our approach, we slow down. What of this body? What would they think of it?
“I cannot bring this sadness to them,” we say, and turn toward the outskirts, swimming deeper, to where there is ocean floor.
When a zoti aleyu dies, we bring it to shallow waters, where plant life grows, and wrap it in layers and layers of whatever we can find. Coral, seaweed, kelp. When it’s done, the body is ovoid and thick, looking like a plumped, filled bag of waters. Or an entire womb. We then take it to some bit of seafloor and weigh it down with rocks.
We are prepared to do none of this with the two-legs, so we go to a small hut we’ve built outside the city and take off pieces of the wall to wrap the surface dweller in, till her form is concealed, so she may rot in some kind of peace if the ocean doesn’t erode away the wrappings too quickly.
We set her off into a strong, cool current, saying farewell to our kin.
Over the years, we raise so many pups. We find more zoti aleyu. The strength of our people is our togetherness. Many of us lurk in the deep, yet we are one, and as the years pass and we grow old and decrepit, we remember that we are young, too, thriving, because we live on in this legacy of strange fish we’ve made.
In these last moments of our life, we try not to linger upon the horrors, of which there were many. We do not think about the secret of our origin and how easy it became to find zoti aleyu once we’d learned it.
We discovered which ships to follow. We memorized their routes. We learned their accents, their languages, and heard them through the water like an alarm. We followed ships where none went overboard, but this brought its own grief, for we knew the lives of those on the ship would not be good ones.
At times, we did more. We could not hide the truth of what happens on the ocean surface from all the zoti aleyu, many following us to discover our secret truth. The first such time, a group of them followed us and watched as a ship cast all of its cargo into the deep, the enslaved having been taken by some sickness. We and the other zoti aleyu now present gathered together to trouble the waters, to sink the ship. This did not come about by plan, but by anguish. As all of us wept and raged, we noticed the way our fury made the water pulse and rise. Swept up in the power of our newly discovered abilities, and engulfed by the grief over the immense loss of life, we let our ache fill the water. The effort of it left us and the other zoti aleyu spent for days, but when we recovered, we buried the bodies from the ship on the ocean floor.
We never wanted our people, our kindred, to suffer the loneliness we have known. Over the years, when others came to us desperate to talk about it, we encouraged them to forget. “Focus on what we have together. Here. Now.” Not all could manage it, and they required extra help to let go of those terrible memories. We reached into their minds and searched, taking away the hurtful moments when we found them.