Yetu wouldn’t let them do it.
The ancestors were needy but rarely cruel. Surely they would understand why she couldn’t do this again. To let the wajinru put the rememberings back inside of her would be to commit suicide. To live, she must flee. With a last look to her wajinru kin, soaking up their beauteous dance in the mud womb, Yetu left. She swam, and she swam, and she swam, and she forgot, the rememberings becoming more distant with each upward meter gained. They didn’t need her. They were stronger than her, always had been. Where Yetu was sensitive and high-strung, they were free-spirited and happy. The History would not undo them like it had undone her.
Yetu did not look back, but she felt them in her wake. They were trapped in the memories with no one in the wings to relieve them of the burden. They were in the Remembrance now, one with every wajinru who’d ever lived. She felt them churning the water, even though the womb was supposed to prevent that. She felt them remember. Yetu feared the world would feel it too.
4
HOW STRANGE WE WOULD’VE LOOKED to the first mothers: wild, screaming fish creatures, scaled and boneless. What would they have made of our zigzag bodies curling through the water in a spirally streak? Perhaps it is a blessing that because of their deaths they could never look upon us. They never once had to fret over the strangeness they’d wrought.
What does it mean to be born of the dead? What does it mean to begin?
First, gray, murky darkness. First, solitude. Each of us is the only one of our kind, for we are spread apart and know not of one another’s existence.
We die in droves, foodless.
We live only by the graciousness of the second mothers, the giant water beasts we’ve years and years later come to call skalu, whales, who feed us, bond with us, and drag us down to the deepest depths where we are safer. Sperm whales, blue whales, whales that are now extinct, whales so rare there are only one or two of their kind.
We live among them, they our only kin, unbeknownst to any one of us that there are others who would come to call themselves the wajinru.
Until one day—
We are Zoti.
Babies of all kinds are always wanting more: more touch, more food, more answers, more kindness, more world, more sea, more newness, more knowledge. But none want more than us, a little fish-child whose whale pod dies of grief when its matriarch perishes from a harpoon.
Another fish-child might’ve died, but we are so hungry that we swim to shallow, unsafe depths where we know food is plentiful. Without the pod to coordinate hunts, and too small to catch anything big, we feast on trout. It is not enough. We are so big now. We go shallower, to where the light stabs our eyes, blinds us.
It is days until we see food large enough to satiate. Something floating—a sea lion? Out this far from shore?
Our pod never preferred to feast on carcasses, didn’t like the rot, but sometimes it was necessary. Right now, for us, newly orphaned as we are, it is necessary.
We swim toward the floating creature, but it is not dead. It is not even sleeping.
It turns toward us, first with a look of shock, and then with a look of fear.
It is smaller than it should be. Emaciated. And it cannot swim well. Lashes on its back. It is a surface dweller of some kind. A land animal.
Despite our hungry belly, we cannot eat this creature, whose face is so captivating, drawing us in. Something familiar and warm circles through us, a memory written in our blood.
Though it looks like a stranger, we, a small and scaled squirming thing, had come from the belly of a being like this.
Is it a penguin or another animal who split its time between sea and land? Did we come from a pod of them who all died, making them virtually extinct? Was this thing here the last of its kind? How lonely. We must save it, or at least make sure its last moments are not spent alone.
It makes noises at us. Nonsense.
Its brown skin peels and flakes.
We grab it with our fins and it screams. Swimming on our backs, we move our fins quickly in search of land. The movement of the water means we’re not too far from a small island.
The creature gurgles as water lands in its mouth, but this is the best thing we can do to keep it above water. We could go faster if we swam on our bellies, carrying it underneath, but with that length of a journey, a land dweller would die.
This surface-dwelling creature with split fins—two legs—is bigger than us, but near weightless in the water, and we finally are able to drag it to shore.
It makes noises again, all of them incomprehensible.
Every day we bring it lobster, shrimp, crab, or fish. It does not eat it how we eat it. It has put three large flat stones together over a little pit where it rubs sticks together until they spark orange like the inside of a glowing fish. Then it lays whatever we’ve caught for it that day over the flat stones until they sizzle white stuff and turn golden brown. The scent of it is divine.
We begin to understand the things this strange creature says, and the more we do, the more we begin to think of it as her Water means where we live. Land is where she lives. Sky is what’s above. Sand, stone, trees, fire, hungry, hot, cold, sweat, sad.
She talks and talks, and we listen, captivated by the noises. She is nothing like our pod, friendly and warm, but she gives to us in her own way. She gives us time. She gives us objects to explore. She gives us words.
Every day, we recognize more of them. Bark. Spice. Cut. Bruise. Scale. Fin. Us. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Light. Dark.
As we grow, we learn, until we can make sense of almost every noise that comes from the two-legs’s mouth. The fascinating world of the surface dwellers opens up to us. Their technologies and creatures. Their ways of seeing. “You are perplexing,” she says to us, and though we don’t know what perplexing is at first, we begin to as she uses it to describe other things: mysterious tracks in the sand, a washed-up object she can’t identify. Perplexing means a problem she hasn’t solved.
She is always trying to understand the world. She is like us. Hungry for more. She is curious about how to make plants spring up from the ground, how to make the plants into nets she can use to catch fish.
Whatever she knows, she shares with us, and we soak up her every word. Not just facts. Not just the names of things. Stories.
When with our pod of skalu, we only hummed—long, low howls that filled the depths so we might find one another. It’s difficult to achieve at first, but after a time, we try to copy the land creature’s noises and make them our own.
We want to tell her things the way she tells us things. We want to share everything we know with her. We want to tell her that she’s special. We want to tell her that we’d only been searching for food those months and months and months ago, but instead we’d found—we don’t know the word for her yet. We will invent a new word. Our land creature is worth a new word.