The Deep

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.

After copying and copying her, we learn to make sounds with our throat and tongue. They do not sound like the surface dweller, but after a time, she understands. As she looks upon us, we can tell the land dweller still thinks us perplexing. She says she has always known there was a world beyond this world, a world where the unseen happens, but that we surprise her still.

We like that we surprise her because that sounds like it’s a good thing. Warmth floods us.

“You did not come from a god,” she says. We don’t think she means this cruelly, but it bothers us still. We know a god is a special thing.

“Could you be our god?” we ask, words hoarse and croaky.

We would be content to spend our days basking in her presence, swimming in the water as she fished and told us stories.

“I am too small to be a god,” she says.

Indeed, a year has passed and we are her size now.

“Why do gods have to be big?” we ask.

“I do not wish to talk about this anymore,” she says.

The land dweller will no longer engage in conversation about where she came from or how she came to be floating half dead on driftwood in the middle of the sea. We wonder if her god abandoned her.

When the creature asks us where we came from, we say that we only remember a little. We remember a face like hers. Just like hers. We remember the ocean. We remember chewing the fleshy seaweed that bound us to our first mothers.

“How can you know all of that?” she asks.

We don’t understand the question. We just remember. Every moment is a spark, and the spark is there forever.

We do not speak how she speaks, deep and smooth. Our voice is a raspy, clicky mess, and the two-legs often struggles to parse us.

But in the water, we make beautiful sounds with our throat, and from the creature, we learn how to name the whole world, the whole sea, using this thing we only had a half idea of. Language.

Now we have a name for being alone. A name for being anxious. For searching. For fear. For denial. For ugliness. For beauty. For wanting something and someone.

“I am Waj,” the two-legs says one day.

We are out in the ocean, she on the shallow, sandy ocean floor, and we just beyond it so we have more room to swim, our head above water. At first we think she means that’s the name of what kind of creature she is. A waj. Soon, it is clear she means that it’s a name just for her, to distinguish her from others.

“What does it mean?” we ask.

“Chorus or song,” says Waj.

“What’s a song?”

And then she sings for us and we are in love.

We do not have a name that can be spoken in the way Waj speaks, nor do we have a name at all. A unique pitch, perhaps, that our pod called us by, but that was a different sort of thing.

“Will you name me?” we ask.

Waj smiles and laughs. She reaches out to touch our cheek the way the whale did with its jowl when we were but a pup.

“I will call you Zoti Aleyu,” she says.

We know those words together mean strange fish.

There is a gap between us that cannot be bridged. We live in the water, she on the sand. We sleep alone below the surface. She sleeps on the beach. She is tired, angry, and mad with loneliness. We are too.

She builds a raft from pieces of the island, and we ask her where she will go. “Back home,” she says.

“Where is that?”

But she is done talking except to say, “Do not follow me, strange fish. Savior. We must each be where we belong.”

“What is belonging?” we ask.

She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

We do as she asks and do not follow, but when she is out of range of the distance we can feel, we immediately regret it. We swim as fast as we can in the direction she has gone, chasing any trace of either the feel of her paddles in the water or the smooth surge forward of her sails up and catching wind.

On the third day of searching and finding nothing, we feel a storm working itself into a vortex above us. A giant spiral of doom for anyone on the water or near a shore. We don’t know if the land creature is caught in it, but we must save her if there’s a chance she is. Neglecting food and rest, we look for her.

Our search is unending, and when the hurricane comes, sweeping the center of the ocean into mad, mixed-up sludge, our search for Waj becomes a search for wreckage. We never find even that.

The moment we first ever saw Waj all that time ago, a year or two years or maybe more, floating, looking like something good to eat, we could not have known what she’d come to mean to us. Perhaps it would’ve been better never to have understood, to have stayed in that moment full of possibility.

We’ve lost our pod. We’ve lost our two-legged surface dweller.

For days, we drift. We are not worried about dying, though we are not yet at the point where we are wishing for death. That time will come. Moons from now.

Waj had said she was returning to the place where she belonged, and that belonging meant not feeling lonely. We do not have a place to return to, as our pod is dead, and we are alone, the abandoned creature Waj had dubbed us Zoti Aleyu, a suitable name for something singular and alone, but perhaps—

We dive down to the deep where the second mother once dragged us. The pressure is immense and it squeezes us. We plunge through the cold, through the darkness. The deep will be our sibling, our parent, our relief from endless solitude.

Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another. Down here, we eventually find more of us. A whale, one of the biggest we’ve ever seen, descends like a sunken ship. We tremble as it hums its song. Waj.

Its dive is right over us, and it swims closer and closer. Soon it will barrel right through us like a torrential wave, bowling us over, likely killing us. We accept this death. It is the very opposite of dying alone. We will perish much like we began, with the second mother heralding our passage between this world and the beyond world.

We don’t close our eyes. It will be upon us in seconds. We are not afraid. We welcome it. This is belonging.

The whale, a few measures away, opens its mouth. Inside, there are pups, pups that look like miniature version of us. Little zoti aleyu. Strange fish.

We gasp. We are outside of our body. We wonder if the blue whale devoured us and we are dead, and this is the afterlife, a world of dreams.

The whale hums and our whole body shivers and shakes from the force of the vibrations. We don’t understand its beautiful, hoarse moans beyond the most rudimentary levels of communications. It is kind. These little zoti aleyu are not gifts, and this whale did not come looking for us, but it recognizes that we are one kind.

“Welcome!” we say, gathering the pups, six in all, stretching our fins out to pull them into the fold of our body.

Having never been with child, we are without milk. How will we feed them?

“How will I feed them?” we ask the whale, a mix of shriek and song using mouth shapes not dissimilar to what the surface dweller used.

The whale hums. Again, we do not understand, but it stays with us. We’re not sure how much longer it can lurk in the deep before needing to return to the surface to breathe.

“Where did you come from, zoti aleyu?” we ask the creatures so much like us.

We pull them close and nuzzle them. We watch their wobbly attempts to swim and move. Their scaled skin is softer than ours, and their faces are so tender, they’re like the soft meat inside a clam.

They are different ages, some as many as two or three years. Some just born. The whale has collected them, has been taking care of them, and it plays with them even now. It won’t abandon them. It will continue to give the milk we don’t have to the youngest among them.

The pups mimic the sounds we make. When we say, “Hush now, sweet thing,” they imitate approximations of the sounds all in unison. A chorus of “ooo”s and “eee”s and “eyeyeyeye.” Their soft, whistling vocalizations are the most noise we’ve heard since our surface dweller left us. It is wondrous and overwhelming, and our skin is alive with the tingles of new waves and vibrations. Our ears are alert, ready to capture every new sound from these remarkable creatures.

We bring them close. We will not let them leave our side. Not like Waj did.

We do not cry, though we want to. We cannot ruin this happy moment with tears.

“There are so many of you,” we say. “There are so many of me. Creatures just like me.”

We ask the whale if there are more, and when it doesn’t understand, we gesture to the little zoti aleyu and sweep our fins wide to suggest magnitude, volume, quantity.

The resulting moan of the whale is thunderous and sad. It cries. The pups giggle at the fluctuations in the water making them move and bounce, making their little pointed teeth chatter.

The cries carry on, and the pang of loss strikes us, too. There had been more at one point, perhaps. But now?

We mourn for every zoti aleyu, cast away into the ocean, eaten or starved. But we do not mourn long. If there are six right here, then there are more somewhere else. Or there will be more. We’ll swim through every speck of ocean if we must to locate our animal siblings.

“I am Zoti,” we tell our new pups. They are our pups Ours. They will not know loneliness like we have known. They will have no true knowledge of the concept of abandonment.

In time, the pups fatten before our very eyes. Anutza, Ketya, Omwela, Erzi, Udu, and Tulo. Their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them.

To cover more territory, we ride the back of the blue whale to search the seas for more of our fellows. The pups squeal as we rush through the water. They make a lovely melody without even trying. Stuck so long with our own voice, we didn’t know how good zoti aleyu could sound. Every sentence is a gorgeous song and their harmonies rip us in half because we are too full on contentment. Too happy.

First we find two. Twins. Not quite fresh out of the womb, but nearly. We look through the water trying to find where they have come from, but they have drifted too far.

We are nine in total now. Then we are sixteen. Then seventeen. Then thirty. It is only a few years later that we find some closer to my age. A pod of four. We cannot speak to one another, but their joy is plain. We are sixty now, then seventy. And yet we are one.

For those not from my fold, it is difficult to get along at first. They are without language almost completely, with but fifty or fewer concepts. They learn.

Ekren, when she learns to speak, sings a song to me and tells me to follow her. We do. Her purpose is clear. She wants to mate.

There are so few of our kind that—should we know how to do this? We don’t.

Ekren does, and she shows us. Our bodies move in the water in an awkward rhythm until a passion takes hold and we are in ecstasy. After finishing, we swim back to the pod. There is possibility here, for more, to make more. There could be zoti aleyu who know who their parents are, whose past is not a question mark.

So we make more and more. We find more. We build. The deep is our home and we are filling it. This cold place will become a shelter for any stranded, abandoned thing. In this big wide sea, we are far from the only strange fish.

We become queen of this place. One of the eldest among us, we know what most others do not. For that, they call us historian.

To protect ourselves from those who’d destroy this precious thing we’ve fashioned out of scraps and leavings, we build cities. The materials of our structures are mud, carnage, ship wreckage, and plants harvested from more shallow seawater. Our language flourishes until we’ve lost count of the words. We have words for every creature in the ocean. We have words for every region of the water.

We hone our natural skills and learn how to hear one another across distances that span days of travel time.

And yet we, the maker of all this, want more and more and more. We are collectors, and a collection is never complete. This vast city of ours must endure forever, which means it needs more reinforcements. Thicker walls. More huts to home and protect the growing families. And more zoti aleyu. Our population, roughly three hundred, is still too small to be considered robust. We remember the way our centuries-old pod was wiped out like a flash. When not properly fortified, a legacy is no more enduring than a wisp of plankton. It is our duty to ensure that the zoti aleyu survive, and that means we return to searching the ocean for any who are stranded.

We are away now so often that children swim after us calling, “Zoti! Zoti! Stay! Stay with us! Tell us the story of the surface dweller on the brink of death you saved! Stay! Please!”

“I am making it so no one of us will ever be without a home again,” we say, and shoo them off. We are in a hurry. We’ve planned for a several-week trip to the surface in hopes of learning the answer to our most pressing question: Where do the zoti aleyu come from?

One of the more precocious of the lot grabs us by our tail fin and pulls, then bites savagely. “Stay!” it says. “I despise you. If you go, I hope you never come back.”

Its mouth is full of our flesh.

Injured now, we should have no choice but to obey the little zoti aleyu’s request that we remain in the city we’ve made at the bottom of the ocean. We don’t have time to nurse wounds, however. Every moment wasted is a moment toward our people’s destruction.

Others come to gather the misbehaving pup, and we are off toward our lonely days of searching. It is a pleasant loneliness because in the end it will mean more togetherness. We are getting older and older, thinking more about what it is that makes a stable future when the world is so full of unpredictability.

Weeks are spent at the shallowest depths. Ships pass us by and at times we follow them, but to no end.

It’s been almost half a year when we find another of our kind, a seven-year-old feral thing recently taken in by a pod of fin whales. It’s blind and deaf, sensing only by its skin, which is heavily scarred and torn off in places. It recognizes, either by smell or feel, that we’re like it, and swims up to us curiously.

We try to draw it to us so we can take it back to the deep before we continue our search for more zoti aleyu, but it will not leave the whales.

“Come!” we say.

It will not come.

We reach out our fins to grab it but the whales intervene. They are easily four times our size. Not to be trifled with.

We use our words so it might feel them against its worn skin, but the zoti aleyu is not having it. The whales hum in unison and we’re stunned into paralysis by the vibrations of the sound waves. While we’re immobile, the pod swims from us, the zoti included.

We have known too much loss. Right now, the whale pod is all that pup knows, but in time, it will want for more, and will it be able to find us?

It could find us if we were massive, if our dwellings stretched so high, their tips were in the shallow part of the sea. We need more workers. More builders. More zoti aleyu.

How disorienting it is to go most of your life wondering about a thing, only to happen upon the answer, and it is a horror.

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.

That is what we think about now, the peace we imparted, the togetherness we brought. We have absorbed many lifetimes of pain, but it is no matter compared to the good.

“Tell me a story,” Aj says, fifty years old now. Hard to believe we witnessed his birth from the two-legged surface dweller, cast into the sea. “A happy one. Something that will comfort me in these next coming days, when I am to lose you, Amaba.”

We nod. “I will tell you more than just a story. I will tell you every story. Happy and sad. But you must promise to tell no one else. I do not wish to burden them with these things I have to say. We cannot falter on our mission. Some things… weigh. I fear if they know the truth of everything, they will not be able to carry on, or they’ll swim to the surface to learn things for themselves I do not want them to learn. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, Amaba,” Aj says.

“When I pass, you must tell them my wish for them,” we say. “That they live lives of togetherness, in the present. That the many of them who started out their lives in loneliness and solitude, they must put it away, and remember where we are now. Together. Safe. Do you promise?”

“I promise,” says Aj. “Now come on. Begin. Before it’s too late.”

“Do not forget any of this,” we say, though our voice is weakening.

Aj touches his fins to ours, lays his cheek to our cheek. We communicate how pups communicate. In electricity, in charges. No need to speak. Aj sees all. Our memories transfer to him as we lived them.

We close our eyes in Aj’s arms, listening to the water, to the noise of the city, to our kindred all around us.

There are so many of us now, we could hardly be called strange fish anymore. We have made a place in this sea. All the fluttering, building, loving, hunting, embracing, mating, we hear it all, our presence unmistakable. A whole chorus of the deep. Wajinru. We are not zoti aleyu. We are more vast and more beauteous than that name implies. We are a song, and we are together.

We remember.