The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

“Then wake up,” Amaba said, “and wake up now. What kind of dream makes someone lurk in shark-dense waters, leaking blood like a fool? If I had not come for you, if I had not found you in time…”

“I do not wish for death,” said Yetu, resolute despite the quiet of her worn voice.

Even though Yetu always kept herself tense against the ocean’s intrusions, they found their way in; but with her senses freshly unreined, the rush of feeling was dizzying. This was nothing like the faraway throbbing she’d grown used to when she threw all her energy into repelling the world outside. The push and pull of nearby currents upended her. The flutter of a school of fangfish reverberated deep in her chest. How did other wajinru manage this all the time?

“I am here, Amaba. I promise,” said Yetu quietly, exhaustedly, though she wasn’t sure that was true. Adrift in a memory that wasn’t hers, she hadn’t been present when she’d brought herself to the sharks to be feasted upon. How could she be sure she was here now?

The rememberings were always drawing her backward into the ancestors’ memories—that was what they were supposed to do—but not at the expense of her life.

Yetu didn’t remember, but as she took a moment to zero in on the emptiness in her stomach, she was surprised to find the pain of it was a vortex she could easily get lost in. She moved her body, examined its contours. She’d been withering away, and now there was little left of her but the base amounts of outer fat she needed to keep warm in the ocean’s deepest waters.

As evidenced by her encounter with the sharks, Yetu’s condition was worsening. With each passing year, she was less and less able to distinguish rememberings from the present.

Venom leaves slithered like slime down her throat and into her belly, and with every swallow she coughed.

Disgustingly Descriptive

Given her sensitivity, no one should have been surprised that the rememberings affected Yetu more deeply than previous historians, but then everything surprised wajinru.

Their memories faded after weeks or months—if not through wajinru biological predisposition for forgetfulness, then through sheer force of will. Those cursed with more intact long-term recollection learned how to forget, how to throw themselves into the moment.

Only the historian was allowed ...

If Yetu died doing something reckless and the wajinru were not able to recover her body, the next historian would not be able to harvest the ancestors’ rememberings from Yetu’s mind. Bits of the History could be salvaged from the shark’s body, assuming they found it, but it was an incredible risk, and no doubt whole sections would be lost.

A historian’s role was to carry the memories so other wajinru wouldn’t have to. Then, when the time came, she’d share them freely until they got their fill of knowing.

“We grow anxious and restless without you, my child. One can only go for so long without asking who am I? Where do I come from? What does all this mean? What is being? What came before me, and what might come after? Without answers, there is only a hole, a hole where a history should be that takes the shape of an endless longing. We are cavities. You don’t know what it’s like, blessed with the rememberings as you are,” said Amaba.

more than it gave. It required she remember and relive the wajinru’s entire history all at once. Not just that, she had to put order and meaning to the events, so that the others could understand. She had to help them open their minds so they could relive the past too. It was a painful process. The reward at the end, that the rememberings left Yetu briefly while the rest of the wajinru absorbed them, was small. If she could skip it, she would, but she couldn’t.

She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

The meaning behind their name, wajinru, chorus of the deep, was clear.

Wajinru knew the faces of lovers they’d once taken, the trajectory of their own lives. They knew that they were wajinru.

Unlike Amaba, Yetu remembered the past and remembered well. She had more than general impressions and faded pictures of pictures of pictures. Where Amaba recalled a vague “difficult relationship,” Yetu still felt the violent emotions her amaba had provoked in her, knew the precise script of ill words exchanged between them.

It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.

Her people’s survival was reliant upon her suffering. It wasn’t the intention. It was no one’s wish. But it was her lot.

“Anyeteket?” she asked. She hadn’t thought of that shark in some time. Anyeteket had only died last year but had lurked in these waters since the first wajinru six hundred years ago. Her age and infamy had earned her a name, which was not an honor bestowed on most sea creatures.

One, she’d probably never forgotten the rain of bodies that descended here when two-legs had been cast into the sea so many centuries ago. Sharks didn’t usually feast on surface dwellers, but easy meat was easy meat.

She guessed the two-legs skull inside of Anyeteket had been what had made her so ill all these years. There was a chance the head was one of the first mothers, the drownt, cast-off surface dwellers who gave birth to the early wajinru.

The rememberings were most certainly increasing in intensity. Years of living with the memories of the dead had taken their toll, occupying as much of her mind and body as her own self did. Had she been alone, with no one prodding her to get back, she’d have stayed with the foremother and the child for days, perhaps weeks, lulled.

They would be in no position to fend for themselves in that state, so they built a giant mud sphere in defense, its walls thick and impenetrable. They called it the womb, and it protected the ocean as much as it protected them. Wajinru were deeply attuned to electrical forces, and when their energy was unbridled, they could stir up the sea into rageful storms. It had happened before.

They had to fast before the Remembrance so as not to vomit when the ceremony was taking place and to ensure their minds and bodies were weakened by starvation. That made them more receptive to bending. A historian needed her people’s minds malleable to impart the History.

You are someone normal, and you don’t know anything.”

“How are you feeling?” Nnenyo asked. Yetu nodded her head. “I will do what is asked of me.” “You are a blessing,” said Nnenyo. “I am what is required,” she said, no warmth left in her even for Nnenyo. Everything

The History was her power, and it ignited her. She could do this. She would do this. She would be their savior.

That was all remembering was. Prodding them lest they try to move on from things that should not be moved on from. Forgetting was not the same as healing.

We were born breathing water as we did in the womb.

In general, Yetu didn’t tell the Remembrance. She made her people experience it as it happened in the minds of various wajinru who lived it.

Oh, was this pain real? It didn’t even belong to her. Was there anything about her that wasn’t a performance for others’ gratification?

Yetu felt Amaba’s body cease to struggle and go limp, then someone else’s, then yet someone else’s, until every wajinru sunk together to the bottom of the womb, mimicking the falling bodies of the first mothers, just as Yetu intended. “Remember,” she said. This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.

As she commanded them to remember, she wished she herself didn’t have to.

The rememberings had stolen Yetu away. Who might she have been had she not spent the better part of her life in the minds of others?

This happened sometimes. The process of remembering demanded an openness, and in some people, openness became nothingness. The void of the ocean washed out their identity as the History tried to get in. “Help me!”

She shared with the woman the image Yetu often used to retether herself: the first infant wajinru being rescued by a whale.

Through Yetu’s machinations, the wajinru experienced the rememberings like they were living out their own memories. They were the ancestors.

For a short time, the History would be outside of her. It was their people’s one concession to the historian: three days of emptiness while they processed the rememberings.

She remembered the first mothers, the images of their floating bodies as seen by their children or other wajinru.

They would feel pain, but she would feel release.

Shrieks and sobs erupted throughout the womb as they saw their brethren, sistren, and siblings gobbled alive by massive white sharks. “Wait!” someone called. In the remembering, they swam closer to the site of the slaughter, putting themselves in danger of becoming victims of the massacre. “Wait! Look! It’s not us. It’s not us!” Closer up, the differences between wajinru and the strange floating bodies became clearer. Their tail fins were split into two. Two legs. They had no scales. They were land dwellers. Dead land dwellers at the mercy of the cruel sea.

Like Yetu, they couldn’t take it. It was too strange to carry both truths at once: the aliveness of their own bodies, and the deadness of the two-legs corpses. The conflict split their minds in half, threatened their own bodies.

That was why Yetu had squeezed a dragonfish to death, pried open its dead jaw, pressed its teeth into her scales until she stained the water red, then swum to where sharks hunt easy prey. To join the realities. To make sense of it all. Sometimes, the rememberings took precedent over everything else, even over the survival of the present.

To let the wajinru put the rememberings back inside of her would be to commit suicide. To live, she must flee.

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.

Until one day— We are Zoti.

But none want more than us, a little fish-child whose whale pod dies of grief when its matriarch perishes from a harpoon.