The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

“Do you wish for death?

Yetu kept her senses dulled.

lest it overwhelm her into fits.

to make her body a wo...

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?

With each passing year, she was less and less able to distinguish rememberings from the present.

“Eat these. They will help your throat heal,” said Amaba, drawing her daughter into her embrace. Yetu floated in the dense, black brine, her amaba’s fins a lasso about her torso. “Come, now. I said eat.” Amaba pressed venom leaves into Yetu’s mouth, humming a made-up lullaby as she did. Water waves from her voice stroked Yetu’s scales, and though Yetu usually avoided such stimulation, she was pleased to have a tether to the waking world as her connection to it grew more and more precarious. She needed frequent reminders she was more than a vessel for the ancestors’ memories. She wouldn’t let herself disappear. “Keep chewing. That’s good. Very good. Now swallow.”

rememberings affected Yetu more deeply than previous historians, but then everything surprised wajinru.

through sheer force of will.

learned how to forget, how to throw themselves into the moment.

Only the historian was allowed ...

In addition to reaching into the minds of wajinru to log the events of the era, historians learned whose minds were electro-sensitive enough to host the rememberings in the future, and shared that information often and repeatedly with other wajinru.

The ocean overwhelmed her even when she was in its most quiet portions, and that was before taking on the rememberings.

it was even worse, her mind unable to process it all. She couldn’t fathom spending her days traveling across the sea only to burden herself with ...

She couldn’t fulfill her most basic of duties. How disappointed he would be in the girl he’d chosen. She’d grown up to be so fragile.

“There’s so much to tell you, yet I never know where to begin. But I am ready now. I can speak.

“It is in the past. It is already forgotten. What matters is that you are here now, and we can focus on the present. It is time for you to give the Remembrance.”

The rememberings carried her mind away from the ocean to the past. These days, she was more there than here. This wasn’t a new thought, but she’d never felt it this strongly before. Yetu was becoming an ancestor herself. Like them, she was dead, or very near it.

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.

Late as Yetu was, the wajinru must be starving for it, consumed with desire for the past that made and defined them. Living without detailed, long-term memories allowed for spontaneity and lack of regret, but after a certain amount of time had passed, they needed more. That was why once a year, Yetu gave them the rememberings, even if only for a few days. It was enough that their bodies retained a sense memory of the past, which could sustain them through the year until the next Remembrance.

“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...

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 caviti...

wasn’t cavity just another word...

The Remembrance took more than it gave.

she remember and relive the wajinru’s entire history all at once.

she had to put order and meaning to the events, so that the othe...

She had to help them open their minds so they could re...

painful p...

The memory of Amaba’s fins squeezing around her tail fin, dragging her away from the sharks at nauseating speeds, lingered unpleasantly, the same way all memories did. She understood why wajinru wanted nothing to do with them but for one time a year.

that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge,

Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams. She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

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

They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts. Wajinru knew the faces of lovers they’d once taken, the trajectory of their own lives. They knew that they were wajinru.

She dealt with death every day during her rememberings, and more again when she was lucid enough to hunt for food. For once, she wanted to avoid confrontation with such things, reality though it may be. 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.

It did help. She didn’t understand why everything couldn’t be like that. Gentle and easy. No sacrifice. No pain.

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. Two, being sickly, she couldn’t travel far to hunt. Wajinru supplemented her diet by bringing her grub.

Sometimes, when she came across something she’d never seen before, she could reach her mind out to the History and find it: a tiny detail she’d missed in one of her rememberings.

Yetu closed her eyes as she felt a remembering tug her away from the present.

In the sacred waters, there was never color because there was never light. That was how Yetu knew the remembering had overcome her, because there was blurred color. Light from above the ocean’s surface peeked through, painting the water a dark, grayish blue. It was bright enough to reveal a dead woman floating in front of her, with brown skin and two legs. There it was, something pressed into her short, coarse hair.

It was a comb, a tool used for styling hair. Yetu flowed from remembering to remembering. She could only find three combs in her memory. The one in her fin didn’t seem to be one of them, but its origin was clear. It had belonged to one of the foremothers.

Yetu stared at the face of the woman in her remembering, not yet bloated by death and sea, preserved by the iciness of the deep. She was heart-stilling and strange, her beauty magnetic. Yetu couldn’t ...

In the remembering, Yetu was not herself. She was possessed by an ancestor, living their story. Not-Yetu reached out for the comb in the sunken woman’s hair and noted the smallness of her own fins, the webbing between the more stable cartilage finger limbs not yet developed. She was a young child. Old enough to be eating fish, shrimp, and so on premashed by someone bigger, but still young enough to need mostly whale milk to survive. The little hand grabbed the comb, then Not-Yetu was jamming it into her mouth to stimulate and soothe her aching gums. During such rememberings, Yetu’s loneliness abated, overcome with the sanctity of being the vessel f...

It ached to leave the foremother, the peacefulness of being the child, the comb, but she had her own comb now. Nnenyo h...

Yetu might like to stay in a remembering forever, but she couldn’t. What would happen to her physical form, neglected in the deep? How long would it take her amaba to find her body? Would she ever? Without Yetu’s body, they couldn’t transfer the History, and without the History, the wajinru would perish.

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.

A historian needed her people’s minds malleable to impart the History.

Worse, the Remembrance might subsume her. Reliving that much of the History at once—it might kill her in the state she was in. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it already had, that it had been poisoning her for the two decades she’d been the historian.

It was one of the few tangible things she’d touched of the past, a reminder that the History was not an imagining, not just stored electrical pulses. They were people who’d lived. Who’d breathed and wept and loved and lost.

“Someone normal wouldn’t be able to tell you that the object is a comb. Someone normal wouldn’t be able to tell you that a comb was a tool the wajinru foremothers used in their hair,” said Yetu. “Someone normal would never know these things. Someone normal couldn’t fill your hole. You are someone normal, and you don’t know anything.”