The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

In one of the rememberings, there was still hair caught in a comb belonging to the foremother. Salt water had washed any hair strands from the tines of Yetu’s new comb, and now she could only imagine how the bonds of black keratin had once choked the carved ivory.

This one knowledge, this one piece of history, it was hers and no one else’s.

She had become so ragged, not just since the last Remembrance but over the course of her youth and young adulthood. It all had a cumulative effect, didn’t it? She imagined a sunken ship, heavy with cargo, pieces peeling and rusting away year by year like dead scales. Yetu wasn’t as hardy as those feats of two-legs innovation, though. She would die, and corpses were not eternal.

“They don’t care if you are strong. Only that you remember,” said Amaba. “Do you remember?”

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

She only need remind them. 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. “Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the seafloor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers,”

“Our mothers were pregnant two-legs thrown overboard while crossing the ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the seafloor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers,”

She’d discovered the History on her own, through out-of-order scraps and pieces. Slivers slicing through her.

But she felt her whole body go rigid and then snap. Her body was full of other bodies. Every wajinru who had ever lived possessed her in this moment. They gnashed, they clawed, desperate to speak. Yetu channeled their memories, sore and shaking as she brought them to the surface. The shock of it nearly knocked her unconscious. She had once imagined channeling as a sweet, beautiful flow of energy, the past running gently through her. It was more like slitting an opening in herself so they could get out.

Though their bodies were protected by the safety of the mud womb, in their minds they had become someone else, taken by the remembering Yetu foisted upon them.

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.

This was their story. This was where they began. Drowning.

“Remember now or perish. Without your history, you are empty.”

Piece by piece, Yetu showed them their past, filled them with it. Soon, she’d give them all of it. It would be theirs, and she would be free from it, for a little while. 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.

Yetu remembered, remembered, and remembered. She called to the memories, drew them to her, then pushed them out to her people one by one in an unrelenting torrent. Not quite sequentially, but a complete telling of their story, with some sections rearranged as necessary.

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

They all watched together in the remembering as hundreds of sharks gathered to share a feast of bodies that looked so much like them, just like wajinru. “They’re killing us!” someone screamed. 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.

Dead land dwellers at the mercy of the cruel sea.

Outside the remembering, wajinru knew what two-legs were. They knew to avoid them, to stay clear of shallow waters where their boats sometimes roamed. But in the remembering, it was like they were seeing them for the first time, possess...

The moment the wajinru understood how related they were to the two-legs, the remembering changed, just how it had for Yetu two days ago. They were all now one of the floating dead bodies. Their lives recently extinguished, some spark still remained, brains starved for oxygen but pressing on. The wajinru felt the deadness like it was their own.

Sometimes, the rememberings took precedent over everything else, even over the survival of the present.

It wasn’t a complete picture, but from the scattered fragments, she understood one important thing. The wajinru were her people, and for now they were held captive by the History, living the lives of the ancestors from beginning to end. At some point, collectively, when they’d learned and internalized all they could, they would give the History back to Yetu, their historian, who would keep it for them while they lived out their days in blissful ignorance.

These were her people, her extended kin, but they were also death itself. When they’d had their fill of the rememberings, they would come for her and pour it back into Yetu, a cracked vessel.

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.

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.

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...

Collective speech

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.

Strange fish

We must each be where we belong.” “What is belonging?” we ask. She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

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.

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.

First historian

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.

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?

yet we are one,

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.

We never wanted our people, our kindred, to suffer the loneliness we have known. Over the years, when others came to us desperate to

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.

Yetu’s will thrived where her body faltered. The only thought on her mind was go, go, go. Forward, never backward. Flee. The place she’d gone from was a world of pain, and there was no distance she could swim where that past wouldn’t haunt her.

The wajinru would come for her to return the rememberings once they recovered—and they would recover. Most assuredly they would. If Yetu could survive the rememberings intact, weak as she was, they could too.

She had a sense of the rememberings still, though already the details had faded. Whenever she tried to concentrate on anything specific, it slipped through her mind like sand through her webbed fingers. She could feel it still, but she didn’t know it.

But Yetu didn’t need to orient. She just needed to go. That was what mattered most. The goal was to be away from where she was now. The particulars of where she ended up were inconsequential.

It made her remember fire and bombs, images of thrashing water tumbling through her mind, but then she couldn’t remember where the fire and bombs came from. A few seconds later, Yetu couldn’t remember what fire and bombs were.

She’d done the one thing the first historian wanted no wajinru to do. By leaving, Yetu was forcing them to endure the full weight of their History. She’d left them alone. Had abandoned them. They were not one people anymore. Yetu was apart. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light and reminded herself that they’d be okay. Amaba was the strongest wajinru Yetu had ever known. Her will did not bend. Not even the rememberings could ruin her.

There were no nightmares. Rememberings didn’t haunt her. She was just Yetu. She wasn’t quite sure who that was, but she didn’t mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain.

The water was extremely shallow, but the tide brushed over her, back and forth, allowing her to breathe through her gills. Strangely, she was breathing with her mouth and nose, too, sucking in air from her surroundings with the two narrow slits in her face and her wide mouth. She didn’t know she could do that. It was a new, uncomfortable feeling, and her lungs felt unsatisfied.

She settled for a scream, opening her mouth wide, showing rows of sharp, long teeth, narrow and overlapping.

Her eyes and nose disappeared as her mouth expanded, her face replaced with a black, endless pit guarded by fangs. The two-legs jumped back, then stepped away farther and farther with cautious steps, hands held out in front of them.

Prior to this Remembrance, the other wajinru must’ve felt this way all the time. Unburdened, they could do as they pleased and follow their whims wherever they took them. Now, trapped in the mud womb, they had to endure the limitations Yetu had had since she was fourteen.