The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

When she reached for the past, nothing was there. The emptiness inside her stretched far and wide in every direction like a cavern. It was lonely. She had thought herself unmoored when she was the historian, but this did not compare. She was a blip.

“I meant you’re… you’re like us,” Suka said. It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different by her role as historian.

meant you’re… you’re like us,” Suka said. It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different by her role as historian.

“Well, kinship isn’t inherently a good thing,” said Yetu, beginning to understand Oori more and more. Perhaps for Oori, kinship meant taking care of a mother who’d hurt her. For Yetu, it had meant isolation from her people as she tried to cope with the rememberings. And now? She wasn’t sure what it meant. She would always see herself as wajinru.

She missed being a part of not just the sea, but the whole world. Without the History, she felt out of place and out of time. She missed being connected to all.

I suppose that’s why she prefers animals to people. Most animals don’t exchange hellos and ask how the other is. They just exist next to one another.” Yetu’s ears and skin perked at the sound of that. Oori preferred animals, did she? “Perfect, then. I’m not human,” said Yetu. Though her foremothers were two-legs, she felt she had very little in common with these strange land walkers, whose teeth were weak and flat. “I am animal.”

Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu didn’t like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled the land and

what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said it themselves—existing alongside it. Suka didn’t understand Oori. Yetu did. And what she didn’t understand, she wanted to. Suka had written Oori off. But Yetu was happy to simply exist alongside her whenever Oori made herself available for such things.

She had dark skin, darker even than Suka’s, and there were scars and markings cut into her face in elaborate patterns. They were beautiful and strangely familiar. Yetu squinted to get a stronger impression, but she couldn’t place them. Something from the History? That didn’t feel right. The memory felt more present than that, more recent. Yetu wanted nothing more than to keep looking at Oori’s face, which was startlingly captivating. Her eyes were dark as the deep.

Yetu relished all the time she got to see Oori in the bright light of day. In addition to the patterned divots and scars, there were black markings inked permanently into her face and neck in similarly elaborate designs. If only Yetu could feel them, she might know what they were. Her eyes did not see as well as her scales did.

“Do I frighten you?” asked Yetu. She was glad that her voice sounded so strange, croaky, and broken, because it disguised any hurt or bitterness in it. “Scared that even though you’ve been feeding me, talking to me, that I’ll gobble you up? You think so little of me?” She’d meant it to sound like a joke, but she knew it didn’t come out that way.

“I am not naive,” said Yetu. “I know more about the world’s cruelty than you ever will. I know all of it.” Except she didn’t anymore. The rememberings were gone, replaced with a ghost. Still, the echoes the History had left told her that the two-legs were capable of savagery.

“Sometimes it’s not the worst thing to lose everything. Sometimes it’s good,”

“If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, it’s good for it to go, don’t you think?” said Yetu. “I was a historian.” It made her feel so good to say that. Was. No longer. She blinked her eyes shut and tried to cast out thoughts of the wajinru locked in the Remembrance. “It was a very holy thing for my kind. It meant I held on to all the memories so no one else had to, generations and generations of them. Six hundred years of pain.”