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.
Yetu didn’t know much, but she knew she couldn’t let that happen. Not this time. Not again. Or she would die. She looked down at her own body, trifling and small. A mere wisp of dead seaweed billowing in the dark.
There were the burns. Amaba never knew about those, about the year Yetu became so sensitive to touch that she swam to the bottom of the sea and pressed her scales against a lava vent to scorch away the nerves. Her brain could not hold the History and the present. She felt the wajinru as they moved in the shadow of the womb, a great hulking black mass surrounding her. 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.
In time, she’d be subsumed. She’d never been this close to annihilation before. It had always pained her to take back the rememberings, her own mind blotted out in favor of those who’d lived before. Those times, though, Yetu had managed to keep an inch of herself. Now she wasn’t sure even a speck would remain.
The ancestors pulled her deeper and deeper into the abyss of the past with each passing year. How long before she didn’t awaken from their summons at all? How long before, in a confused state and painted in blood, she went to the waters of the great whites like she had done before Amaba had found her? That couldn’t be what they wanted, for her to disappear. Yetu felt the wajinru swarming all around her. Yetu knew what they would do. First, seize her. Next, gut her mind. Last, fill her empty shell with ancestors and pretend they hadn’t just murdered Yetu by forcing her to endure these memories endlessly for another year. The thought of it made her shake. This time, she wouldn’t emerge from it. There would be no Yetu left for the next Remembrance. She’d be dead.
Yetu wouldn’t let them do it.
The ancestors were needy but rarely cruel. Surely they would understand why she couldn’t do this again. To let the wajinru put the rememberings back inside of her would be to commit suicide. To live, she must flee. With a last look to her wajinru kin, soaking up their beauteous dance in the mud womb, Yetu left. 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.
Yetu did not look back, but she felt them in her wake. 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. She felt them remember. Yetu feared the world would feel it too.
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