The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,13

of their kind.

We live among them, they our only kin, unbeknownst to any one of us that there are others who would come to call themselves the wajinru.

Until one day—

We are Zoti.

* * *

Babies of all kinds are always wanting more: more touch, more food, more answers, more kindness, more world, more sea, more newness, more knowledge. But none want more than us, a little fish-child whose whale pod dies of grief when its matriarch perishes from a harpoon.

Another fish-child might’ve died, but we are so hungry that we swim to shallow, unsafe depths where we know food is plentiful. Without the pod to coordinate hunts, and too small to catch anything big, we feast on trout. It is not enough. We are so big now. We go shallower, to where the light stabs our eyes, blinds us.

It is days until we see food large enough to satiate. Something floating—a sea lion? Out this far from shore?

Our pod never preferred to feast on carcasses, didn’t like the rot, but sometimes it was necessary. Right now, for us, newly orphaned as we are, it is necessary.

We swim toward the floating creature, but it is not dead. It is not even sleeping.

It turns toward us, first with a look of shock, and then with a look of fear.

It is smaller than it should be. Emaciated. And it cannot swim well. Lashes on its back. It is a surface dweller of some kind. A land animal.

Despite our hungry belly, we cannot eat this creature, whose face is so captivating, drawing us in. Something familiar and warm circles through us, a memory written in our blood.

Though it looks like a stranger, we, a small and scaled squirming thing, had come from the belly of a being like this.

Is it a penguin or another animal who split its time between sea and land? Did we come from a pod of them who all died, making them virtually extinct? Was this thing here the last of its kind? How lonely. We must save it, or at least make sure its last moments are not spent alone.

It makes noises at us. Nonsense.

Its brown skin peels and flakes.

We grab it with our fins and it screams. Swimming on our backs, we move our fins quickly in search of land. The movement of the water means we’re not too far from a small island.

The creature gurgles as water lands in its mouth, but this is the best thing we can do to keep it above water. We could go faster if we swam on our bellies, carrying it underneath, but with that length of a journey, a land dweller would die.

This surface-dwelling creature with split fins—two legs—is bigger than us, but near weightless in the water, and we finally are able to drag it to shore.

It makes noises again, all of them incomprehensible.

Every day we bring it lobster, shrimp, crab, or fish. It does not eat it how we eat it. It has put three large flat stones together over a little pit where it rubs sticks together until they spark orange like the inside of a glowing fish. Then it lays whatever we’ve caught for it that day over the flat stones until they sizzle white stuff and turn golden brown. The scent of it is divine.

We begin to understand the things this strange creature says, and the more we do, the more we begin to think of it as her Water means where we live. Land is where she lives. Sky is what’s above. Sand, stone, trees, fire, hungry, hot, cold, sweat, sad.

She talks and talks, and we listen, captivated by the noises. She is nothing like our pod, friendly and warm, but she gives to us in her own way. She gives us time. She gives us objects to explore. She gives us words.

Every day, we recognize more of them. Bark. Spice. Cut. Bruise. Scale. Fin. Us. Tomorrow. Yesterday. Light. Dark.

As we grow, we learn, until we can make sense of almost every noise that comes from the two-legs’s mouth. The fascinating world of the surface dwellers opens up to us. Their technologies and creatures. Their ways of seeing. “You are perplexing,” she says to us, and though we don’t know what perplexing is at first, we begin to as she uses it to describe other things: mysterious tracks in the sand, a washed-up object she can’t identify. Perplexing means a problem she hasn’t solved.

She is always trying to understand the world. She is like us.