Hungry for more. She is curious about how to make plants spring up from the ground, how to make the plants into nets she can use to catch fish.
Whatever she knows, she shares with us, and we soak up her every word. Not just facts. Not just the names of things. Stories.
When with our pod of skalu, we only hummed—long, low howls that filled the depths so we might find one another. It’s difficult to achieve at first, but after a time, we try to copy the land creature’s noises and make them our own.
We want to tell her things the way she tells us things. We want to share everything we know with her. We want to tell her that she’s special. We want to tell her that we’d only been searching for food those months and months and months ago, but instead we’d found—we don’t know the word for her yet. We will invent a new word. Our land creature is worth a new word.
After copying and copying her, we learn to make sounds with our throat and tongue. They do not sound like the surface dweller, but after a time, she understands. As she looks upon us, we can tell the land dweller still thinks us perplexing. She says she has always known there was a world beyond this world, a world where the unseen happens, but that we surprise her still.
We like that we surprise her because that sounds like it’s a good thing. Warmth floods us.
“You did not come from a god,” she says. We don’t think she means this cruelly, but it bothers us still. We know a god is a special thing.
“Could you be our god?” we ask, words hoarse and croaky.
We would be content to spend our days basking in her presence, swimming in the water as she fished and told us stories.
“I am too small to be a god,” she says.
Indeed, a year has passed and we are her size now.
“Why do gods have to be big?” we ask.
“I do not wish to talk about this anymore,” she says.
The land dweller will no longer engage in conversation about where she came from or how she came to be floating half dead on driftwood in the middle of the sea. We wonder if her god abandoned her.
When the creature asks us where we came from, we say that we only remember a little. We remember a face like hers. Just like hers. We remember the ocean. We remember chewing the fleshy seaweed that bound us to our first mothers.
“How can you know all of that?” she asks.
We don’t understand the question. We just remember. Every moment is a spark, and the spark is there forever.
We do not speak how she speaks, deep and smooth. Our voice is a raspy, clicky mess, and the two-legs often struggles to parse us.
But in the water, we make beautiful sounds with our throat, and from the creature, we learn how to name the whole world, the whole sea, using this thing we only had a half idea of. Language.
Now we have a name for being alone. A name for being anxious. For searching. For fear. For denial. For ugliness. For beauty. For wanting something and someone.
“I am Waj,” the two-legs says one day.
We are out in the ocean, she on the shallow, sandy ocean floor, and we just beyond it so we have more room to swim, our head above water. At first we think she means that’s the name of what kind of creature she is. A waj. Soon, it is clear she means that it’s a name just for her, to distinguish her from others.
“What does it mean?” we ask.
“Chorus or song,” says Waj.
“What’s a song?”
And then she sings for us and we are in love.
We do not have a name that can be spoken in the way Waj speaks, nor do we have a name at all. A unique pitch, perhaps, that our pod called us by, but that was a different sort of thing.
“Will you name me?” we ask.
Waj smiles and laughs. She reaches out to touch our cheek the way the whale did with its jowl when we were but a pup.
“I will call you Zoti Aleyu,” she says.
We know those words together mean strange fish.
There is a gap between us that cannot be bridged. We live in the water, she on the sand. We sleep alone below the surface. She sleeps on the beach. She is tired, angry, and mad