The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,15

with loneliness. We are too.

She builds a raft from pieces of the island, and we ask her where she will go. “Back home,” she says.

“Where is that?”

But she is done talking except to say, “Do not follow me, strange fish. Savior. We must each be where we belong.”

“What is belonging?” we ask.

She says, “Where loneliness ends.”

We do as she asks and do not follow, but when she is out of range of the distance we can feel, we immediately regret it. We swim as fast as we can in the direction she has gone, chasing any trace of either the feel of her paddles in the water or the smooth surge forward of her sails up and catching wind.

On the third day of searching and finding nothing, we feel a storm working itself into a vortex above us. A giant spiral of doom for anyone on the water or near a shore. We don’t know if the land creature is caught in it, but we must save her if there’s a chance she is. Neglecting food and rest, we look for her.

Our search is unending, and when the hurricane comes, sweeping the center of the ocean into mad, mixed-up sludge, our search for Waj becomes a search for wreckage. We never find even that.

The moment we first ever saw Waj all that time ago, a year or two years or maybe more, floating, looking like something good to eat, we could not have known what she’d come to mean to us. Perhaps it would’ve been better never to have understood, to have stayed in that moment full of possibility.

We’ve lost our pod. We’ve lost our two-legged surface dweller.

For days, we drift. We are not worried about dying, though we are not yet at the point where we are wishing for death. That time will come. Moons from now.

Waj had said she was returning to the place where she belonged, and that belonging meant not feeling lonely. We do not have a place to return to, as our pod is dead, and we are alone, the abandoned creature Waj had dubbed us Zoti Aleyu, a suitable name for something singular and alone, but perhaps—

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.

Down here, we are wrapped up. Down here, we can pretend the dark is the black embrace of another. Down here, we eventually find more of us. A whale, one of the biggest we’ve ever seen, descends like a sunken ship. We tremble as it hums its song. Waj.

Its dive is right over us, and it swims closer and closer. Soon it will barrel right through us like a torrential wave, bowling us over, likely killing us. We accept this death. It is the very opposite of dying alone. We will perish much like we began, with the second mother heralding our passage between this world and the beyond world.

We don’t close our eyes. It will be upon us in seconds. We are not afraid. We welcome it. This is belonging.

The whale, a few measures away, opens its mouth. Inside, there are pups, pups that look like miniature version of us. Little zoti aleyu. Strange fish.

We gasp. We are outside of our body. We wonder if the blue whale devoured us and we are dead, and this is the afterlife, a world of dreams.

The whale hums and our whole body shivers and shakes from the force of the vibrations. We don’t understand its beautiful, hoarse moans beyond the most rudimentary levels of communications. It is kind. These little zoti aleyu are not gifts, and this whale did not come looking for us, but it recognizes that we are one kind.

“Welcome!” we say, gathering the pups, six in all, stretching our fins out to pull them into the fold of our body.

Having never been with child, we are without milk. How will we feed them?

“How will I feed them?” we ask the whale, a mix of shriek and song using mouth shapes not dissimilar to what the surface dweller used.

The whale hums. Again, we do not understand, but it stays with us. We’re not sure how much longer it can lurk in the deep before needing to return to the surface to breathe.

“Where did you come from, zoti aleyu?” we ask the creatures so much like us.

We pull