them close and nuzzle them. We watch their wobbly attempts to swim and move. Their scaled skin is softer than ours, and their faces are so tender, they’re like the soft meat inside a clam.
They are different ages, some as many as two or three years. Some just born. The whale has collected them, has been taking care of them, and it plays with them even now. It won’t abandon them. It will continue to give the milk we don’t have to the youngest among them.
The pups mimic the sounds we make. When we say, “Hush now, sweet thing,” they imitate approximations of the sounds all in unison. A chorus of “ooo”s and “eee”s and “eyeyeyeye.” Their soft, whistling vocalizations are the most noise we’ve heard since our surface dweller left us. It is wondrous and overwhelming, and our skin is alive with the tingles of new waves and vibrations. Our ears are alert, ready to capture every new sound from these remarkable creatures.
We bring them close. We will not let them leave our side. Not like Waj did.
We do not cry, though we want to. We cannot ruin this happy moment with tears.
“There are so many of you,” we say. “There are so many of me. Creatures just like me.”
We ask the whale if there are more, and when it doesn’t understand, we gesture to the little zoti aleyu and sweep our fins wide to suggest magnitude, volume, quantity.
The resulting moan of the whale is thunderous and sad. It cries. The pups giggle at the fluctuations in the water making them move and bounce, making their little pointed teeth chatter.
The cries carry on, and the pang of loss strikes us, too. There had been more at one point, perhaps. But now?
We mourn for every zoti aleyu, cast away into the ocean, eaten or starved. But we do not mourn long. If there are six right here, then there are more somewhere else. Or there will be more. We’ll swim through every speck of ocean if we must to locate our animal siblings.
“I am Zoti,” we tell our new pups. They are our pups Ours. They will not know loneliness like we have known. They will have no true knowledge of the concept of abandonment.
In time, the pups fatten before our very eyes. Anutza, Ketya, Omwela, Erzi, Udu, and Tulo. Their names were words from the language the surface dweller taught us, and meant together, many in one, never alone, family, connected, and kinship. We are not ashamed that we put every hope and dream for them into what we call them.
To cover more territory, we ride the back of the blue whale to search the seas for more of our fellows. The pups squeal as we rush through the water. They make a lovely melody without even trying. Stuck so long with our own voice, we didn’t know how good zoti aleyu could sound. Every sentence is a gorgeous song and their harmonies rip us in half because we are too full on contentment. Too happy.
First we find two. Twins. Not quite fresh out of the womb, but nearly. We look through the water trying to find where they have come from, but they have drifted too far.
We are nine in total now. Then we are sixteen. Then seventeen. Then thirty. It is only a few years later that we find some closer to my age. A pod of four. We cannot speak to one another, but their joy is plain. We are sixty now, then seventy. And yet we are one.
For those not from my fold, it is difficult to get along at first. They are without language almost completely, with but fifty or fewer concepts. They learn.
Ekren, when she learns to speak, sings a song to me and tells me to follow her. We do. Her purpose is clear. She wants to mate.
There are so few of our kind that—should we know how to do this? We don’t.
Ekren does, and she shows us. Our bodies move in the water in an awkward rhythm until a passion takes hold and we are in ecstasy. After finishing, we swim back to the pod. There is possibility here, for more, to make more. There could be zoti aleyu who know who their parents are, whose past is not a question mark.
So we make more and more. We find more. We build. The deep is our home and we are filling it. This cold place will become a shelter for any