the surface dwellers. For what else could explain our similarities, our ability to speak their language, our memory of the face so like Waj’s during our infancy, floating still in the water?
But the full truth is not as we imagined it.
We lurk near the surfaces, hoping to find more zoti aleyu. We listen to the talk and chatter of two-legs on their massive ships. There are surface dwellers in the bottoms of these ships whose language we understand, whose words are the same ones Waj had used.
They are suffering and scared. They have been robbed from their homes, stolen from their families. Their lives are no longer their own. They belong to the two-legs on the decks of the ships.
We are descendants of the people not on the top of the ship, but on the bottom, thrown overboard, deemed too much a drain of resources to stay on the journey to their destination.
We know this because we see it. One day we are swimming but a few feet down from the surface in pleasantly cool waters, when there’s a plop from above, a struggle causing the water to stir, and then a sinking.
The surface dweller is in our arms, heart still beating, but we are too far from any land for us to think of dragging it to an island. It is unconscious, and its belly is round with child. We bring it to the surface so it might breathe, but it never comes to. Underfed and malnourished, this is no surprise. We wonder how close it was to death already before whatever devil who captained that ship abandoned it to the seas.
The two-legs dies in our arms, but not moments later, its body starts moving, taken over by a spirit or some other thing of the next world.
Afraid, we let go. We don’t wish to intervene with the dead. We watch from a distance, feel its convulsions in the water against our skin.
Its eyes are closed. It is dead, isn’t it? Yet it moves as if something is inside of it, using its body as a vessel.
As we see the two-legs’s belly move and bend, something inside of it indenting the flesh, we understand its baby is trying to get born. The poor thing is trapped inside, and we want to help, but how? How can the body even push? We worry for the two-legs’s pup and wonder if we should claw open the two-legs’s belly. We can save the child in a way we couldn’t save the parent.
We bring our teeth toward the belly of the dead, but we cannot bring ourselves to desecrate the flesh in this way. The fat round belly gives under our touch as we lay our cheek against it. We can hear the two-legs baby inside.
“Come out,” we sing. “The world is ready for you, and you are ready for the world.”
It’s the birthing song we zoti aleyu sing for our little ones, and there’s a chance that something in our voice will reach a two-legs pup too.
“My body is preparing milk for you,” we sing. “You are hungry. Come to this world, so you might eat.”
We look for the place where the baby is to come out. The ashti. The tunnel.
There’s a round button on its belly that looks promising that we feel with our front fins, and we wonder if we have to nudge it to open. We press and press, but it does not yield. Then the surface dweller’s legs begin to splay apart, and we come under it. We see it: the head. Our eyes widen, struck. It is not a two-legs head.
There are fins at the center of its back, on its sides, and at its front. Hairless. And darker than any land creature. It is zoti aleyu. It is zoti aleyu!
What magic had intervened to transform the pup in the womb? Was it the ocean itself, the progenitor of all life? Did the zoti aleyu have a god after all?
“Come!” we sing. “Come. We have been preparing for you. We have feasted so you will be strong.”
The pup is coming. Head, shoulders. Then we grab hold and pull it out into our embrace. This close to the surface, we see its features so clear. Black eyes. Brown, nearly black skin. Beautiful dark scales.
We sing to it to rejoice, overtaken. We have never seen a zoti aleyu this new. This small. This fragile. How many who’d been just like this were swallowed whole? “Precious pup,” we say.
We cannot