could tear them apart if she wanted to.
She swallowed air through her nose and chest, working out the mechanisms to suck it in so her chest didn’t constantly feel empty. This made the surface dwellers stand back even farther. She must’ve looked hungry, like she was biting the air. As her breathing became more fluid, her body stilled and she could take in the sight of her audience more thoroughly.
There were four in total, and they looked similar enough that she guessed they were of the same people, perhaps even the same family. They were a range of sizes, and likely, ages, one small, coming only up to the hips of the others, one lanky and wobbly and uncertain on scrawny feet. They had dark brown skin and long, dark brown hair that was wild, scraggly, and long, matted into pieces that looked like long chunks of coral.
Yetu’s memory stirred as she regarded them. At first, only a fuzzy gray outline emerged, then flashes of images from the History flicked through her mind without context. She saw the bodies of two-legs drowning, but not just in the water, on land, too. Water erupted from the sea and flowed onto the surface. A war. The ocean war? The wave war? Yetu concentrated deeply, straining to remember. Fractured details returned, but only briefly. The memories were caught in a quick current, hurriedly swishing away from her.
The drownings had been a part of the Tidal Wars—that was the name—a conflict between wajinru and two-legs. Yetu rummaged her mind for more images, more precise explanations, but it was all too disconnected to put together. She pressed and pressed, anxious to know what had happened, but all that was left of the rememberings were traces and impressions, and even those seemed to be fading from her. Though the curious quiet and lightness of her mind pleased her, she did not relish forgetting. She felt unmoored.
“What if it needs our help?” said the youngest one among them.
Yetu studied what remained of her scant memory to identify the language they spoke, but even though she understood it with ease, she didn’t know where it came from, what region of surface dwellers it belonged to. This, very much like the breathing through her mouth and nose, surprised her. How much of two-leggedness was in her? She didn’t know what came from instinct and what came from the History and echoes of rememberings.
Though Yetu knew that at least distantly the two-legs were kin, the similarities were not as prominent as their differences. Yetu was black and scaled. She lived in the water and she looked it. They looked so… fleshy. Yetu only had skin like theirs over her belly, and a smaller portion on her face, over her eyes, nose, and mouth.
“Leave it. Let’s go,” said another one of the two-legs.
They left, and she was alone again. Yetu still couldn’t move. Sunlight faded, thank goodness. She welcomed the dark and the rising tide, which soon left her gloriously submerged.
Strangely, despite the physical pain her body was in, she felt better than she had in ages. The ache of her muscles, bones, and cartilage was nothing compared to the pain she was used to carrying, of the History and what they’d been through. There was no doubt that despite the disorientation of life without the rememberings, Yetu felt tranquility, too.
Not far off from sleep, she wondered if she’d still be here in the morning, or if she’d wash up on a different, nearby shore. How miraculous it was to go where she pleased. No past, and no future, either. Before leaving the History, she’d had little chance to discover who plain old Yetu was. The wajinru inside her from the past had pulled her backward, and the wajinru around her had pulled her outward toward their various ends. The combating forces had stretched her so far this way and that way that she had lost her shape. If she had a will of her own, she was too deflated to actually exercise it. Now, though, reduced to a skeleton, she could build herself back up however she wanted.
Prior to this Remembrance, the other wajinru must’ve felt this way all the time. Unburdened, they could do as they pleased and follow their whims wherever they took them. Now, trapped in the mud womb, they had to endure the limitations Yetu had had since she was fourteen.
As Yetu drifted in the tidal pool toward sleep, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she