Yetu revealed a shark tooth in her front fin and held it to her neck. “I’d rather die than go.”
At fourteen, the rush of rememberings from the History had been so new that they suffocated her.
“My child,” Amaba said, frightened. “What sickness is this? What madness would cause one to put oneself in fatal harm purposely, knowingly? Surely, it cannot exist.”
Yetu turned from Amaba and toward the dark fold of infinite ocean beckoning her from all sides. There were pockets of the deep still untouched by sentient life. Yetu had ached for them. For their quiet.
“What of your responsibilities to us, to the wajinru?” Amaba added. “Without you, we perish. Without the Remembrance and the gift of the memories you bestow on us annually, we would flounder until there was nothing left of us but cartilage.”
Yetu swam in pacing circles, speed increasing with each repetition, still clutching the shark fin. No amount of explanation would make Amaba understand what it was like to have the rememberings. The two of them had been here before, and before, and before.
With each twist of her body, she churned the water into thick, impenetrable blurs. It was a maelstrom to hide in, Amaba’s words unable to pierce.
“Still yourself. Now,” Amaba said, reaching her front fins through the dense cloud to touch her child. “And drop that thing!”
Yetu, small for a wajinru of fourteen years, slipped from her amaba’s grip and continued her efforts to spin, mouth catching up to tail. Moving was the only way to quiet the restless energy burning through her like electric cancer.
“Such madness does exist,” Yetu said, dizzy, her words gobbled up by the eddy she was whirring. “You all made me this way. I carry the burden of remembering so you don’t have to. So acknowledge it, then! That it’s a burden!”
Amaba tackled Yetu from above, wrapping her fins around her child’s torso and curling her tail fin around Yetu’s to immobilize it. “Still, child. Still,” she said.
“You’re always wanting answers to why I do the things I do, but when I try to give them, you cannot fathom it. Is this my curse? To be unfathomable? Am I even alive anymore? Maybe Yetu is already dead,” said Yetu. “Are you even holding me now, Amaba? Or are you holding a corpse?”
Amaba pressed the webbed appendages at the ends of her fins over Yetu’s face as she let out a moaning cry. “Stop it. Don’t speak such ugliness.”
But Yetu couldn’t keep silent, not now that the truth was gushing out of her so freely. “All I have is ugliness, Amaba. All I have are these ugly rememberings. You say madness such as mine doesn’t exist, but it would exist in you, too, if you had to experience the ugly things I do all the time,” she said, defeated and deflated in her amaba’s arms, near suffocation. Amaba held her so tight, she couldn’t sway her body enough to filter water.
“What about the rememberings could be so, so maddening?” Amaba asked. Yetu tried to writhe free, but Amaba’s strength was irrefutable. “Tell me, child!” Amaba said.
“Dying,” Yetu cried out. The pair was jowl to jowl as Amaba overpowered Yetu from behind. “Today I was three boys in the moments before their deaths, then I was them during their deaths. They were three bodies and then they burst from the inside into thousands and thousands of little, incomplete bodies. I know what it’s like to be turned into splinters and fragments.”
Amaba shook her head forcefully, the rushing echo of water against Yetu’s skin enough to make her wish she was inside of one of the rememberings now, rather than here, because when you are in pain, sometimes the only escape is another different pain.
“Why are you telling me these horrible things?” her amaba asked.
“They’re true.”
“They are not. Such a thing—what could even cause that? Such breaking apart of bodies?”
“Energy,” Yetu said.
Oblong slivers of cartilage, seared skin, tooth shards—Yetu had learned so much about the past since taking on the History, but she’d learned about the present, too. Her amaba didn’t want to believe that the things Yetu spoke about the past were true. If they were, what would it say about her as a parent to have consented to her child becoming a vessel of such ugliness?
“Stop, stop, stop, child,” cried Amaba. She swam away, putting as much distance between herself and Yetu as she could. She could not even look at her.
“I tell the rememberings to stop,” said Yetu. “But